CW 572 - Taking The Mystery Out of Repairs, Improvements & Rehabs with Pro.com with Matt Williams

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Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to the Creating Wealth Show. This is episode number 572. This is your host, Jason Hartman. Thank you so much for joining me today. By the way. We've got some great episodes coming up. We always do. Our flashback Friday episode will be with Dr. Steve Sugarud of Stansberry Research and Agora Financial. So check him out. I think you'll really enjoy that episode. And as we talk about what was gonna happen to the real estate market a few years ago and that prediction was pretty darn accurate again, again, another good prediction. And then Monday we've got Darren Bloomquist realtytracks Housing News report. Some really good data there, understanding closing costs and good faith estimates next week on Wednesday. So you'll get some good insight into that with one of our lenders. We've just got a bunch of other great shows coming up, so just stay tuned. Really good stuff there for you. So before we dive into this one, I want to first tell you that I may sound just a tad giddy. Just a tad giddy. Just a tad excited. When I'm interviewing this guest and I want to give you my motivation, it's not money. Well, at least not directly. It is that I am just excited about the idea that people are becoming more and more empowered. In fact, one of my goals that I have done absolutely nothing to bother to pursue, like so many other goals I have, is to do a TED Talk. And I want to do a TED Talk on this idea of individual empowerment, of how power is going down to the person with all of the great technologies we have nowadays and the advantages of that. And I'm not going to tell you the title I'm thinking of for my TED Talk because I Don't want to just broadcast that. But anyway, I do sound a little giddy because this interview today with a former CEO of Digg.com of course, that's Digg.com Matt Williams. He's going to talk about his new company called Pro Dot, which allows people to really take the mystery out of repairs and rehabs and improvements to their properties. And I, I just want to tell you, I may sound a little excited when I'm interviewing this guest, but I have no affiliation with them. I'd never even really heard of the company before the interview was booked. I mean, I didn't hear of it before that. I did hear of it a little bit before I interviewed him as I was looking at my upcoming interviews scheduled. I just think this is yet another of the many examples of the way the information is being taken out of the hands of that third party of that property manager, and it is being put into the hands of the investor, where the investor can easily access this information. The only areas where big money is cloaked in mystery and the empowerment doesn't get to the individual is of course government, Wall street, the banking system, and including the Federal Reserve, of course in the Wall street banking system cartel, and also the deals where people are investing in syndications and in LLCs and not following commandment number three, thou shalt maintain control by being a direct investor. These are the areas where information is cloaked, where it is hidden, where the power is not in the hands of the individual, but it's in the hands of the sponsor, the person, the company, the entity sponsoring the deal, or the arrangement or the relationship, rather than the individual who's putting their money into the deal. So, you know my opinion, follow commandment number three, thou shalt maintain control. And so that's what this interview is about today. You know, I'm not getting any money from him. I don't accept money from guests. You know, the people have offered me money to come on the show. No, we don't take money to put people on the show. In fact, some other podcasters are out there charging guests to be on their show. I don't want to say I'll never do anything like that, but it just, I've never done it so far and it just does not strike me as having journalists realistic integrity. So now a word from our sponsors. Just kidding. So anyway, I, I do sound kind of excited just because I'm really just into the whole idea of this individual empowerment. And of course, we are working on a tool to help you with this even more to help you with self management, to help you have more control over your investment properties. A software tool. And it's looking pretty good, I have to say. Say our team is doing a great job on it and we will be talking about that this weekend in Rhode island at our Venture alliance event. We're going to be presenting a little bit about this tool and what it can offer to investors. And maybe some of our Venture alliance members in our Venture alliance mastermind will become beta testers, maybe some of you will as well. Look for a future message on that and you can learn more about it on a future episode. But before we get to our guest today, I just want to talk about a, you know, the subject of inflation. And there's a great article in Zero Hedge which, which really does have some, some good stuff. I don't like Zero Hedge in some ways because, you know, it's kind of this like underground sort of gold bug mentality. And you know, I don't agree with that. I think gold is a lame investment. I don't think it is an investment. I don't think silver, gold or any of these things are investments. I think they are simply a way to save money to store value and insurance policy. So again, to qualify as an investment, as I always say, it has to produce income. If it doesn't produce income, if it doesn't have rent, if it doesn't have cash flow, it does not qualify as an investment. Now don't be too confused about that because income is judged by the noi, the net operating income. It is not judged by the cash flow. Okay, so I don't want to misspeak there because if you have an investment property that is very, very highly leveraged, maybe it's actually over leveraged. It could have break even or even negative cash flow and it could still actually be a good investment. That is actually possible. And I have talked about that on some of the past 571 episodes of the show. And so just keep that in mind. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole today. But go to jasonhartman.com in the search bar. You can type deferred down payment. You can learn a little bit more about that. It's about the net operating income, not the actual final cash flow because that many times is influenced too much by leverage. We should view leverage as a separate component of it. Okay, so this Zero Hedge article, it's entitled and it's by Tyler Durden, obviously a fake name, right? From the movie Fight Club, which was a excellent, very well Written movie, by the way. The mystery of the missing Inflation solved and why the US housing crisis is about to get Much worse. Now when you say housing crisis, that has many, many meanings. Because what they're talking about here in a large portion of this article is they're talking about the. And it's in bold. It says the reason for this is very simple. I'm quoting is a very simple, if dramatic one.

