Data Driven Decision Making Part 3 With Ashkán Zandieh

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This is Real Estate Investing Live from New York with James Nelson, the principal and head of Avis & Young's Tri State investment Sales Group. In this program, you'll learn about the world of commercial real estate and find out why it's one of the largest investment opportunities in New York and around the world. Now here is your host, James Nelson.

Welcome to Real Estate Investing Live from New York. This is your host, James Nelson, bringing you episode number 109. Thank you, thank you, thank you as always for joining, for listening, to sharing with your friends your ratings on itunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, help others find the show and I am incredibly grateful for you taking the time to to help share your feedback. And if you have not already, please make sure and connect with me at James Nelson NYC there. I love getting questions on LinkedIn. I want to be a resource for you to be the best possible investor that you can be. And finally, but certainly not least, if you have not already, check out james nelson.com I built this site for you. This is an investor hub with all the information that you need to be successful. Not only can you find show notes in this podcast, but you can also find an exclusive video series. You can also find keywords, links, other favorite books, podcasts that I've read. So and we've got some exciting news that we'll be announcing in a couple of weeks, so stay tuned on that page as well. So for today's show, we're having with us my good friend Ash Zandi, who is doing part three of three on data driven decision making. And if you have not already checked out part one and part two, this is incredible information that you need to know to be successful, to be as Wayne Gretzky going to where the puck is going. So if you are not leveraging data to make the best possible decisions for your investments, you are really missing out on a tremendous opportunity. There's just so much data. There's so many providers out there now who are making it that much easier for you to do the research you need. And Ash has such incredible, incredible experience. Not only is he the senior director of Proptech at Antenna, a leading real estate tech agency, he's also the chair of the center for Real Estate Technology and Innovation for credi. He's the board member at NYOP and he's also a board member and founder of Cretech. He's a serial entrepreneur. He also started Sonature, which came out of Property idx, which many of the brokers in New York know all about. And now Sonature is helping sellers and buyers find each other and to help provide that information. So we're going to have a really, really in depth conversation on what data that you need in your arsenal to be most successful. So we're going to have a brief word from our sponsor and we'll get right into that interview with Ash.

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So I'm pleased to introduce my good friend Ash Zandi. Ash is an innovator and real estate tech specialist. Few people in the world of real estate tech are as connected, informed and important to the ecosystem as as. She is the former CIO and board member of Kretech, Chair at the center for Real Estate Technology and Innovation, a board member at NYOP Nao York City and founder of sonicher, formerly Property idx, a buyer prospecting platform for the New York City multifamily real estate industry. And most importantly, an incredible guy. So Ash, thank you so much for joining us. And you know I really, I so appreciate our friendship. You know, we've known each other for years. You were kind enough to ask for my opinion very early on when you launched the predecessor to this property IDX Signature. And it's just been amazing to watch your growth and to see how your company has been involved. So thank you for all that you're doing for the real estate community to move us forward.

Oh, thank you so much James. I'm actually honored. It's like a privilege. I'm so excited to be on this show. I'm looking forward to this like all month.

Awesome. Well, this is like the and I know we had to reschedule a couple of times. It was definitely worth the wait. And we did. This was a three part series on data driven decision making. We had Rich Sikowski from rionomy, then we had Craig Leibowitz from Avis and Young talking about data driven decision making. Now we get to hear about what you've been up to. And so I love to hear about, and I want to get to this about how you view data decision making and certainly predictive decision making. But let's start with how you got into this because if I'm not mistaken, you got into the business, what was it, as a broker originally. And I know you also have, your father is in the business as well. So maybe let's start with growing up in a real estate family and what that was like and kind of how your father influenced you.

