You're listening to inside real estate your source for all things mortgage and real estate related this shows that brings you all the hottest topics and insights directly from those who know it matters. Now sit back and enjoy the show
is up everyone Paul apostle aka Salvatore Guzman Oh, we are missing Brad wise Gerber. Today we are inside real estate. Welcome to another episode. For those of you finding us again, thank you so much for listening in. We obviously appreciate the patronage. If you are this is your first time welcome. You can find us at Ira podcast calm and go to Facebook forward slash Ira podcast and go to YouTube you can go to you can really listen to us and on any podcast app that you show you should please please like, share, subscribe and hit that notification bell for any new episodes. And please leave us a review that really does help us out a lot. Salvatore Guzman what is up man rates are high as shit.
What's going on? Man? I would say rates are higher. We're about they're still pretty low. You know if you look
yeah, they're still I mean, historically, like we're below 5% I still think real estate is a really good investment even at 5% Yeah, I mean, yeah,
I think we'll be at depending on what happens. I think we could be at five plus pretty soon though. You know?
Yeah. I mean, we're creeping up there. Yeah, we're, we're creeping up there. We're getting up there like 4.75 right now so yeah, I'd
say about that. But you know, excellent credit for something five if you got you know, middle range credit you're probably more like five five and an eighth. So long Yeah.
So we're already on some on some deals. We're already at 5% Right.
Yeah, for sure. I locked in by the other day. So it is what it is right.
It is what it is people are still buying houses demand is still really high. This supply issues not going away. I feel like this this. Do you think this markets like unhealthy right now because of the because of the way that it's kind of sitting like if you're a buyer right now putting 5% Down in the house. If you don't have money for appraisal, guarantees or pay cash or all this stuff to win offers, it's pretty hard for a first time homebuyer to win an offer right now, wouldn't you say?
I mean, I guess it just depends, right? I think cash allows you to get a little more Kreative with your offers, right? With the appraisal guarantees and whatnot, but you know, yeah, I mean, that's that's kind of been the tale that's becoming like the broken record, right. Appraisal guarantees this that I mean, yeah, if you get no money, I mean, it's gonna be difficult to buy a house in this market.
Yeah, man. Yeah. So today we got a interesting guest. His name's Nate Jones. He is CEO of I'm sorry, he's the head of innovation over at structurally structurally does some interesting stuff with AI. They were voted in the top 100 tech company by Housing Wire, the they've really expanded under Nate, you know, they've gotten the last four years he's been involved. They've experienced 10x growth and convert conversations. It's a really interesting company. It's an AI company. It's a tech company in our in our space. So I wanted to bring Nate Jones on the show, and talk to him a little bit about what tech is doing in real estate. So Nate, welcome to the show, man.
for having me on. Really appreciate it.
Welcome to the show, dude. So they obviously you're, you're in the real estate space, but more on the tech side, right? Have you always been on the tech side? Or how did you get into the real estate space, but while also marrying the tech side to it?
Yeah. So actually kind of got structurally started in college when me and my co founder decided we wanted to be real estate investors. But when we were in college, we had no money. So it makes no sense to actually do that. But so we ended up talking to a bunch of agents, lenders, people from the space and found that they struggle pretty hard with lead follow up and conversion. I think everyone in the space is really good at kind of getting face to face, converting kind of getting in there and closing deals, but the behind the scenes stuff is hard for any salesperson following up with leads. Jason, I'm being consistent, and we kind of set out to solve that problem with technology. We were lucky enough to bring in some really smart technologists PhDs in math, stats, software, and we decided to set out and solve the lead conversion and qualification problem with tech conversational AI, rather than just throwing a call center at it, which has kind of been done for the last 2025 years.
Yeah, I mean, that's been the grunt work, right is call center work follow up on the call center? How How, how does a I replace that and keep it? Because obviously, from a from a general consumer standpoint, they don't want to sometimes be speaking to AI? They are they are they don't. Right. So how do you find a ways to keep that? So it's more conversational? I mean, it because it's got to be pretty hard considering all the different inputs that you possibly can have.