Bold.

The US transformation from a home ownership society to one of renters. Okay, now is this a crisis? I don't think so. I think it's a huge opportunity. I love this and this article really deserves probably some more attention on a future episode when we have more time. But let me just give you a couple of highlights. One here says at this point we should perhaps remind readers that according to the latest Census data, the US homeownership rate tumbled to 63.4%, the lowest reading since the first quarter of. Wait for it. You ready? 1967. Whoa, wasn't that before Woodstock? You know, the famous concert Woodstock, Right. Wow, that was a long time ago. Isn't that when Nixon was. No, Nixon was elected in 70. In 1970. Right, because he would have gone till. No, he would have been 72. I'm getting my dates a little mixed up here. Was that in the L? That was the LBJ era, right? Wow, that's a long time ago. In fact, it says it's the lowest homeownership rate in 48 years. Woohoo. I am very excited about that. In fact, I'm so excited. Let me just play you a sound effect. What's going to be the sound effect? And look, you know what I've said about this? I'm probably the only guy in real estate that thinks the homeownership rate should actually decline. I think it should be about 55% because I don't think there's anything wrong with renting. I think this whole idea of everybody should own a home is. Is sort of a silly idea. It's not necessarily good for them. I've talked about the well known Time magazine article from a few years ago that talks about how unemployment rates in areas with high homeownership are higher because people can't move to the jobs. The best thing you can have on a resume is mobility. You've heard me say that many times. And so you know, this is all part of this. So again, a huge opportunity for investors. The demographics coming at the rental market for the next decade are nothing short of phenomenal. Quite possibly, as I've said the best they've ever been in history. You look at the rent inflation. Okay, so median asking rent for vacant rent units and rent inflation, let me see here. It says since there is an unpaid unprecedented demand for rental units across the US as quote owning unquote alternative has become inaccessible, the median asking rent not only soared at an annual rate of over 6%. Okay, I'll, I'll, I'll cease with the dumb sound effects. Well, maybe not. You know, that's the first time I've ever done sound effects. So give me a, give me a, a long leash on that, okay? Because you know, we, we never did those cheesy sound effects before. But I just happen to have my little sound effects machine that I use at seminars sometimes right here on my desk. So 6%, it has never been higher with the Census Department recently reporting that the median US asking rent just hit an all time high high of $803. Okay, and the article, and then there's a graph. And the article goes on to say what is odd is that according to the Bureau of Labor statistics, the BLS rent inflation is far less at just 3% in the most recent print. One wonders what seasonal adjustments American renters should use use to make their monthly paycheck smaller the way the BLS perceives it. Okay, you know, of course this is all the manipulation they're talking about. Still at 3.6% it is the highest annual rent inflation since 2008. Folks. The opportunity is excellent for investors. Investors that are buying in cash flow oriented linear markets where properties make sense the day you buy them. Where you're following my 10 commandments of successful investing income property of course, the most historically proven asset class in the entire world. One more point. And herein lies the rub. The article goes on and this is in bold because it is not so much what the real honest influence inflation growth rate of rent is, it is what the offsetting income growth is. Unfortunately, while the BLS can seasonally adjust rent payments to make them as low as a bunch of bureaucrats want, the bigger problem is that U.S. household income is not only not keeping up with rent inflation, it is far below it. In fact, as reported last week, real income is now back to. This is really really depressing. You ready for this is now back to 1989 levels. That is terrible news. Again, I don't think we need to be this home ownership society, but I certainly think we need to see incomes going up in real dollar terms, not in nominal dollar terms. And Americans have not had a raise for decades. That is not good. But as I've talked about, and I'll tell you this next, creating wealth in today's Economy live seminar that I do and the next Jason Hartman University