Yeah, I reluctantly got into the real estate business. So my father, for those that don't know him, he's Mohsin Zandy, self made real estate guy. I mean, typical immigrant story, comes here with nothing and then finds his way buying some multifamily property. The cool thing about being his son is kind of seeing the entrepreneurial spirit, seeing the hustle, seeing actually what it takes to actually create something like that. So I think from an early age the entrepreneurial spirit was set very, very early on. And he was also a licensed broker. He was a former president emeritus of the Long Island Board of Realtors. And so you got to see how to navigate the political landscape and those nuances as well, on a local level and also on a state level. Yeah, but before all that, I was an A and R at Universal Records. I thought I was going to be in the music business for a long time, still have a lot of friends in the music business and kind of brought everything that I was doing in music from an analytics perspective, marketing, pr, everything over to the real estate industry. And what happened and how I kind of joined, you know, joined the real estate industry was my father was running for the Long island border Realtors prep residency. He was losing. He asked me to help with his PR marketing campaign. I said sure did that. He won, thank God, and then wrote me a check. It was much more than I was getting paid in the music business and said let's go. And so I came over to the real estate business, then went over to got an inside look into the operations of what it takes to own an acquisition shop, a property management shop, and within his own company, prominent Associates, and then left that between all that, went and got a few degrees from different educational institutions, one of them namely nyu. And then I left that as soon as I graduated, joined ABS Partners and became a commercial real estate broker. And everything kind of changed from there.

Not to stop you, but I Gotta say, because I love the fact that you've got this experience with, you know, the physical real estate, you know, the bricks and sticks, you know, some people call it. And you know, I don't want to make a generalization and nor do I want to kind of put you in this prop tech box, but oftentimes you've got people who come from that tech background, but they don't really understand what it takes to operate real estate and understand the ins and outs of the business. So you know, first of all, for you to experience firsthand what it takes to run a building and then to also have been a broker, I mean, I'm sure along the way you must have just been noticing wild inefficiencies. Right? So yeah, I've got him. It sounds like your father brought you on to say, okay, Ash, you know, help us improve what we're doing. I mean, were there any things that you were doing early on in your career to try to innovate and say, hey, you know dad, maybe we could be doing this a little bit different or maybe once you showed up to abs, you know, maybe we want to think about brokering differently. Any early ideas you had for innovation?

Yeah, you know, back then, you know, the big, the big Kahuna, even though we had, we still had StreetEasy, the big kahuna for mid market multifamily, was still Craigslist. Like Craigslist was a great platform, you know, for tenants and today not so much, but I mean it was like the spot you would go. And one thing that would just drive me crazy was that you'd get all of these inquiries as soon as you posted and there was nothing to automate that. And I said, well, what if we automate that entire process? So as soon as someone would reply to the Craigslist post, we would have an immediate reply back to schedule an appointment. And then so it would automatically do that for us. Us. I didn't have to spend time scheduling, you know, walkthroughs of space. You know, the tenant or prospective tenant would, you know, schedule a time and you know, and the beauty of that, actually it avoids any potential conflicts. Right. And so everything was non biased. Like if you want to make an appointment, show to anybody, it doesn't matter who it is. Right. So the technology, you know, was kind of like made things a lot easier. And that was one.

What year was that, do you think?

God, I don't even know. I think 2010. I think 2010, because. 20, 2010, 2011.

So I mean it's amazing to me. And today everyone says, you know, Ash, that sounds pretty basic. I mean, but you know, back then, like you said, I mean, I'm sure so few owners were even. I mean, those were the days of, you know, place an ad in the New York Times or just wait for brokers to bring tenants to you or, you know, whatever else you did. But, you know, put a sign on your building. But. But no one was probably thinking about how do we convert online leads now? It's like a given. In fact, over Yardeni was on my podcast and he talked about they now have AI, they have a virtual assistant. So if you email a request to rent one of their apartments, you know, you'll get someone who replies at any time of day. And it's not immediate because if it was immediate, you would know right off the bat that you're speaking to a computer. But, you know, the capabilities now are mind blowing. And they survey the people after, you know, all the way to getting them to the apartment to go see it. And you know, half the people they surveyed didn't even realize that they weren't speaking to a real person. So I mean, it is amazing. But back then to kind of have the foresight that, you know, that's where the industry should be heading. I think you were certainly ahead of your time. So yeah, I wish I had enough.

Foresight to actually go into that business. Oh, that's the, that's the thing, right? It's like, oh, like AI back then didn't exist. Right. So yeah, you had chat bots and stuff, but they weren't at the level as where they are now. Like you go to a website, you see a little chat feature, you start typing, you think you're talking to someone, but it sends you a bunch of different links. But yeah, it's, it was a fun time. You know that the wild west back then, like no one knew what to make of it. So it's just like try to automate that. You could even do it now, to be honest with you, even with StreetEasy, like you said, even a prospect now, even on street, the process hasn't changed still. So if you go on street, easy, someone sends you a prospect, sends you a message, it goes directly to your inbox. You can still set that up to reply back to all those prospects still. And actually, funny enough, my father asked from time to time I still get involved with some leasing stuff. He asked me if I could help him lease one of his units, said sure. And then she set up the same exact system and it still works. It just had an auto reply back.

