Think Like an Investor to Create a Windfall of Listing Opportunities (Jesse Burrel interview)

What's up? Real estate Business Builders. This is going to be an interesting episode of the podcast. I've got Jesse Burrell on here is the CEO of Batch Service. And he's been at this for a while as he's got his license, he's an investor, and he's also built a business with, I think you said, tens of thousands of customers. So we're going to get into a little bit, you know, I want you to introduce yourself, give us a couple minutes on your background and what you do now. But then I think we can get into, you know, low inventory environment as we're sitting here recording this, you know, so what advice would you give to real estate agents looking to invest or bring listings to market? And then maybe after that we can get into some of the challenges of, of growing a business and, you know, organizing herding cats, as we call them, in terms of, you know, organizing people. But Jesse, give us a little bit of an intro, you know, and why would we lean into this conversation today?

Yeah, Lars, thanks for, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be on here. And just a quick little background of me. I got into real estate in 2013, so I've been doing this for about nine years now. When I got started, I was working for an investor and basically my job was to help him go find deals to either fix and flip or get his rentals that he would sell to foreign investors. He was Israeli, so he had a lot of people that wanted to park money into real estate in Phoenix. That's where I'm from. And that's basically what I did. And then I soon after, once I learned that skill set, I got my license and my main focus when I got started. At this time, you could still find short sales, pre foreclosures, distress properties on the MLS for investors. And that was basically my niche is I knew how to identify a deal. I had a group of investor buyers that would have me rep them as the buyer's agent and basically just got started from there and then started working with lenders and stuff like that. So really focused as a real estate agent probably the first six to eight months. And then I actually really started getting into wanting to add tools to my tool belt. So that's when I started wholesaling as well. So I obviously knew how to identify undervalued deals. And that's instead of just going straight to the mls. That's when I started going direct to seller off market and looking for distressed properties that people would want to sell. And then that was another way I'd sell to investors. So I kind of two different ways of how I could really focus on working with investors. And it was off market and on market deals and really did that. And once I was able to build up some success from there, then I started to cherry pick deals that I would source, started flipping some once I made more, I'm giving you the very short version here. And then I started funneling some of that money into rentals, single family rentals and some like eight plexus, six sixes, stuff like that. Because once you start making money you want to be able to offset some of those taxes. And and then that led me to really growing that operation and there was a lot of solutions that weren't out there software wise to really keep track of your data, find the right data to go after homeowners that you want to identify. And me and my now two partners started developing some softwares and then a few short years later that actually grew so quickly and became so big that now my real focus is not investing or being an agent. It's really servicing the agents and investors with our software. And that's kind of a short version of my journey.

I coach agents and I built an organization in like 45 states in the US and across the board. It is like what's your biggest challenge? It's like there is no inventory, you know, so what. And this is sort of maybe MLS reported deals, we went from, you know, a normal rate of like six and a half million or so houses sold in a year and we'll be down in like four and a half million this year and probably the same level next year. So a lot of agents are expected to leave the industry. But what, what advice given your background in business as an investor, you know, working with real estate agents and on market properties. What advice? Maybe three things you would tell agents right now given this like sort of out of left field view of what's going on.

I would make sure as it's really funny because I have we've really been focus on agents using our software now and me really understanding what the agent's been taught even further and how they do things is I would really make sure you start diversifying. If you're going to a listing appointment, let's say you do get that listing appointment, I would make sure that you give them an option to sell on the market, but also give them an option to potentially get cash offers for their house. If the house is in a as is condition, make sure that you have those Pocket buyers to be like, hey, I have a network of investors that could potentially give you a cash offer. And then depending on who you are as an agent, you could build it to where the buyer pays the, the commission, right? Or the seller pays that. So you could get way more creative. When you're going into a listing appointment, what you really want to do is you want to solve someone's problem. Do they want to have a bunch of open houses, do they want to get very top, top dollar, or do they have a reason to where they're willing to take a little bit less to get a cash offer, to know it's going to stay sell because the market's been wonky. You know, the market in Phoenix, there's a lot of inventory sitting. It's still not a lot of inventory, but it's sitting inventory to where people may just want, hey, what does someone want to give me today? No repairs made, none of this made. So I think the first thing is, is giving more options instead of just walking in saying, I could list your house, and this is what I think I can list it for. That's definitely number one. Number two, I kind of alluded to investors already start working with investors. You should find, you know, the areas that you work, find who's buying cash purchases, and then you should go out and look for deals for them either on the market or find their buy box and use a tool like batch service what I own and identify the properties they're looking for. Make some outreach to homeowners. You know, with certain criteria, you can figure out distress points to where there's a likelihood that they could sell and reach out to these people. And here's the good news. If it doesn't work for the investor but they're interested in selling, you could still get a listing out of it. It's, it's, it's finding different ways to just be more productive with your time and giving more options. And then I guess the third thing is, as I said, a lot of people pay for leads with, you know, Zillow or Redfin or taking these big commission cuts. Be willing to go find listings, go build your own pipeline with services like what I'm talking about with what we have is identify the type of homeowners you want to work with. Is it. Do you want to go reach out to a bunch of landlords in a specific zip code that may have owned a rental property for more than 10 years and see if they have any, any idea of selling or, you know, we have filters for vacant Properties. A property is vacant for a reason. Like reach out to these homeowners and see do they need help with anything? Do they, can you help rent it out? Is, are they looking to sell it? Are they out of state? What, what's going on with some of these situations? I think Realtors for so long have just been taught, work your sphere, do this. No, go find deals, go look for stuff, go build a pipeline, go work with investors. You're going to work with a client, let's say you get a listing, they're going to sell their house one or two times. You will go work with a high volume investor, they're going to use you on the buy and sell side for so many more properties. If you go watch Million Dollar listing, Ryan Sirhan and all these different guys who do they work with, investors and developers, there's a reason why people do this.