class that we do and the upcoming Meet the Masters program that we do that many of you have already signed up for. Go to jasonhartman.com for that and make sure you get your early bird price tickets for Meet the Masters coming up. But the next one we do, you know, we're going to dive into this a lot more because many people have asked me, especially years ago during the financial crisis when my message and you can hear this on the flashback Friday episodes and of course, if you attended one of our live events back then when my message was much more gloomy, okay, as it was with everything in the, in the media and the economy, it was, it was definitely more gloomy. And people used to always say, Jason, if, you know, if incomes are going down, if inflation is high, if unemployment in the future is going to be bad, then we're depending, we're depending on people to rent our properties. They're not going to be able to pay the rent. I would always answer that question by drawing two ladders on the flip chart. And those are the economic ladders. And it shows one ladder shows people moving up not so much of that, you know, according to these gloomy articles, and people moving down more of that. And it talks about how economics is a relative phenomenon. It's a relative phenomenon. Think Einstein's theory of relativity. And as such, that means that it's not that they won't be able to rent some house, it's what house. See, the house is not a fixed thing. So, you know, in the place first future, if technology doesn't rescue us, which by the way, it might, and all of these problems may just disappear because technology is so incredible and it's such an amazing time to be alive. I'm ultimately an optimist, but we'll see. You know, can the, can the crap that the bureaucrats and the government has done to our economy, can it be outdone by the power of free market technology, technological innovation? It's possible. I don't know which one will be the stronger of the two forces as the years go by. I mean, it's an amazing time to be alive. There's no question about it. But there are serious issues with debt, with income levels in terms of in real terms being at 1989 levels and rent inflation being higher. So if you talk to your tenant, phone five ten years from now, they might say to you, well, I used to own a house and the house that I owned was in a nicer neighborhood and it was 2,000 square feet. And now I'm living in a lesser neighborhood and the house I'm renting from you, Mr. And Mrs. Landlord, is only 1500 square feet. So it's not a matter of will they be able to afford a house. It's a matter of the house asset is obviously not fixed. So that changes with the investor or with the renter, of course, and their standard of living is what is under attack. That's what can decline in this type of situation. So anyway, I'm going too long here as usual. I'd love to see stick around and talk to you just forever. Apparently you guys like my diatribes, so I appreciate you listening. Thank you. Thank you for putting up with me. Go to jason hartman.com get your ticket for Meet the Masters coming up in January in Southern California, you Venture alliance people, we look forward to seeing you in Boston, Martha's Vineyard, Providence, Rhode Island, Newport, Rhode Island. We got an awesome weekend plan planned. And next week we'll report back to everybody about it. If you're interested in the Venture alliance and we've had more and more people expressing interest, go to venturealliancemastermind.com that's venturealliancemastermind.com and jasonhartman.com those are your two resources. Let's dive in and let's hear about empowerment when it comes to rehabs, repairs and maintenance of your properties. This is one of the many things Amazon.com also has a program like this. There's some good stuff here. So let's Talk to the CEO and founder of Pro.com. It's my pleasure to welcome Matt Williams. He is the founder and CEO of Pro.com and he is the former CEO of a company you all know, and that is Dig D I G G former CEO of Digg, entrepreneur in residence at Andreessen Horowitz. And it's great to have him with us today. Matt, welcome. How are you?

Good. Thank you for having me.

Good. It's good to have you. Give our listeners a sense of geography. Where are you located?

Up in Seattle, Washington.

Okay. Good stuff. Beautiful place when it's not raining.

You've heard that before, which is most of the year.

Yeah. Well, that's why it's beautiful. Yeah. Good. So, you know, before we dive into pro.com, i'm sure our listeners would love to hear a little bit about Digg and Your experience there as CEO, can you just give us a little background on that?