Yeah, 100%, I'll be the first to admit that no one wants to talk to a robot. Well, I've always said that, starting in real estate, and we work in in lending, as well as leasing. But starting in the general property space, I guess I'll call it is probably the hardest industry, we could have started in having really lifelike conversations is like paramount. Because when people are going when people are buying a house, it's one of their biggest financial decisions of their life. It's usually triggered by big life event, you know, debt, the 3ds of real estate, that divorce disease, there's some positive ones, too, you know, a new child, a new job, things like that. Those are all like big life events that require a lot of empathy. And I think a lot of people are like, how can aI have empathy? How can it build the same relationship that I as a human could. And what we've seen across about the 6 million conversations we've had, is 99% of consumers believe they're actually talking to a human when they're talking to our product 99.9%. And we're able to kind of, like we're able to tell at a really granular level, when people are saying things like, hey, is this a robot? Are you a human? What are you? And that's only happening point 1% of all of our conversations. And a lot of the times we've actually built responses in where if they say, Hey, are you a robot, we say I'm the digital assistant here with XYZ lending team, and then they actually keep the conversation going, because we overcome that objection. So there's a lot of like little tiny things that we've done in a conversation that mimic like human the way humans talk.
That's the biggest thing is you're gonna get, because I've used text messaging, AI driven situations before with our leads. And it was okay, it wasn't, it wasn't great with the company that we use. So what sets you guys apart from some of these other companies that are kind of doing the same thing?
Yeah, I'll be, again, the first to admit that I've experienced horrible AI, I'm sure we all have been on a website, some little thing pops up in the right hand corner, it says, you know, I'm the, you know, digital bought for so and so you can click one of these buttons to talk to sales service or whatever, right? And then if you, if it says something like, you know, what's your name, and you say, you know, what's your name, then it will, it'll just break instantly, right there. And right, that is not the type of conversations we have. Our conversations are very open ended. We don't use like buttons, where you can only click a button, you can only say a certain word, are conversations. You can say anything at any time, because that's how people talk. It's really hard to actually build software or even think through in terms of like your world as a salesperson, how many different like avenues a conversation can go down, and what you might need to say next. So we've built lots of little things to make the conversations feel really lifelike. So like we put first purposeful typos and our messages that we correct a second later with, like asterik th, e, if we spelled that wrong, we use emojis, we use gifts. And then I think one of the big things is every we have we've built a lot of robust customization in our products, like you guys are talking about changing rates, different things to do to get your offer, accepted, or at least noticed a little bit better. Every, every person in the property space, we'll just call it that has a different offer. You might have like a you know, entry offer for first time buyers that's different than you know, the lender down the street, who doesn't work with those of our conversations can be totally customized to every little like nuance that your business has. It's not just like a one size script fits all. And I think that goes a long way to to making our conversations extremely personalized, local, and human. Like
who's the right client? Oh, go ahead.
So I just say I mean that's I think like the biggest thing right? Like I was on PayPal yesterday I got a text Someone you know, like one of those like, you know, here's your verification code. I got nowhere. So I was like, go on there. I can't figure out how even how to change my password on their app. So I do like the message and it's like, clearly a bot. Right? Someone will, will call you in a few hours is what a sentence like? He's closed my PayPal account. Truly bad technology. And bad AI made me close my PayPal account, because I don't have time to wait on something that I know is just not there. Like not. There's no human behind it. Right? Yep.
Yeah, so you could there's there's potential for turnoff, right?
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. We're not gonna avoid that, for sure. But like I said, the biggest place where we see turn off is if they're trying to decide if they're talking to a human or not. And that's happening a minuscule amount of the time. And we're even handling that as an objection we've, we put little tiny things that just seem like easy in a conversation. It's actually really hard for like humans to get right, just like empathy. When someone comes in, and they're searching for a home or filling out a form at 3am, you know, speed, delete, super important. But if you set up our product to respond at 3am, a common response we see from leads is like, why are you up? Why are you awake right now? This is weird. This is clearly an autoresponder no one would be up at this hour. And we built like funny replies in there, like, oh, you know, I'm working 24/7 I just happen to see this message and wanted to reply quick, like human like. So I think that goes so far in these conversations. And, you know, just to round it out, like we we have humans in what we call humans in the loop, reviewing our conversations constantly to so our our conversation, quality is the only thing that we care about, because we know that like we're playing with fire a little bit your leads are your most valuable assets, some of your most valuable assets, we know that if we have one slip up, that that lead might close their account, they might never, never talk to you again, they might ghost you might say I'm gonna go talk to a actual human at this other competitive brokerage. And we know that we have to get our conversations, right, which we do. I mean, it sounds
to your point, if it's slick, right, like, for example, you know, I, like I love that, like with an Apple phone, you can just text Apple, right? And they usually like, what are you looking for blah, blah, blah, and then they do connect you to a real person once they can't figure it out. Right. But that I mean, it sounds like you've taken it to the next level.
