MTRO PRO - The Midterm Rental Operations System MTR Operators Have Been Waiting For with Dre Galaviz

But first we want to build the tool and perfect that tool and focus on being that tool that all of the MTR operators really need to be able to run their business and focus on working on their business instead of inside their business. Instead of all of the guest communications, everybody wants to scale, everybody wants to do more, right? They want to co-host or they want to get into arbitrage. They want to get into these other things. And so in order to do that, you have to have a system behind you that supports that. And that's the tool that we're building.

Welcome to the She's Got Assets Real Estate Investing Podcast. I'm the host, Ashona Lepus. Follow along as we unpack and demystify real estate investment strategies through expert interviews and personal experience. From how to find off-market deals to creative financing to long-term and midterm rentals, we aim to educate and inspire others to gain financial freedom and generational wealth through real estate. And as always, please subscribe so you never miss an episode. We really appreciate reviews. It helps others find us and just helps us get found. Hey everyone, this is Shona from She's Got Assets. I have a really awesome guest on, Andre, I can't even say. Okay. Thank you so much. He is working on some really cool MTR software. It's called MetroPro and we're going to dive into all the details and just there's such a need for this. So we already started talking about, I'm like, we better record. So Andre, maybe just give us a little bit of background and then I really want to dive into the nuts and bolts, but thank you for coming on. I'm really excited to have you.

Yeah, Shawna, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate being on the show and I'm really excited to talk about this product. You're right. There is nothing in the market that is available specifically for midterm rental operators. Which is loosely how we came about the name MetroPro. It's M-T-R-O Pro. And so yeah, it really started with me losing my job. So I actually got laid off in August of last year. And prior to getting laid off in August of last year, I got into real estate around COVID because that was the first time that I had the possibility of getting laid off. I've worked for this company for a decade. I worked in tech, I did systems and integration for the tech company. And so that was really the first time that I really had the threat of being laid off and how I discovered real estate, started investing. And so when the layoff actually happened, all the couple, these 6 years later or whatever, I had already started establishing myself. I had a portfolio of 4 units at that point. And getting past that, like 2 and 3 units, it really started to become hard to manage that, juggle that mainly on the leads, on the bookkeeping side of things. Those kinds of things were like the bigger things, like the accounts, like getting stuff together for like taxes and all of that stuff was really a challenge. And so I started looking around for tools that I could get into and coming from the world that I came from. It was really difficult for me since I built unified tools in my previous job, and I did that for a decade. It was really difficult for me to find this hodgepodge of tools, right? And so I was using one tool for my lease and one tool for my signatures, one tool for my accounts, one, three tools for my communications, right? And that's not including email and SMS from your phone and all of that. And so there were just all of these different tools and I thought there's gotta be a better way. I started looking around, there wasn't really anything out there. And so knowing that I had a skillset, I started tinkering with it. And so I was doing this maybe for about, I don't know, a couple months or something like that, just on my own using live coding and AI tools and things. And then I got laid off. So that layoff was actually a sign for me to go, okay, I'm going to go full into midterm rentals. I think we're doing pretty good because the revenue that we had from our midterm rentals, we were just throwing back into the pot to get other rentals and stuff. So we're like, okay, we'll start pulling that. I talked with my brother about the possibility of doing this and he was like, you know what, let's go for it. Sounds like there is really nothing out there. And then we started building it. So here we are 6 months later with a team of 7 people, developers, and Yeah, we've got this thing almost ready to launch. We're looking at launching around the beginning of June.

That's really exciting. Yeah, I think, I don't think the MTR space is new. I think it's really top of mind now. And there is, there's so many hot, like you said, hodgepodge and it's, yeah, I feel like I'm always on my phone. I'm trying to get into my CRM, but I'm like too lazy to transfer the data. So yeah. I, what I love about real estate is I think it, whatever your background is, you can bring it to that. Right. So I love that you're doing that with your background.

That's super cool.

Yeah. Let's see. I'd love to just talk. I feel like the platform, it's so exciting and there's such a need for it. Like what, what functionality and what your goals are. And cause I just think there's such a need for it. So it's so exciting.