Sure. I'll just actually walk through a little bit of my background. I started out as a kind of a son of a mother and father who were entrepreneurs in completely different industries and ended up starting my first company when I was 23 years old. I sold it to Amazon and I was at Amazon for about 12 years in various roles, one of which included shadowing Jeff and leading our third party kind of E commerce site business called Webstore and spent quite a bit of time in that business learning the ins and outs of building marketplaces. Early days of Amazon's community and I had a passion very few people knew about for news and decided to leave after about 11, almost 12 years at Amazon to be the CEO of Digg at a time where Digg had just launched its V4 and was in a tear in the wrong direction and was able to get that turned around and then sold just under two years later.

So what is V4?

Yes. Well, for those that remember it, that.

Was a controversial thing, right?

It was a very controversial launch that the founder of Digg and the team had launched, which was an attempt at a deeply personalized news experience. Unfortunately, it really tore apart the primary dynamics of the community itself, how it worked, how stories were promoted, the whole mechanism for digging itself was changed. And. And it wasn't purposeful that the website would change that dramatically, but it did, and the community was very upset about it. And ultimately I came in to try to try to really bring back the community and the website and was able to get the metrics turned around, but it was very different, I think, experience for many of the users after that Dig V4 launch.

Yeah. So the complaint with V4 was that it was an invasion of privacy or something, right?

No, it was really that the gamification of Digg as it was had changed dramatically. So Dig had been built on a community of users that were very passionate, very active about finding the most interesting.

News of the day and basically voting them up or down the chain, right?

Yep. Yeah, voting them up.

I wish we could do that with traditional media that we see on television. Not one day.

One day, yes. And so that's how it worked. And with the change in the algorithm as well as the website front end, it really made a big difference in how stories were voted and it really attempted to clean up the voting process, but through that it did not yield really anything like the previous Dig experience in terms of the best of the day, getting promoted to the top. So we quickly came in, listened to the community, made a number of changes to the website experience to really try to bring back the community's impact on the news and what was the best news of the day, and really just had a number of community members that were up in arms about it and did not like the new site that had launched.

I remember when that happened, I didn't follow the story much, but I just remember seeing some of these really negative, very irate posts online on various social media and so forth about Digg and so forth. These people were like the biggest fans in the world, I guess, and they felt alienated after this, right?

Yes. And we had to go out and I spent a lot of time actually talking to some of the power users and some of the Dig community to understand what contributions they were making and how they would make them going forward, and even reinstating some of their profile metrics, which were not lost, but had not been replaced when the new site launched. So there was just a whole series of things that really brought the community up in arms.

But you turned it around and sold the company after that?

Yeah, it was sold after a couple of years. And then I was entrepreneur in residence at Andreessen Horowitz and incubated pro.com out of my time there at Andreessen.

And who was the dig buyer, just out of curiosity?

The dig buyer was actually. It came out in a couple of different ways. We had a company, Washington Post, that was very much into what we were doing as a team. They actually brought most of the team and some of the technology.

Jeff Bezos owned the Post at that point. Yeah.

Actually, it was right before that that we sold the company.

That's your old boss. Yeah.

Yes. And then some of the IP and the other assets went to a few other kind of companies, one of which was specifically Beta Works on the east coast that actually took over the website and has changed it into what it is today.

And we'll go on to pro.com here. But what years were you working with Jeff at Amazon? I mean, that was the early days, right?

It was, yes. My company, livebid.com was acquired in 1999, and I was there through 2010.

Fantastic. My dream is to get Jeff on the show someday, so we're working on that one, but. Good. So your new venturepro.com I really wanted to have you on the show because, of course, we've got such a big audience of real estate investors. And Matt, they're all, you know, we find people are really willing and, you know, I'VE been in that business for a good 11 years now of people who are willing to invest nationally. You know, they want to. They want to. Or people in foreign countries that are clients of my company that invest in the US and you know, they have properties they've never seen, tenants they've never met. And, and you know, you, you can make that work nowadays pretty darn nicely and you can be in the market that really offers the best r. But on the downside of that, you know, you can't drive by your house very easily. You can't go swing your own hammer, which, God, why would you want to anyway? In fact, this kind of gives you a discipline of not having to ever do that. But pro.com solves some of these problems. I think it could be a good tool for investors.