It's amazing that some of these technologies, and maybe they're a data provider and they solve one thing, but then they don't, you know, bring it through the whole arc of the sale, you know, so, so, but let's talk about abs. So then you start, then you get into brokerage. So now what were you. An ABS is a great shop. They do leasing, they do sales. What was your focus while you were there?

Yeah, so I worked with a great guy named James Casey and the entire team there. Just so at the time you were very innovative for such a boutique operations. For those that don't know abs, they're byproducts of the Helmsley Spears era of commercial real estate. A lot of their assets are Midtown south kind of driven assets. 915 Broadway, 200 Park Avenue South. Like these are phenomenal assets. And I had the privilege of shadowing Jay for two years and kind of learning the ropes and he had some tremendous stories. And Earl Altman had some phenomenal stories of like when he was at, you know, Harry Helmsley's right hand guy, he had some phenomenal stories. He one time told me this story about Harry and there was a journalist from the New York Times at a holiday party or something like that. And the journalist asked him, what are you looking at? And he says inventory. I couldn't stop and I was in the cafeteria. So I mean, as a what, behind the ears, 20 year old in that office? I mean it was pretty awesome to hear some really incredible stories. And my whole claim to fame kind of began there, if you want to call it that. I was an office leasing guy and nobody wanted to talk to me. Honestly, no, at that time even prop tech or tech wasn't even a thing yet, or real estate tech was even a thing. And I was trying to get in touch with some fire, you know, you know, prospects, you know, finance, insurance, real estate, like anyone traditional sense, conventional industries. Nobody wants to talk to me. I was, I didn't know anything. So what I did was I just basically walked into buildings and tried to get kicked out of them. In Midtown south. It's basically canvassing, doing territory, you know, canvassing, you know, stuff like, you know that you guys pioneered over at Massey and so did that. And I had some friends in tech and those are only people that wanted to talk to me. So basically sub 5,000 square feet and there's a map behind me in the office and I just started plot mapping all the buildings. I was getting kicked out of basically and I'll tell you a funny story. One of the Trinity buildings I was basically zigzagging across. I'm the security guy trying not to catch me. But it was fun, you know, wear the rubber, you know, the soles of my shoes thin. It was awesome. And basically noticed that all the buildings getting kicked out of were hovering around 915 Broadway and that was really interesting. That's an ABS property and turns out Union Square Ventures was there and across the street was General assembly and General assembly at the time was co working. They eventually moved over to 915 and that's really interesting. I wonder if this theory holds true. So if I pick another VC. So I found another VC and I try to find all the sub 5000 sq ft tenants. This is before CompSec so had to actually go and do the manual stuff and turned out the theory holds true. And basically it was a overlap. This is basically a Venn diagram. And I said wow, this is. I'm a sociological marketer by trade and so this is the law of dynamic density in visual form right now. And so the middle is the sweet spot. So every time I try to go find an expiring lease I point them there and I had a high hit rate and I try to find that in different pockets. I indexed that information, I presented it at a company memo, turned to a company memo, presented the findings at one of our broker meetings and nobody cared and it fell flat. Nobody cared except for our head of prior which at the time was a Beckerman pr and he said do you mind if I shop this around? I said sure, go ahead. And he shopped it around a week later I said do you want to talk to Forbes? And I said about what? It's about your memo. So I spoke to the guys at Forbes, Carson Strauss and he said I love this. Can you turn into an actual report? So I turned into a report, was featured in Forbes and my life changed overnight in the tech circle. Six months later the commercial observer said, you want to do an expose? No, not actually like an article on you. I was like sure. I thought it was gonna be like this one thing about like up and coming agent. No, it turns, it turns out it's like a photo shoot and expose three page thing. Stuff that your parents take and cut out and like you know, frame and I'm not gonna ask exactly what my dad did when it came out. And then my real estate career took off and I think they called me like the tech whisperer which is crazy. And my life Kind of changed overnight. Now the real estate people in our industry started caring about me and actually started taking my meetings and my calls and so everything kind of shifted at once.

