Dream technology to help your real estate investing?

Question

Hi everyone,

I’m fairly new to the real estate world and I’m currently a student as well as a software developer. I’ve been programming since about fourth grade, and I like to think I know a thing or two about building technology products.

So I’m curious about what technology investors typically use to systematize their investing. I’m also curious about what doesn’t exist yet! What pain points do you personally have in your investing that could be potentially eased by new tools? What is possible to “automate away”, so managing deals is as easy as it can be? Dream big! Things I’ve looked into before that come to mind are tools for managing networks, organizing contacts so you remember who is good at or looking for whatever, keeping track of the many documents and having on-device signing of those documents.

Hoping to hear some fun responses from you all.

Chris

Jessica Stevenson · Answer

@Chris Vanderloo I'm interested to see what types of responses you see here!

I currently use dotloop for digital filing and electronic signatures.  It's a great way to keep in place all the documents I need to keep a transaction together, make edits, share with any involved party, and be sure everyone has signed.

Any CRM for an investor or real estate professional is an absolute must.  There's a lot of them out there, all at different price points ranging from about $10/mo to over $120/mo.  Check out realvolve, contactually, less annoying, top producer, liondesk, the list goes on. A CRM that has built in email and mail marketing campaigns is a huge plus.  Haven't found a good (affordable) one yet that specifically targets the multifamily/commercial space.

Marketing apps similar to dealmachine, where you can find a property and put that owner (occupied or absentee) on an automated mail campaign.

I haven't done extensive research yet, but also haven't come across anything that gives me a reliable phone number or email address of potential sellers.

Just some quick thoughts, but hope this helps :)

Chris Vanderloo · Answer

@Jessica Stevenson Lots of these CRM's seem to be pretty pricey for what they actually offer. What would you be looking for in a CRM that would be more suited for the multifamily/commercial space? Speaking as a person without any experience in that arena.

@Jim Goebel

1. That actually sounds doable as long as the data can be pulled down. I'm a big fan of the ELK stack - an open-source data ingestion and analysis tool with built-in custom dashboards and the ilk. I think it could be pretty easy to make a powerful ingestion system built with that, and then use their location-based heat maps to graph it.

2. In terms of scraping the MLS, I saw a thread on that at one point, and I think they've tried to make it difficult for anyone to actually scrape the MLS. Best bets there could be Zillow's API, but that's obviously a fraction of deals.

3. Doesn't look like Monday has any official way to add on a plugin like you were thinking.

4. That's an awesome idea. Data would be hard to come by, but if we can figure out a reliable source for it, it could be doable. I'd love tracking for people that do labor like that... see reviews of past investors and compare posted rates.

Justin Black · Answer

Hey Chris,

I am a Salesforce Engineer getting my feet wet in REI. While, right now, we are not a place to implement technology to automate our deal-flow due diligence, it is my hope to use SFDC in this fashion.

Ultimately, my end goal would be to use APIs for lead generation, automate basic qualifying data points based on our personal acquisition criteria (location, potential rents per unit, AVR, rehab costs, etc.) to eliminate the manual element behind analyzing deals. The hope here is to minimize the number of deals we look at to only those that are deemed qualified. This will allow us to only invest time and energy on deals we believe are a good fit for us and discard the rest.

Additionally, we would use it to track revenue for properties we close as well as capital expenditures to log rehabs done over the lifetime ownership of the property. Hopefully, we can use this as a means of being proactive in predicting when future rehabs will be needed (i.e. original roof was 25 years old at purchase, 10 years remaining until we need to re-do it based on the general lifespan of roofing in that area)

From there, we will also use the system to automate marketing touchpoints, keep up to date on what agents, contracts, PM's, lenders we are using in each market and hopefully generate robust reports to allow us to understand data point on properties we did close or did not close (i.e. sales price, current listing price, etc. for properties we did not acquire.)

I am currently looking into ways to pull the above off as we ramp up our operations and start locking down properties. I would love to hear your perspective on the above!

Thanks,

Justin

Jim Goebel · Answer

@Chris Vanderloo

Hey Chris some other thoughts, and I'm surprised not more have weighed in:

• Some analytics / data visualization that shows Variables like: price changes over different time periods (either based on estimates like Zestimates or actual sale data), in some cases, steep/rapid changes, or acceleration may be a window into when an area is getting that critical mass to move forward - I'm thinking a heat map etc after scraping price info over time - by the way, the Zestimate I've found the historical graph is not the ACTUAL historical Zestimate, (for whatever reason)
• Scraping the note world (paperstac, Note MLS) to again look for rapid changes in default rates or other relevant info that'd be leading indicator for pricing - note this would need more brainstorming
• We use Monday.com - if there was a plug-in or something that'd help very specifically handle RE projects, especially as we onboard other people, that'd be great.
• Platform for specifically detailing projects for bid - something different than the Homeadvisor model, though - If we as investors could see actual historical labor rates on a per unit basis, this would be great.  Would be pie in the sky, likely, to capture transactions for RE work on a platform as that'd be what was needed for historical (accurate) data
• 
•

If you're serious about developing something and have a good skill-set, I wouldn't rule out getting together on this.  I'm not a developer (software, I mean :)) but in a previous life I had some Java skills.  My wife is more of the IT wizard having worked professionally in that field for a bit.  We've got some real ambition and a budget that can go towards projects that we think we can get some value out of and have a market.

Sidebar, we need more of this kind of activity in the BP community.

Chris Vanderloo · Answer

@Jim Goebel That’s usually a big one! Many people have tried to piece together MLS scrapers and whatnot, but I suppose it’d be nice to have all the numbers (comps, taxes) found for you as well. I agree.

Jim Goebel · Answer

@Chris Vanderloo

Any tool that gives investors a leg up in finding good deals, would be helpful.

Dream technology to help your real estate investing?

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