We do. And in fact, a lot of our customers, you know, that we have in different parts of the country have some kind of a rental house or have a rental property that they're managing or they might be helping a family member or one of their parents get their house fixed up or even to fix something that breaks. Pro.com makes it super easy to find out how much it's going to cost to get some work done in and around the home in any zip code across the country and then get that work scheduled and get that work done in usually a matter of days. It's a very fast process for entering, you know, your work that you're going to get done, find out what the cost is in your locale and then to schedule it with a trusted, kind of vetted, pre qualified pro in your area. And so pro.com has been doing that for the past year and a half under the pro.com name. What we've been doing in real estate is even more interesting because we've started to actually take some of that technology and the pricing and applying it from for homeowners to actually take a look at what does it cost to maintain this home. What if I were to get my home ready for sale? What would I want to do to my home? And usually most agents recommend two or three or four or five different things to get the home ready for sale. Well, all of those we've predefined with agents. And so to go get your home ready for sale, an agent or their homeowner client can go and check, check, check and see. Oh, this is going to cost, you know, 800 to $900 to get this room painted, to get this changed out, to get a new stainless steel appliance. Installed. And that has been a huge headache for most realtors and most agents. And so we both are helping homeowners get anything done in and around the home and in the real estate community itself, helping agents to get homes ready for sale and to help price out home improvement projects once homes are purchased.

Now, now, Matt, I mean, come on, seriously, you can't be coming on the show saying it's difficult to deal with contractors, right? Oh, that's the easy part, I tell you. Maybe the two most picked on occupational groups are lawyers and contractors. That's quite good reason. Yeah, I agree. For good reason. Yeah, yeah. So there's a of lot. There's definitely some truth in it. But I mean, look at, there's a lot of people in this space, a lot of players. There's, you know, I don't even know if they're still around, but I remember that company. Dial one. There's Angie's List. That's different than what you do. I know, but, but, you know, just help us distinguish that marketplace a little bit. And what is the real unique selling proposition of pro.com?

Sure. It's really that we've built the most comprehensive pricing engine for any home project, bar none. If you're, if you want to find out what it's going to cost to get something done for your home, you just visit pro.com, type it in and you'll have an answer in a matter of seconds. I think that most other services that are out there are simply trying to just connect you with a pro and the moment they've done that, they're out of the picture. They wipe their hands of anything you're going to do moving forward and they usually get paid some kind of a lead generation fee for that buy the pro. Our service is very different. We only make money if we connect you to a great pro who does a good job and you pay. At the end of the day, it's a commission. It's a marketplace model, very similar to product marketplace. You might see where a commission is paid on the product that gets purchased. Our model is to make the consumer have a, a successful kind of transaction with a pro where the pro is on time, they do good work, the customer is happy, and then the pro gets paid. We then earn a commission on that. So it's a very different model. So pros like it a lot because they don't pay anything to get a lead. They're ultimately either getting a job and then they pay for that job if it comes through and they complete it or they don't. And so it's a very different model for the pro. And then for the consumer, we have the most comprehensive pricing engine that you could price any home project and get a pro who's pre qualified and trusted in a matter of minutes.

Okay, but when you say pricing engine, of course, if you call, let's use a painter, for example, you call one painter and he'll give you one price and another guy comes out to give you a quote and it's a different price, and then the third one is a third price. And you know, they all kind of say they've got better quality, their more attention to detail, whatever their shtick is. Right. Are you saying that these things are really, all these home improvement projects are really commodities in the sense that there shouldn't be a difference in price like, you know, in the old days or, well, still the current day really. But the old model is you call, you get those three estimates on painting and they're all different. And you know, we all kind of scratch our heads and wonder why. Well, maybe this guy, you know, is just more greedy, you know, that charges the most, or maybe he runs a less efficient business, or maybe he's a real artisan and craftsman. I mean, how can you say the price is all the same? Right. Aren't contractors different?

Contractors are very different. And I think that's, that's part of the problem in the industry is that there, there's a real lack of transparency of what it actually costs to get a service done in or around the home. And painting a room is a great example. So if you go to visitpro.com and type in paint a room or paint my kid's bedroom or paint my room, you'll find out that in Seattle, it's roughly $361 to $385. Now the beauty of that is that's what it should cost to paint a room. Now, if you want more than two coats of paint, you're going to have multiple colors involved. You have high ceilings. You can actually adjust that estimate yourself, find out that that's actually closer to $409 to $433. Now you want to get your baseboards painted. You can say, oh, let me add base, you know, paint my baseboards. And that, you know, that ultimately adds another $139 to $175. So painting a room with baseboards is now $548 on average.