I mean I've known you for, I mean easily, I mean I would say at least 10 years, you know, maybe longer. And I've never heard that story. Probably too modest, but that is unbelievable. So this report you said, so you were basically showing where you thought there was going to be movement amongst the tech world. So kind of tracking where tenants were and where they were going. Were you already thinking kind of predictably, kind of trying to track or map out where the trends were going. Tell us a little bit more about what this report actually said.

Yeah, sociologically, yeah, absolutely. You try to, you try to, you know the analogy that everyone always uses, you want to skate to where the puck's going to go, right? And I try, you know, our industry is so, you know, hands on commercial real estate, such a hands on, you know, full contact sport that you have to be up and active. But you know, sometimes what I realized early on amongst the real estate industry in the community is that everyone's so transaction focused and in it for the deal at the moment. And I said, well I can't compete for the deal at the moment. I have to find where the future opportunities are going to be. So I try to basically skate to where that would be. And I had no advantage, I had nothing. I didn't have a network, I didn't know any owners. The brokerage industry, there's a new kid in town, I had nothing to offer brokers and the only again I wanted to talk to were tech companies. So I basically spent the first few months just like researching the industry, researching comps, researching stats and really just kind of be a sponge and then weaponize that information analytically for future clients and but doing a very sociological way. I'm a big fan of dynamic density. I'm a huge, still a huge fan of that theory because explain what that is.

What's dynamic density?

The basic principles of is basically kind of birds of a feather flock together, right? Like if you can find you know, center cores and commonalities amongst, amongst people you can find the trends within. Basically if you had like random dots on a board you can find or people like cell towers do this really, really well. If you want to track like people you can find, you can track individuals by heat maps. You know, you can really start circling people out and indexing them and basically creating heat maps based on commonality like, like, like lunch, like Lunch spots, transportation, accessibility to transportation, stuff like that, and find patterns within human. And if you can do that, it's awesome. Like it's actually always used in ethnical, ethnic marketing. So like, if a non Spanish brand is trying to break into the Spanish market, they typically use dynamic density marketing practices to enter, you know, central Queens or South Queens, you know, or whatever. So you see it a lot. Actually, it's never really spoken about, you know, we.

I saw you at the Cretech conference here in New York and what amazed me is it seemed like half the booths that were there were all about, you know, geolocational tracking and whether it was trying to figure out, you know, what the trends were as far as where were shoppers, where were people, people moving. It just, you know, we're in this. Maybe it's the golden age of data where there's just so much data out there and it almost becomes overwhelming. It's like, where do you start? I mean, most of the listeners of this podcast, a lot of them are aspiring investors and they might be saying to themselves right now, you know, Ash, this sounds really cool, but I'm one person, right? I'm looking for a thesis. I want to know where to buy. I want to start with a 1020 unit apartment building, you know, and maybe I'd like to start in my own backyard. But what's, what's the next neighborhood like? How do I figure out where an area is going to pop? So what would you say to that question? If I, if I had to figure out what's the neighborhood, where do I want to go by? Where am I going to see the best rent growth? What are the key data points that you would use and where would you find them?

That's a great question. So we're lucky that we live in New York and we're lucky that New York City has open data. And you could use, I think nyc, just Google NYC open data. Type in whatever data you want and I guarantee they have it. Very similar to how you can use flight patterns as an example, as a proxy for future growth. In certain cities. I look at ridership, I look at ridership, like transit ridership. If there's an increase in transit ridership, that's like number one. I also look at outlier data like white, white collar crime and, and, or not like, I apologize, petty crime. So like how like bikes or bicycles stolen, what is the increase of bikes that are stolen within certain areas? That's a funny enough, outlier indicators. So those kinds of stuff I start.

Looking at meaning if there's a huge. If there's a huge drop in bike theft, yeah, the area is getting better because it's getting safer. Right. And if you're tracking the subway ridership and it's very easy to see what is the ridership at a subway location. And I would assume they would map it so you could actually see, okay, there's been a boost in subway ridership at this station. The area appears to be getting safer. This is something I want to be paying close attention to. Absolutely.

If you're getting started in this business or you have one building, two buildings, three buildings, there's a unquantifiable factor that I think never gets spoken about, and that's safety. You as the individual, because you as the owner, you as the property manager have to actually visit that location. And my father, I went and found a property. I won't name the neighborhood, but it was an undesirable neighborhood, and it was on an upward trend, and it's still trending in that direction. But he said to me, flat out, it's like, that's a great opportunity, but I don't plan on losing my life for future rent growth. And you have to feel safe in the neighborhoods that you want to own. But no one talks about that. Like, yeah, the market could be appreciating, but you have to still go visit. And would you visit that spot at 12 midnight, God forbid someone sets off the fire alarm, you have to go and shut it off. You know, if you don't have a super, you're the super. You got to go shut it off. And so do you feel safe enough to actually visit that location?