Yeah, yeah, we're trying I think every it's so weird. I think there's a stat out there that like even Google, Google, of all companies, they every single day, some percent like 20, think it's 10 to 20% of the queries or inputs that people search in Google are new to Google, they've never seen the query before. If you think about that, it's like, that's Google, people are searching millions, billions of times a day and stuff is still new to them every day. The same is true with our conversations, we've had 6 million which pales in comparison to the number of times people are searching, searching Google, but every single message is different. For us. Every single one is a unique, weird story, people open up to our product all the time telling us about their entire life story. And that's great, because that means they're opening up, we have an opportunity to build that rapport. And we do, but we're ultimately still trying to pass it off to our agent or lender, whoever is on the other side for a phone call, basically a warm phone call.
So that's the end, that's the end goal, right? Is getting them on the phone and actually having a phone call conversation with the client, right?
Yeah. And what I like to talk about here is is always you know, dials are dying. I think that we've all kind of been through it, it's not to say that phone calls are gonna, you know, become extinct, but people are answering the phone less because they're a lot more skeptical. If they don't see if they see a phone call coming in, that's a number they don't know, probably going to ignore it. Or it's even become more common that that's being blocked as potential spam by the carriers. And people are never going to answer a message that's from potential spam. But if you have a conversation over text first day, you know, qualify the lead basically, I'm going to give you a call or my agents going to give you a call from this number, same number or a different number that we message in the in the conversation. I know this is a common feature actually in apple but what what happens is if you kind of give it name in a conversation, to a net new number Siri or Apple's AI actually says, like suggested contact. Ashley. Right. Some of you might have seen that. But that's actually a really kind of sneaky way to actually make your conversations feel less spammy. For a number with these leads are from from a number that these leads don't know.
Yeah, you see that in the text right now? Maybe Ashley? Yep. Right. Or, you know, you go into the contact. It's already prefilled.
Yep. Yep, exactly. It's a, it's an interesting little hack that we've seen in terms of getting a little bit more response rate, and teeing up our our conversations for a phone call later. Because Because people we can also include like our agent's phone number. And Siri also does things like parses text messages and emails. And it's it can usually sometimes tie, like, I've seen it tie a person's phone number in their signature in an email, to their contact as well, which is pretty common.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you'll you'll just so sorry, you'll add a suggested contact about their email, phone number everything, right, and picked it out of an email, which, you know, maybe was something that they texted you after, right? I didn't add it from my email, it's like all intertwine. Yeah.
Um, who's the right client for you? Like, who? What kind of agents make the most sense to use your product?
Yeah, I like to say that. If you. So if you don't have an Iisa team, we typically, you know, get a lot of questions about like, oh, so if I use a product like this, I don't need an inside sales team, I don't need an inside sales agent who's pounding the phone texting, following up with leads, that's all an inside sales agent typically does is that behind the scenes work to convert deals, that's what our product does. We are not trying to replace Ishs at all. In fact, most of our best customers are actually high producing teams from the mortgage space leasing space or real estate residential real estate space with is at&t or best users or ISPs, because we're actually making their lives easier, because they don't have 100 times get them you know, 99 noes for the one yes, they get to basically open up their the top of their funnel a lot more. So they can just a lot more leads, only call the ones that our product is qualified, and kind of work those those warmer leads, it makes their life a lot easier, a lot more enjoyable. And so I'd say like our sweet spot for customers is, you know, kind of established teams with a decent number of leads, whether old leads so we work old leads to that might be stale in your database, or, you know, a decent lead volume for net new leads. But that's not to say we can't work with a new agent either. What I always like to say is, if you don't have an ESA, you are the ESA because it's your job to follow up with all those leads to convert those leads. And you've got a million other jobs as a new agent. So maybe you want to augment your lead follow up and qualification with a product like ours, to kind of get your your feet under you.