What about the type of paint?

Well, so that's the, that's the, this is the this is the labor cost. And most. Most customers, they're choosing the ceiling fan for install. They're choosing what paint they want to use, right? So that is a cost that they already know, usually from visiting a paint store or picking out the paint themselves. Certainly the pro can also price that out and add that to the estimate. But what we do is instantly provide you what it should cost to get that work done, to get the labor done for that job, and put you in the control of, oh, let me actually customize this. Let me actually customize the dimensions of my room or whether or not we have vaulted ceilings. It's that question of what should it cost? It's kind of like TrueCar does for the automotive industry. What it should cost is incredibly empowering to the consumer, because then they can ask the Pro, well, what Pro.com told me is it should roughly be this price. Why isn't it that price? And then the pro knows they can have a very open discussion with the customer. Oh, it's because your room's actually a little bit larger, or you also have two different windows, and you need to paint the trim around those windows. We break it down in terms of the actual cost of the sub cost of the work that's being done. But it's so simple for the consumer. You literally type in, paint a room. You can move a bar to the left or right in terms of complexity and modify one other dimension, like the dimension of the room, and you can instantly see a price estimate.

Okay, that's interesting. So you have a sophisticated engine then, is what you're saying, Matt, what about bigger jobs? I mean, if summer is coming and you decide, hey, you know, I want to add a sunroom or a swimming pool, I mean, you know, that stuff is just cloaked in mystery. I've done many landscapes projects, and they're all over the board.

It's very true. But there are some very common ones, like build a deck. And building a deck has a number of different components. The square footage, whether or not it's on a raised on an incline, whether or not it requires stairs, railings. There are a handful of questions that if you answer, you can come up with what it should cost to build a deck in Boston versus Seattle. And so we have done that. We've built that engine for every single job you can imagine in and around the home. And if you want to remodel your kitchen or your bathroom and you want to replace the vanity, change the tub, do two or three things versus five things, you can go choose what you want to do and then see what that will cost.

I was going to pick on Seattle as you were mentioning the painting of the house example in your town. Of course, of course your engine has to adjust for $15 an hour minimum wage. Right.

The labor rates are actually set per locale and it's really contractor labor rates. So it's not, it's far different from, I guess, the minimum wage discussions because most of the contractors have different rates. If you're a plumber versus an electrician in part based upon the state requirements of what you have to do to get licensed and everything else.

Oh, sure, sure. But it's not un uncommon that a painter would have some helpers that are minimum wage or maybe just above minimum wage type people.

Absolutely. Still, at the end of the day, most jobs are priced out on some hourly basis. That is the standard hourly rate for painters. And so that's how they calculate most of their estimates. And regardless of the underlying labor and how that labor is used, their jobs have, you know, have to, you know, factor in the total cost of the job.

So let's kind of recap the uniqueness of pro.com. so it's basically the sophisticated pricing engine. So the consumer is empowered with the BS detector, Right. They don't, they don't have to accept this stuff from contractors. And then the other part of it is that contractors don't pay for leads, but they do pay refreshment referral fees on completed paid jobs, right?

That's correct.

And I assume you do all the payment processing, right?

We do for most of the jobs. And it's fairly standard in the industry. If you've got a general contractor you're working with and they bring in another contractor or pro, they're paying them some, usually modest, you know, modest fee based upon the total value of the job. So we're very much in line with the industry practice in terms of how general contractors work with subs.

Okay. So I just, you know, don't take offense to this question, but I just want to ask you, like, how significant is that the pricing engine component? It sounds like that's really your big deal. And I'm sure you've spent probably a fortune in, in time and resources figuring this out. I mean, that's got to be pretty complicated stuff. You know, for example, maybe before you answer, I remember I was at one of these walk in clinics recently, had to have a little quick medical thing. They told me that there are thousands of, what do they call them, treatment codes or something? You know, for every little thing you could possibly imagine that a doctor could do. Right. How many things are there, for example, in the home improvement world?

That's a great question. There are thousands of, I guess you would call them common projects. And the thousands of common projects are paint my room, replace my toilet, fix my sink. Right. There are, you know, there's a fairly actually common set of even hundreds that happen to most homes. But there are thousands that are, that are, you know, kind of that start to get into the tail. And then within those you probably have multiple variations of those. Right. So if it's paint my room, does it include the baseboards, the crown molding, the trim of the windows? There are a number of different variations on those. So the permutations probably get into the tens of thousands of different job types that are most common. When you start combining those things, we've built an engine to take all of that complexity out of the hands of the consumer. Just make it really simple to understand. I'm a homeowner, I have this job I'm trying to get done. This is how much it should cost.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. So that is the big thing, that empowerment of knowing that. Right?