Great point. So talk about after abs. So what was your next move from there?

Yeah, so I launched a company called Retech, which is basically the Gartner of real estate tech. I eventually sold that to Cretek or CRE Tech, and that's how I became a CIO and board member there.

But I remember some of those early events you do, you know, those competitions. Right. And I mean, you were certainly a first mover on that. Now they have these hackathons and everything. But, like, I remember, you know, I think it was. You had me as a judge for one of those, and there was some really exciting ideas back then.

So Square Foot, I think, launched just around that time, too, which is now this, like, office brokerage shop.

Yeah, yeah. So you were. You were right in the middle of this all. So. But I mean, at the point, were you even trying to monetize that, or was this just like, hey, I want to be in the middle of this. This is. This movement's going somewhere. Was that. I mean, ultimately, you know, you sold the business.

But yeah, what happened was, you know, you know, after the Forbes and Commercial observer articles that came out and then the Real Deal and all the other media stuff came out, all these real estate technology companies started coming out the woodworks and they started asking to demo for me and my team. I said, this is silly. Instead of you guys coming one by one, why don't you come as a group and why don't we have an event? Again, I came from the music business. Instead of doing things one off, let's do as a collective. And we have demo days in the music business all the time. Right. Universal Records has a stage in this building. So it's like we constantly have them. And it was so foreign to me that we didn't have it in real estate. And so by the good graces of having First Mover Advantage hosted the world's first real estate tech demo day, and by the good graces of First Mover Advantage hosted the world's first real estate tech hackathon. And all of these things kind of happen and how all this kind of came together. I was having lunch with Justin Pettigre, who founded 42Floors, and he also launched a brokerage tech company as well. Justin said, justin, what should I call this? And he's like, why don't you call it Real Estate Tech Demo Day? I said, it's too long of a name for a URL on eventbrite. So I shortened it. So just like on our license, we can abbreviate real estate to re. So we just called it RE and then tech and that became retech and hosted a world. I thought, we're gonna have like 30 people at the event. We had like 400 people. We had the fire marshal show up, said, you had too many people here. Had like people from J.P. morgan to Barclays, like, people I never thought in a million years would show up to an event like this. Some big names showed up for to hear eight companies speak about real estate tech. Honest. Buildings, demoed, 42 floors, demos, BTs or at that time, view the space. You know, these were companies that many.

Of those companies now achieved unicorn status. Right. I mean, there are some that are. I mean, if they're not at a billion dollar valuation, they're close. And this was like just they were getting off the ground.

Yeah. So we did that. And the thing that kind of what everyone liked was the reports that were pumping out. So we thought we were going to be in the events business. Turns out the events business was just a result of our research and our content. So I left brokerage. I went into this business. It was rough. You eat bologna on hand for a few months, literally bologna on hand. Because I was too proud to ask for financing. I said we can do it on our own. Which I'm not sure if that's a positive or a negative, but it was rough going the first few months and then eventually got the business up and running. NAOP was our first client and did a ton of stuff with them. Did a lot of programming, then work with ULI, work with a handful, work with WeWork and a handful of other real estate tech companies and co working.

Companies and they help program events. Right. So you're trying to bring your members together, help them innovate. I know one of the latest things you're doing, if I'm not mistaken, is that NAR actually has a fund to invest in prop tech. Maybe you want to talk a little bit about that.

Yeah. So Second Century Ventures is a for profit venture capital firm. They partnered with the national association of Realtors and they have an accelerator called NAR Reach and I'm advising them on their Venture Advisor. There's. And I mean it's an entire global platform. You get to see some really cool companies on the ground level. Now most people associate NAR as a residential company, which they understandably would do, but there's a huge commercial component to the organization and they're affiliates and some of their affiliates are like sior, ccim, IREM and a handful of others. And so we have the awesome job of working with some really, really cool prop tech companies or real estate tech companies in the commercial real estate industry and finding some opportunities. The cool ones are the ones that actually aren't in real estate or don't know they should be in real estate. Those are really awesome ones, like good examples of that, like our DocuSign or like Notarize and companies like that. But you have some really, really cool companies and they're currently recruiting for their 2022 cohort.