I'll give you an example. Like we as a business like we did a lot of leads, we've since turned it off, just because we generated 1000s of leads. So I've got I've got 1000s of leads just kind of sitting there. So with this product be something that could go in there and farm that lead pool.
Yeah, yeah, we like to use the analogy of kind of sift in the dirt from the gold because you definitely have a lot of gold in those old leads. I've talked a little bit in some some previous podcasts about like, a little thought experiment is I believe, lots of agents teams, brokerages could actually turn off their new lead, spend, and be just as productive with those old leads, they could just focus on those leads they've already paid for. Really try and sift them out and qualify those that are already in their funnel, and probably not really see a dip in in productivity or revenue. Yeah, what's the cost for your product? Did we lose so that conversations a lot? Yeah, we we obviously tailor our conversations a lot more specifically to old leads when we have those conversations, because the the the messaging is totally different
look to get like this set up and get going for an agent because that's, you know, obviously it's gonna come down to the bottom line of the agent. So what is also set your program up with, with with like, let's say we want to do our old leads, how much would that cost us?
Yeah, so it's all based on lead volume, and it doesn't matter if it's a new or old lead. So our Packages start at just 299 a month and go up to like 15 $100 a month for I think it's 1000 leads. So obviously, the more leads you send through the cheaper per lead it gets. And that gives you 12 months of follow up for every lead do. So that's one thing that's kind of been not spoken about is we do the long term follow up to lots of agents kind of give up after the third fourth attempt. We contact leads 52 times over text and email over a year. So we're pretty aggressive with our with our messaging.
That's awesome. That's awesome. What if so what can what like are opinion? Obviously you're striving to be better every day? What What can you guys do to be better on your side? Is there are you guys like fully formed? Or are you still working on the product as we speak?
I think we froze. He froze. We frozen. Our hair is not good. Maybe we should do a show and just have ai do our show. But notice that's interesting. A tech guy that can that we know Sal, can you hear me? Yeah, I can. Only on his end. Okay. Sorry to mirror. The back?
Yep, I think so.
Alright. So did you hear the question? No,
I don't think I did. So
basically, my thing is, is how do you guys get better? Right? How do you improve every day?
Yeah, yeah, it's a really good question. Like I said earlier, we have a human in the loop team, who constantly reviews our conversations in real time for basically quality, quality assurance. And what they're doing, there is a small subset of all of our conversations, they're hand hand labeling. So I always kind of have to give my little spiel about there's no such thing as self learning AI, because there's always someone who's taught the AI at some point down down the road. And that's what our team is doing with with constantly reviewing conversations. They're picking out things that the AI did, right or wrong. They're saying this was good, this was bad. And there's a whole kind of field of study in machine learning called reinforcement learning, which is exactly that you did good or you did bad. And that's the type of things that we're doing with our product. And with input from our our customers as well to improve like our our script quality, the questions that we ask an answer, as well as the things that the AI is predicting, it should say next.
It's interesting. That's really interesting. So you guys are constantly improving the predictability the AI that you guys have humans kind of watching it. That's it's really interesting. So, and your team, I guess, here's the question that I really want to ask, how are you delivering these leads? How are they being given to the to the agent? Are you guys syncing with their CRMs? Do you have your CRM?
Yeah, so we integrate with about 10 plus of the common prop, I'll just call it like prop tech CRMs. So these are like follow up boss boomtown. Salesforce, even more of the general ones HubSpot, we're integrated with a decent number of the CRMs that are used in the Prop tech space. And it's really easy to what we call like ingest leads, where you basically queue up a list of leads, and tag them, we'll just use that as kind of the term as like, eligible for structurally. And then that automatically sends them over to structurally and we engage them. And obviously, through most CRMs, you can set up automation to do that. So like little if then swear, if the lead as a lead type of buyer, and has not been contacted, send to structurally or add that tag, which sends them to structurally so that's that's the way that we typically like to ingest leads is by listening to the things that you're doing in your CRM. And then we've actually built two way integrations where we can send our conversations back to the CRM. So you and your agents never have to log into structurally, that's the that's the idea. We don't really want you logging into our dashboard. We want you thinking like the AI assistant that we give you is literally living in your CRM alongside you.