Yeah, that's. Do you have any idea how many properties are off market versus on market offhand?

Well, I'm saying it's like for you to go hunt for your next new listing is you could go just cold call or outreach. You're not, you're cold calling, but you're, you're creating a list that has very specific things that could get really niche to where you could reach out to 20 people a day with these specific criterias to see if they have any interest in selling. And that's what I think a lot of agents don't do. They're going to call the expireds or they're going to call the fizz bows. Everyone's calling that. Create your own little niche list and start reaching out to homeowners to see if they want to sell. It's just, oh, it drives me crazy with agents because I feel like the investor and wholesaler are so much more creative and so much more willing to hunt. When we're in the market, we're in. Real estate agents aren't going to make it if they don't start getting more creative with how they go find new business. It's just going to be too tough.

I think the reason, you know, like a Zillow and on the list side, like an ideal agent or a home light, the reason why they can come in, these legal lead aggregators, they can come in and charge 35% referral fee is that agents are, they've just become so lazy. Right. So if the great recession was 0809, you know, 2010, we've been on what, a 12 year run here, you know, 2011, 2022, essentially even Covid didn't really sort of, you know, jar the market much at all. And now we're sitting where agents literally don't know what to do. Probably two thirds of real estate agents have not been through a market like this or even any kind of downturn. So let me ask you this. I've got. I want to shift gears with you a little bit because you built a bigger business. What lessons have you learned? You know, as you're sort of in the trenches as an investor, you're like, man, I really need this bit of leverage. Now you're working on systems and building this technology and you're getting like you're making the journey to growing and scaling a business. Any lessons around systems building or working with people or you know, focusing on dollar productive activities just like straight up business lessons you can give to us, you know, against your journey, mistakes you've made or lessons you've learned.

Yeah, really pouring into. Let's say you're. I owned a real estate investing company so let's, let's correlate that to. Because most people are going to be agents on here to you as an agent having a team, I would say the one thing I wish I did even better was really pouring in to their sales skills and sales techniques and, and really focusing on your. Why focusing on. You know, you want people on your team that want to help customers, that want to help clients if they're really just in it for the money. That, that's just not a type of person that to work with. Make sure you have the right team around you. I don't care if that person's a high producer. If they don't align with the core values of the team you're trying to build, don't have them there. There's no amount of money that could, that could fix, you know, a room culture and people not having and sharing the vision that you have. The other thing is really know your KPIs and really make sure that you hire people that are hungry, that are willing to make those dials and are willing to. I don't ever want a lazy person on my team. I want someone that. And that goes back to the core values, that has the hunger, that's willing to do more, that's willing to, to go hunt and go find new clients and not just, you know, be entitled to expect business to come to you. Because I deserve to make money. I deserve to be rich. No one deserves any of it. You need to go earn it, you need to go work for it. And then you need to continue to work for it because nothing's given to you into this world. And it drives me crazy. The entitlement people have these days. Yeah.

Awesome. Let me ask you this. We talked about it before we hit the record, but on a basic level, how does your technology work? Not so much that you're pitching your technology, although I want everyone to check it out. Let's explain it, like how it works, how you can build a list from it. I know on the one hand it'll. It'll identify potential opportunities or segments and then it sort of does a skip tracing bit where it kind of.