So now are you also you've done some venture capital on your own as well. So has that always been kind of along the way that you've looked to make investments? And then I know you also track investment overall.

So yeah, so I. Yeah. So retech actually eventually became that actually so became. And that's what kind of drove the business moving forward was our research and insights. I've historically Used venture capital as a proxy for future innovation in our industry. Very similar to how there are organizations out there that attract public equities and what have you. I tried to do that on a private side and made an entire business out of it and it was really, really awesome. Had a friend do some coding for me and REST is history and still have that. And index venture capital investments in the industry. The center for Real Estate Tech and Innovation does that. It's basically a venture capital think tank and we index and analyze venture capital investments in real estate tech, namely in commercial and namely in the US but the top five markets are New York, Chicago, la, and then outside that is London and Toronto.

You mean where the venture capital is coming from or. Because some of this technology, it's obviously has global applications. So.

Yeah, no, no, no. Where people are coming from in general, the subscribers and network.

Got it. Okay, I got it.

So we check globally, we chat globally.

And I know you've got a great weekly report that talks about how much prop tech investment is taking place. So maybe just give our audience aside, you know, the scale of this and what kind of growth you've seen over the last couple of years.

Yeah, so this in 2021, 32 billion was invested in the real estate tech sector. That is a phenomenal number. We thought that the industry was going to compress. Turns out it hasn't. 2020. Sorry, 2020. 2020 was a weird year for obvious reasons, but it didn't compress as much as people thought. And the year before we thought was like the year 2019 we thought was the year of proptech. Turns out no, 2021 was. And think about that number for a second. That is larger than the market cap of Cushman and Wakefield, Newmark and other commercial brokerages combined. And if you factor in cb, it's just about even. And that's really interesting. And I think it's only a matter of time that a prop tech company is going to come along and actually acquire one of the larger notable brands is just inevitable given the size and growth. Now some companies are coming out, brokerages are coming out to safeguard their position in the market by actually repositioning or diversifying into the real estate tech or as a tech company. But by and large it's really fascinating to see that.

Yeah, I'm actually going to be hopping on the line next with one of my mentors, Blaine Strickland, who wrote a book adapt and he talked about this, this very thing. So it is amazing, you know, the amount that's being invested. But you know, for a long time prop tech was, was way behind the ball with fintech. You know, there were so many more advancements made and kind of real estate was left behind and now it seems like we're definitely making up for it. So listen, I really want to, this is really interesting and I think it's very helpful for, for our listeners to hear about the investment made in this space. But, but I really want to talk about your latest platform. So Property idx and we've been, you know, a loyal user and client from, from day one. I mean it's an incredible listing platform and you could have just said okay, that's, you know, that's it, it's, it's doing its thing, it's cranking along nicely. But then you said, hey, we're going to take this to the next step. You know, we've got so much data here and we're going to start supplying, providing predictive information namely who's buying and who's selling.

Right.

And you know, obviously for brokers that that's hugely helpful. I mean time is our most valuable asset and understanding the trends and again for the listeners out there who are looking to buy, who are thinking, you know, look, I could either sit and I could wait for the broker to bring me a deal or maybe there's a way that I could, you know, reach out directly to owners or to kind of look at the data and see where there might be opportunities. So maybe talk about predictive as far as when you kind of, you know, create that algorithm, what are you looking for and what is the data telling us?