That's awesome. Now, if someone doesn't have a CRM, do you guys provide one or is there a way to do this without having a CRM?
Yeah, we do. have a dashboard. It's a pretty lightweight CRM, I would consider it where agents can can log in manage the conversations, you can take over the conversation from the AI at any time to you can see the conversations happening. And we have mobile apps to where you can kind of see it. See it on the go as well.
That's awesome. That's awesome.
And how are your conversion numbers? So obviously, let's say, you know, I've got 1000 leads, how many of those are being engaged? How many are actually getting great aged? As far as your numbers go? You have a sense in that?
Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good question. Again, across the board, we've seen about a 57% engagement rate, kind of as the first stage, if you will, we automatically categorize our leads into five stages. With the help of the AI, it's responded not responded interested not interested in, basically needs agent follow up, which is a qualified lead. So 57% engagement kind of off the off the cuff. And then the the most important stage that we care about is that last one, which is needs agent follow up, that's basically someone raising their hand in a conversation. They're saying something like, Hey, I want you to call me, I'm not working with an agent or a lender, and I need a referral or introduction that way. I want to go see a house. Or if they're saying, you know, yes, you can call me at, you know, 2pm, tomorrow, basically a hand raiser, and we see about 17% of all of our leads make it to that stage as well. So that's total, that's not of the 57% that respond, that's 17% of all of our leads, make it to that agent ready stage.
What sets you apart from other similar companies that are doing the same thing?
Yeah, again, I would probably say it's the, it's the conversation quality, that's that's what sets us apart, we've all kind of experienced the, the really bad chatbots that make make people like us close our PayPal accounts. So I would say that that's just something that we can't, that's just unaffordable in in real estate, or mortgage or leasing. You can't have a conversation that goes south. And I'm not saying that we've never had a bad conversation, are constantly reviewing them for the most quality. But it's just the conversation quality when it comes down to it, which sounds really easy. You know, getting a conversation right? With AI is really challenging, though, to do the little things that a human does, to handle objections softly, but respectfully, or moving the conversation forward? You know, I think when we set out to start structurally, we said, we want to build a product that's indistinguishable from human. And I think we've done that. Our next goal is to make it better than a 20 year veteran in the industry. I think we're taking steps to do that. But we want it to feel like it's been a salesperson for the last 2025 years. And it it's kind of seen seen objections, it's handle objections, it can kind of, you know, handle conversations just like an experienced veteran.
That's awesome. Man. What are some of your client? What do they say about the product? We What do you what's the feedback that you guys are getting?
Yeah, I would say that, like, one of the most interesting ones that I always like to tell a story of is, a lot of our customers really adopt it as an actual member of their team. So they give it a name, you can customize the name. We've even seen people put like a fake picture of it on our website and say like, this is a real member of my team. And some of my funny the funniest stories, I think, or when our customers are saying like, their leads, their customers are coming in and asking for the AI in person to meet them, which is really weird, but kind of funny.
I think they say
the agents or lenders usually say like, Oh, they're out of the office this week, or something. Some of them have said like, you know, okay, that was that was a, that was an AI program, you know, and we just star are here to serve you in really sophisticated ways with technology like that. So we've seen people be a little more honest, I guess, if you will with that. But we really like that approach. Like, really adopting it as a member of your team goes a long way makes makes your team seem bigger, more sophisticated. And you know, it's just the right approach to kind of bet it's our best practice recommendation for handling our product to
that's awesome. All right, man. Why don't you tell them I mean, I love it. Anything else that you think is pertinent that the audience should know about your product?
No, I don't think so I think covered a lot. I would, I would just kind of reiterate to that. You don't have an ESA team, if you feel like this is, you know, a little out of your grasp, you're just trying to figure out where to get the next lead. If you don't have an ESA, you are the ESA. And if you're still, you know, looking for the next new lead, consider what you already have in your database. You know, like you mentioned, you have hundreds of 1000s of leads in your database collecting dust right now. That's a great way to start. That's a great place to start.