Right, yeah, I'll do it. I'll do a high level level overview for, you know, real estate agent. It's called batch leads would be the product. We have multiple products, but that's a specific product I'm talking about. And what you're able to do is you're able to go in on a monthly subscription to curate up to 10,000 property records a month. So 10,000 homeowners for our lowest level plan. And you're able to choose, you know, what type of things you want to look for. What we have demographic data, property data. So let's say you want to go, you know, curate in a certain zip code people that have owned a house for more than 10 years that are over 60 years old, that have. You could even go to a, you know, salary less than $100,000 a year and it's vacant. You could curate that list and then go target the. And then what you would do from there is you skip trace them, which that means is you're basically just unmasking that owner contact information, where you're going to get their phone number and email. And now you have a bunch of leads that you've identified that you want to go after and talk to to get new listings and you pick up the phone and call them, or you could text them, or you could mail them. That's all enablement tools that you could do inside our software. And that's why we have tens of thousands of people. As we've mostly focused on the investors, we're really starting to make a push towards the agents because we know there's a need for agents to get much more creative and take back your pipeline. Because Zillow owns your pipeline or Redfin owns your pipeline, you're dependent on the next lead you're getting from them. Not saying stop using that. What I'm saying is add in your own pipeline to where you're curating and creating leads and you'll get to a point to where these KPIs will come into play. It's like, okay, if I call this many people a day, it's going to get me this amount of leads which will in turn get me this amount of listing appointments and then you know, this amount of close deals and start creating a business model on, on that as well. And it doesn't need to be this crazy high volume thing. But either if you're leading a team or if you're a solopreneur, especially if you're solo and just getting started, this is absolutely the way that you should do it. And if, if you're not open to, to making yourself uncomfortable and calling people you don't know, then I hate to break it to you, but you're probably not going to be a successful agent and this probably isn't for you.

Yeah, and this market is going to cleanse all of the agents, you know that think it's 100 person database of people that know like and trust them is going provide opportunity for them to become time and money free on that. Have you ever heard of this? I've got a guy, one of my business partners, he partners with investors. So on the one hand real estate agents aren't good at looking at houses like an investor. On the other hand, investors trash the leads that aren't investable. Can you talk a little bit about that side of it? So another strategy is to partner with investors and say hey listen, if you come across any deals that aren't like they don't meet your criteria as an investor, you know, I can pay you a referral fee or we can work something out. Talk about that angle.

Yeah, that's actually funny that you mentioned that. So once I got really busy on the investing side, I still held my license and would list my own, you know, flips but I actually partnered with a local realtors specifically in Phoenix. And you know, he, since I was licensed, he would pay me a referral fee. All the, let's say off market deals that distressed properties or whatever we were going after in Phenix for people that wanted retail, those were shoved right over to him. So that's, that's the great point Lars is you know, finding other creative ways. I think wholesalers or real estate investors, you know, both of them and agents should work together so much more. They, they fight saying or agents tend to not like wholesalers, which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard because you could get so many leads from wholesalers. They will Pass you all the stuff that's retail and then, you know, vice versa. It's just. And then as an agent, if you come across a listing lead that it's a super distressed property and you need cash buyers, you could go to your local wholesaler, be like, hey, how can you help me find a buyer? And kick them a little something for helping you out to sell a property maybe, you know, off market that doesn't need to get listed or can't or isn't financibles. There's so much synergy for all the real estate professionals to work together. Since I've been in both sides, it's always baffled me that they're competing against each other when you can make so much more money besides so much more successful just working together and helping each other. It blows my mind.

Yeah, that's, that's awesome. And I've got a couple other thoughts on that, but we've got a few minutes left. I want to ask you kind of a few questions, sort of a little bit out of left field, but what's the best advice you've ever received about business?

Oh, man. Received a lot, I guess, best advice and something I've learned is especially as really growing, especially the software company is you get what you pay for. There's no such thing as a cheap executive that's talented. They're not going to be cheap. Like you really get what you pay for. When hiring the right key people, it's going to hurt your wallet. But the value that they add, like truly add, because I've made some bad hires and been cheap on, especially when we're getting started, being uncomfortable having large salaries. And I can't tell you how detrimental it was to our business because the mistakes that, that they made compound during that time. And it's just, that's the biggest thing is just hire, hire the right people. And the other thing is what we've really focused on is have a great onboarding process when you bring someone onto your team, have processes and procedures and an onboarding experience put in place for them to be excited and feel like your shit's actually together as a, as a owner of a company. Because there's so many times where people just show up and there's not even an agenda of what they're going to do the first day, let alone the first two, three weeks for what we have. And I've had a lot of people say, I feel so much more at ease knowing that I'm coming in and working, you know, for a group or A place that's put together and it's really. The first impressions are first impressions for a reason. So I've always thought that's important. It's something we've really focused on to, to make people be excited and know that they're part of a culture that, that wants to treat them right.