Yeah, thank you for that and I love you guys have been such a tremendous valuable partner in all this. I look at Schwab and how they pioneered robo advisory and then I looked at Barclays global investors platform BGI which then pioneered iShares. And for those people that aren't familiar with iShares, they're an index investment strategy and exchange traded fund. I looked at those as an inspiration. Bgi, they built an incredible business off of the Cor quant equity world which had basically gathered a ton of assets and will continue to gather assets over the next five, six years or whatever it was. And it was just really interesting to see that. And then you look at Bridgewater Associates is I think the pinnacle of global macro investing and most folks I think probably heard of them. So I looked at that and look at what's going on in the quantum investing world and the systematic investing world. I said well that's really interesting. But there's one component that makes real estate different from public equities, and that's people. At the end of the day, real estate is held in private companies because they're all LLCs. Private companies are operated and owned by people. And I said, well, who are those people and what is their behavior like? Again, I'm a sociologist by trade, so I want to know how people engage beyond. Because conventionally how I was taught was if you look at when mortgages are going to expire and go and canvas those people to go list with because they may be prospective sellers, or go and target people that recently made an acquisition because they most likely will buy again. The problem with those two methodologies is that it doesn't take in time. And more importantly, I don't know what kind of investor they are. Are they a value investor? What kind of investor are they? And so I looked at that and I said, well, or I don't know, growth investor, whatever it is, well, how can we better understand buyer behavior patterns? And so when we launched idx, which then turned into Soniture, what happened was we wanted to understand buyer behavior patterns in addition to how to engage with a site. And then we wanted to understand how that information correlates with their behavior pattern of their real estate holdings. And so basically we index that information, we overlay the behavior patterns of people and how they engage with the site. And turns out most people aren't qualified buyers. Most people come onto sites and marketplaces just to get a competitive analysis of, of the market. And they are just looking for what's in the market, but they're not looking to actually transact. And so we looked at it and said, well, that's. We never want to always stay a marketplace because marketplaces inevitably become, I don't know, Craigslist. Right. And so we didn't want to be in that position eventually. So we constantly innovated ourselves because we believe that you either innovate or die. And that's basically. And there's two things that happen over the course of three years and most past three years. One was rent regulation because our sweet spot is mid market multifamily. So rent regulation, how owners interacted and engaged with listings that were rent regulated. We did notice an uptick in destabilized unit assets, but again, unqualified buyers. And so we looked at that information and then lastly was Covid. Right? And within Covid, there's two things that happen, actually one additional thing that happened and that was the rent freeze, Right. And then you had shelter in place, right? So you could, you could have been a holdover tenant and been a holdover tenant for two years. And the courses, the court systems here are so backed up, you could inevitably be a tenant for life. And then the day you want to show up to court, you surrender the premises and never have to pay rent. So that's the world we live in. So I just want to index all that information and find buyers.

That's awesome. No, we really appreciate you sharing that. So what is, so what would be the advice then to the investor? Again, starting out, and you already gave some very helpful information on data to look at, on where to invest. But how to uncover those sellers? Where would you suggest they go to start thinking about where these opportunities would be most likely to occur?

Yes, that's an easy one. Talk to James Nelson at Angels and Young. But yeah, I'm a firm believer that broker are the center of the transaction. Like, you need to have a good broker. Like whether a buyer, broker, seller, broker, or whatever. Like your preference is have a broker. Because you need to have a team in place. I really mean this. Like, real estate is a full contact sport. If you think you can do this alone, God bless you. But most people have a team in place. Studied some of the larger organizations, look at how Avalon Transacts or Blackstone or Blackrock or whoever, how they transact real estate. There's a team involved. They also have brokers. And so when you study larger organizations, you realize how to invest. And that's something like Grant Cardone said actually once on one of his podcasts or one of his webinars or whatever he did. But I remember seeing that find up on Instagram, actually it was on Instagram. And he said, yeah, you just study those companies and where they're investing and then find the opportunities there because they have way better data than you will ever have on your own. So I studied that and I saw how they were doing it and they have teams in place. So first of all, have a good team in place. A broker.

And Ash, I got a really, you know, thank you for saying that because not just because, you know, you're validating what we're doing, but here's someone who you have the data, right? And if it was that easy to just say, here's a list of 10 people to call, you know, everybody would do it, but you know, brokerage kind of having that ability to, you know, know how to approach that situation, to ask the right questions. Because again, the information can, can of get you to to closer to these opportunities, but then to be able to convert is. Is a whole nother story and takes. Takes a lot of time. So. No, I. I appreciate that. I. I also think a lot about these. You know, there's a lot of platforms, whether it's the iBuying shops that are basically trying to now, you know, bypass the brokerage community. You know, is there a way that they can just go direct? And it. It's. It's really complicated. It's really, you know, when it. When I. And I. I've asked this question in the past, you know, if there could ever be a I buying model for commercial property. And there's. So even with the billions of data points out there, every property is unique, right? And it's very difficult to kind of understand what is the story with the leasing, the, you know, so the tendency, the condition. There's just so many factors. And so, you know, having that advisor can help breed the tea leaves, I think is really important. So, look, I mean, this is a really exciting conversation. You know, again, I'm so lucky to have you as a friend and, you know, we're really so happy to have you on the show here today. Maybe just in closing, talk a little bit, you know, kind of what has been the key to your success? Because, you know, what amazes me is like every time I talk to you, you know, it's just like you've got this fountain of these incredible ideas that just, you know, continue to build. And, you know, I also see as someone who's, you know, it's about action, you know, some people just come up with ideas and they don't go anywhere and you make it happen. So, like, what's. What's your key to success?