Yeah, I'm going to talk to you after the show about that, because I've got a lot of leads. So if you stick around, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about that. I'm curious and how we can be potentially Yes. Tell the audience? Well, let's do this. We're going to do three questions. They're random questions that we asked our, our, our guests at the end of the show. But before we do that, tell the audience how people can get a hold of you, man.
Yeah, so I like to put my put my money where my mouth is, I guess a little bit. A lot of people are very skeptical of AI. And I totally understand that. So if you want to like test it out yourself, that's where I always like to say go next. It's test your AI assistant comm. You can fill out a form as if you were a lead and have a conversation. And I always like to give it with a little. A little asterisk here that try not to break it. Like, we see a lot of weird conversations like trying to test its limits, saying like, hey, what planet are aliens from? And what language do they speak? Like? We'll have a conversation like that. And it'll be good. But really give it a shot. Like you're a real lead. Definitely right. Ask funky questions and try and break it just like within reason. Not weird. Alien questions. Please.
See, I love that you guys have this build it up. Yeah.
That's awesome.
Yeah. That's awesome, man. That's what I love. When people do that when they put their, their their product out there just to be used money. One of the reasons we use our LMS platform is because he allowed us to use it before we actually got to do any thing. So kudos to you to put kind of put your money where your mouth is on that. That's awesome. All right, man. Let's get into three questions. They're totally random. So first question, I'll ask you if you had to eat one food for the rest of your life. What would it be my?
Um, no, honestly. Honestly, I think it would be chips and salsa. Pretty easy. It's a it's a classic.
Alright, you can't get you so you don't think you can get sick of the salsa, bro?
Nope. That's killing. I like to say it's vegetables, right? Yeah.
Other than you guys in the tech space, who's doing stuff that's impressing you right now.
Outside of tech, or just outside of our company,
outside of Europe, just about other tech companies in real estate are kind of making some waves that you kind of like like, Okay, now they're doing some good stuff.
Yeah, I would say generally in the AI space, there's a big open source company called Open AI, which is actually a former Elon Musk company. But they are on the bleeding bleeding edge of AI. There's a there's a really interesting model out there that they put out called GPT. Three, if you want to do some some research and fun homework. It's the the world's largest natural language processing model, basically. And I think that they're going to change the world if they haven't already. When it comes to conversational AI.
Awesome. Sal, do you ever have a question?
If you had to do something completely different than what you're doing now, right? If you had any chance to like clean slate your career, what would you do?
That is an interesting question. I would I would probably say something in the conservation, or forestry division just being out kind of the complete opposite. or something. Yeah. No technology out in the wilderness. Just the complete opposite side of the spectrum. That's cool. Yeah,
yeah, that would be awesome.
Great. No, no phone ringing and other than, you know, saving Little Bear Cubs or whatever.
Yeah, exactly.
Nate, dude, thanks for doing our show. Hank, back. I just want to talk to you after the show, but Thank you for doing our show, man. I think it's super interesting. What you're what you're working on.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on, guys appreciate it.
Yeah. All right. Thank you. We'll talk to you in a minute. Man, it's aI driven. Lead flow, I think is really the future man. I think people are is sales are gonna be slowly but surely, like, not replaced. But, you know, they, they're gonna get a lot of tools to help them convert these old leads because a lot of real estate agents have a lot of old leads. It's true. You know? Yeah. Yeah. I
mean, you could have one lead. You could have 5000 leads if you don't follow up with them. You can't convert them. Right? Yeah. So yeah.
All good stuff. Everyone. That tip man, anything you want to add Sal, before we go?
Nope. Let's get to it. All right,
everybody that's been listening. Thank you for making it through the show if that's your first time. I know it's weird, but you know, we have a weird show. So Hang Hang in there, wherever you are. I know. There's a lot going on geopolitically. If you guys want to see us live, go to Facebook forward slash Irie podcast. You can also go to YouTube. Go to Irie. podcast.com Please send us a message. Tell us what you guys want to see on our show. Love to hear from you. Until then, we'll see you guys next week. Bye. See?
You've been listening to inside real estate, the nation's top real estate podcast. Don't forget to follow us at Ira podcast.com and everywhere where podcasts are available.