Awesome. Next question. Can you share a personal habit that you believe contributes to your success?

I have to read at least 10 minutes every day. It started that about five years ago, completely changed my life.

Awesome. Awesome. Any kind of books, like personal development.

Books or all of it? I read a lot of personal development books, but there's only so much of that to go around to where it depends on the mood. Like I go as far as reading leadership books. You know, the 5 dysfunction of a team is an absolutely fantastic book. And then going back to the beginning of getting into real estate and real estate investing, you know, the Go Giver was a very influential book for me at the beginning. Right now I'm reading a book called Fearvana. It's about how to lean into your fears instead of running away from them. That's more of a self development book. And then I'm reading books like Never Lose a Customer Again, which is very SaaS related. You know, software tech related is, you know, what, what are all these crazy things that we could do to, to really make that customer journey and experience good? So I, I read a lot of everything. I normally have two books going on at a time. I always have a dry book going that's very, I guess not very exciting, but has to do with, you know, software and, or it could be sales and software. It could be customer support and software. What, whatever I'm trying to learn and grow in, but I get sick of listening to that every day. So I'll normally have like a personal development book in there as well to make sure that, you know, I could, I could mix it up sometimes if it just depends on your mood on, on what you really want to read or listen to.

Awesome. How about. Is there an app or some kind of Internet resource that you think our listeners would benefit from?

What do you mean?

Just like, like your favorite app? Like any kind of app. Like for me it's like Audible. You know, what's on your home screen of your, of your iPhone that you absolutely couldn't. I just got an app to track my water, my hydrate app.

So yes, I get what you're saying now. So audible is obviously on my, my home screen. But the biggest thing that helped me change my Life is. It's called habit share. So it's an app to where I have to check in every single day. So on my habit share, I have the habits that are really important to me. So I have to exercise. I am very diligent with, like, I meal prep and do a bunch of things. So I have, you know, did I follow my meal plan for the day? I have to get it in a gallon of water, so that's in there. Alcohol free is in there as well. I'm allowed to drink, just not often, but it puts it in front of me to say, you know, what do your habits look like last month? It gives me nice snapshots and then last one is it's, you know, read 10 minutes a day and I, I look at the morning and throughout the day and as humans, we're just, you know, unique creatures to where seeing. Hitting us a button and seeing a green dot is so important to me that I will make sure that I get everything done to do that. Because I, I had a lot of bad habits and was very unbalanced. I. About a year and a half ago, I weighed like 250 pounds and I was very on balance with my health and fitness compared to, you know, just focusing on work and growing the business. And that was something that really changed my life. I hired a trainer and he really said, what are the, you know, five, six, seven core habits that you want to follow to change your life, to become the person you want to be? And I've religiously used this thing ever since. I check in every single day.

That's awesome. All right, last question. If you had to do it all over again, what would you do differently?

Nothing. You learn from your mistakes. You learn and grow from your journey. And I haven't been any happier than I have in my life. And all the things I've done have got me here. So I know that's kind of a cop out of an answer, but it's true. I really believe that the experiences you go through and what you do to make you stronger, I just, I wouldn't change it because I'm happy and proud of who I am today, so I really wouldn't change anything.

Awesome. What's the best place we can send our listeners if they want to learn more about you or batch leads?

Just my Instagram is my first and last name. Jesse Burrell. I'm not a huge social media person, but if you ever wanted to DM me or have any questions, but you hop onto my story, you're basically going to see me working out or pictures of my newborn kids. So that's about as far as I'm going to go. Every now and again. I'll have some gems for for some motivation, but I'm really focused on, you know, just family life, health, fitness and making sure we're helping our customers find more, you know, listings to go get or more deals to buy as an investor. Awesome.

And what's the website for? For batch.

It's Batch Leads IO would be the best place to go to to check out kind of some of the software stuff we were talking about today. But there is a free trial for people to check out for seven days. You get a thousand free property records of agents are starting to adopt this and they've had a lot of success. So I hope some listeners could, you know, get something from this, check it out and we we'd love to help you go find some more listings.

Awesome. Jesse, I appreciate it. We're definitely going to keep in touch. I may have you on one of my deeper dive trainings with with my organization at at Exp. So I think that might be fruitful as well or someone from your team. Appreciate the time.

Absolutely. Thank you.