I don't even know. I don't think I hear no a lot like. Or people tell me no, but I don't hear it. You know what I mean? So I think resiliency, I think most people come from because there's a few things that I think the great denominator here is that in tech, it's a running joke. But in tech, nobody cares who your daddy is, right? That's like a running joke in real estate. People do. And I actually like that because it helps people kind of create something on their own and carve out their path. And I'm deeply passionate about our industry. I'm deeply passionate about it and I wholeheartedly so I think the big one is passion, I guess, right? Without kind of diving too far into the why, but you got to have Your passion, whether it's this or music or coffee, food and beverage, whatever it is, right. Hospitality, just have a passion for it. And I think some of the greatest people on earth are working in real estate. I just love the business. It's just, it's awesome.

Well, you can, you can feel it, you can sense it. And yeah, I mean, it's again, it's, I can tell how your mind works and it's just, you know, you're always thinking, right. And it's because you're passionate about, you know, it kind of goes back to what you were saying early in the business, trying, you know, how can we do this better? And so I guess my last question would be advice for those listening. And we get a lot of college students who listen to, they want to learn about the business, they want to think about how to get into this. And, you know, maybe it's not the traditional route to go work at one of the big investment shops, become an analyst. If you wanted to approach this from the prop tech space, like, how do you get into it? Where would you start? If you wanted to go work with one of these prop tech shops and would you tell them, start off at one of these smaller startups or do you go with something more established? What would you tell that person?

Yeah, I think it depends on your appetite for risk. Right? Because basically when we buy real estate or public equities, whatever it is, you're buying risk and you have to assess your risk tolerance. So if you're deeply passionate about, for example, real estate finance and you're getting a degree in real estate finance, rest assured there's a prop tech company out there or 2 or 3 or 10 that are actually tackling a segment of the market that you're getting your degree in. So it might not be a bad idea to check out a handful of companies. We index them. We have our weekly newsletter called at the center for Real Estate Tech. It's called Weekly Prop Tech. It's got to go weeklyproptech.com and sign up for that newsletter. And every week we index and share, you know, the largest funding rounds of that week. And that was a good starting point. Another is subscribing to Kretech's newsletter, that's cretech.com. basically try to get as many newsletters as you possibly can. Fifth Wall has a newsletter which is a large VC in the space. Metaprop has a newsletter, so subscribe to the newsletters. Outside of that, look at the VCs in the space because there's a lot of noise happening in the space and in the industry so you want to cut through that really, really fast. So you want to find the best in class VCs in the industry and really identify some of the companies that are within their portfolio. And most of the time, if not all the time, a lot of these VCs have job boards to help promote their startups job opportunities. So definitely go there. Angellist also has a job board as well for Proptech and yeah, just go there and start looking for some pretty cool companies.

Ash, this was amazing and I really love how specific you got with a lot of these examples. That's super helpful for our audience because it really makes this actionable. So you know, I know that our listeners will get a ton out of this and hopefully this inspires them to do you know the exciting things that you've been up to. So just again, can't thank you enough for joining us today and certainly looking forward to hearing about many great things to come.

Oh thank you James. This is awesome. Thank you so much.

Wonderful. This is James Nelson, your host of Real Estate Investing Live from New York. If you have not already, please go to james nelson.com and check it out. I built this site for you. This is your investor hub to give you the inside edge to real estate investing. Go ahead and subscribe to that video series on how to invest if you haven't already. You can also connect with me, James Nelson, nyc. Link in with me. I love your comments, your questions, and last but not least, please share this episode with your friends. If you like what you heard, supply a rating, give a post. That is what helps spread the word and help the audience grow. So thank you again. Until next week.

Thank you for tuning in this week to Real Estate Investing Live from New York. Please join your host, James Nelson for another program next Tuesday at 7pm in New York, 4pm Pacific Time on the Voice America Business Channel. All shows are rebroadcast on Wednesday mornings at 7:00am Eastern Time and 4:00am Pacific Time, as well as always on Demand. We'll talk again next week.