It is. And we did a lot of research up front. We actually started the business under a different name and somewhat in, you know, kind of under the radar purposely to just start helping customers get pros and get work done at their homes. And all of the research that we did and all of the feedback that we got from customers was ah, really helped me understand how much is this going to cost before I, you know, get this project scheduled. And as it turns out is a huge pent up demand of customers that just don't want to start their projects because they don't know how much it's going to cost. They don't want to pick up the phone and call a pro. And so what they'll do is they'll just go to our website or call or text us and find out how much it should cost.

They can text you?

Yep. They can call, they can text, they can use the website and find out how much it should cost.

And I assume that all of your various vendors, there's a rating system so people can see how good they are. Kind of like the Amazon ratings and reviews there is.

Absolutely, absolutely. And it's every single pro. We will survey the customer after the job. And so the homeowner gives us feedback after the job and then we publish that. It's only for homeowners that got work done by the pro. So you can't Just go and submit a review on our website. It's verified purchasers, which makes all the difference in the world compared to most other sites that just let anybody post. And it really, truly represents the value that that pro brought to that customer because you'll see different ratings for value versus quality, workmanship, that kind of thing.

Right. Good stuff. Yeah. That's interesting. Matt, are there any things you'd like the listeners to know? Maybe a question I didn't ask you that you'd want to just say something about?

Well, we're getting asked a lot about how real estate agents interact with our new offering, which we call Premier Home Services. And I alluded to it briefly earlier, but we work with real estate agents all around the country to send out really local, relevant content to their past clients. And we give the agents a whole dashboard with what their past clients might be interested in. Some things would include home remodels, whether that past client might be looking to buy or sell a home. And so within the real estate industry, we've actually done a lot of work as a part of the national association of Realtors. We're part of their accelerator program. And so we've built a whole product in the industry just for real estate agents that we have. And for the homeowner, it's great because we've created a whole maintenance calculator for what it costs to maintain your home. If you want to get your home ready for sale, you can see the top 10 things you should do, and you can check, check, check, and then it'll show you how much that would cost. And so we've done a lot to bring the data and the pricing engine part of our business actually deeper into the real estate industry.

Okay, good, good stuff. And the website, obviously, pro.com listeners, I do want to tell you, if I sound sort of enthusiastic or really interested in this, it is purely innocent because I'm not getting paid by Pro.com, we're not an affiliate, you're not an advertiser, anything like that. I just think this is an empowering type of service, whether it be this one you use or some of the other sort of related services out there for investors. And that's why I wanted to have them on the show. Plus, I loved the Digg story as well and the Amazon story, so that was great. But who knows what the future will hold? Maybe we'll do some business together at some point, but. But again, this is an empowering tool. And I just want to clarify one more thing for our investors because we have so many investors that are, you know, they look at it from a nationwide perspective, okay? And they may be informed foreign countries, but they own U.S. properties. Or they may be in California and own property in Tennessee or Texas or Georgia or whatever. I mean, they can use this nationwide. Right? They just plug in the zip code of that property probably, and, and get who. See, that's the thing I don't like about Angie's List. It's all localized. You know, you have to join over and over again for every city in which you own a property and that, you know, that's sort of cumbersome for this type of thing.

Yes, yes. No. It's a completely free service to the homeowner and right now to the real estate agent as well. And it's very simple to use in any zip code. And so if you're a customer, you just come to pro.com and you can type in your project. If you're a real estate agent, you can go to pro.com realestate and see the offering that we have there for you. But it's a purposely free service to really make it easy for the homeowner to get work done.

Good stuff. Matt Williams, thanks for joining us.

Thank you.

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Want to be able to sit back and collect checks every month just like a banker. Jason's Creating Wealth Encyclopedia series is for you. This show is produced by the Hartman Media Media Co. All rights reserved. For distribution or publication rights and media interviews, please visit www.hartmanmedia.com or email mediaartmanmedia.com Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own and the host is acting on behalf of Platinum Properties Investor Network, Inc. Exclusively.