Sure. Yeah. And we have a, an explainer page and I'll We could talk about that later on in more detail, but we have kind of an explainer page. That's also the page where we're driving people to sign up to either have early access or be part of the Founding 50 group. And the Founding 50 group is basically 50 midterm rental operators, and it could be any size with a different range of desires, people that are aggressively looking to expand and scale and other people that are really just trying to manage a couple of rentals. And we're going to use this group to actually pull together what operators are really looking for. We've got the basic foundation of the tool together, and now it's time to start talking to the operators and talk about what they really want. Obviously, communications is a really big piece of it. The lease piece of it is really big. The background checking piece is really big, and the payment piece is really big. And when you put all of those things together, The thing that I think that people really don't realize is that the biggest piece of all of this is actually consolidating all of that information into one tool so that it's easier to do your bookkeeping and your accounting at the end of it. And also being able to look at your reporting and identify which properties are performing well, which ones aren't, what your true vacancy rate is. We're starting to call it AMR. People know ADR, right? ADR is average daily rate. Do people really talk about AMR, the average monthly rate? No, they don't. Right. But everybody has seasonality. And so with that seasonality, it means that you're not going to get the same dollar amount every month that you're doing this. So what is your AMR? Do people track that or know that? Maybe they do, but there's no tool that actually helps you to do that. So that will be part of the MetroPro tool. And I think one of the bigger pieces that people don't talk about, but they're constantly communicating about this on Facebook is how do I price my midterm rental? How do I know how to price this? And so there are just all of these different things that if you put them all together, why has nobody built a tool for medium-term rentals to handle all of these things? So It's, it's crazy.

Yeah. Price is, I, I, I just wrote that note when you said that, when you said average monthly rate. And I love that. I haven't, that's a great, I love that you coined that because it's seasonal. It depends on how the length of the stay, the seasonality. And it's like when I'm coaching students, I'm like, it's art and science. And it's very, you, after you have a property for a season, you get to know that, but it's as a new MTR operator, it's like one of those things and there's no tool. You're going to collect that data. Will that help you? And are you going to— there's the AirDNA for short-term. There's nothing for midterms out there really for that. So I'm curious.

Yeah. So at first we'll start off with just some of the basics, some of the general information to help you get an estimate. But as we get more people using the tool, it's just inevitable that we're also going to get their property data. And as we get that property data, we will then be able to build out a proper AMR tool, like a tool for pricing your average monthly. And so the pricing thing is really important to us because again, when you're really starting out and you have 1 unit or 2 units, you really haven't dialed in how to price your rental. And so you don't want to be undercutting yourself or underselling yourself And it's really hard to find that line. It takes a lot of time to go from, I'm going to price this really low and then I'm going to keep pricing it up until I stop getting those leads. Right. And so making all of that stuff easier for the operators is one of our big goals.

That is such a pain point. Like that alone is, we like sign up just because of that, frankly.

Yeah. You know, it's funny, Shona, you're hitting the nail on the head. So many people like we've, we've gotten a lot of excitement and a lot of traction and a lot of interest in this right off the bat. So clearly this is what is needed. And I know that because it was my pain point. I follow Alex Hormozi. He says the thing that you do is either going to be your pain, your passion, or your profession. And this thing ended up being all three of mine. But the thing that was the biggest reason for me to do it is because of the pain point of not having something that could help me to manage these things and make it a lot easier. Having a decade of experience doing systems integration, automation, reporting, like having these things all roll up in an enterprise-level company has really just given me the experience and the skillset that I need to be able to do this for everyone. So selfishly, I started out building it with just like little I used Lovable and created these little things and then tried to connect them and talk to some of my buddies that do like the hands-to-keyboard integration stuff. And like I said, the magic moment was losing my job and knowing that I could put more time into it. So I decided to do it.

Isn't it funny how that opens the door? At the time, I'm sure it was not a fun experience, but now look where you are.

Yeah. I do performance coaching and so it wasn't, it never really was that big of a bump in the road for me, to be honest with you. And it's because I had done, I don't know, 8 months at that point. I had been 8 months into performance coaching and I think it just made all the difference in how I perceived that and accepted what was happening.

That, that's the power of coaching and mindset. I think that's so important. Yeah. Okay. So pricing is a huge— That's with students. That's even myself. I, and I've been at this a long time and I always start out really high and then I'm adjusting it. And then the other thing is every platform has a different price, right? With the fees.

Yeah.

So what are the other, like, we talked about price. Like the other thing I think that people get, I'm just curious, like really overwhelmed by is leases. And I'm like, it's really just a long-term lease and you have an addendum, but how are you guys That's the, I don't know, I'm just curious as far as pain points, right? Because that's interesting to me.

Yeah. One of the other things that we're doing, and again, there's kind of phases of this. So we call it like present state or current state and then future state. And so the current state and the way that you can use the platform today is you actually can take whatever lease you have, and this will be like current and future state. So you could take whatever lease you have, you can upload that lease. And we've seen the other tools that are out there and they really are missing a lot, right? You can't put all of these merge fields into all of the places on the lease so that you've got this lease that automatically has all of this information. And this is where it gets crazy because when people sign up, when people look at your property and they want to book your property, They're submitting that information. So they are essentially filling out a lot of the lease for you. You don't have to touch those pieces, it's automatically put in there. So again, you can upload your own lease and you can get all of the merge fields in place. And then when you get a lead, you basically assign them to whatever property or they're automatically assigned to that property. And you can actually anchor that lease to that property. And so all of the information is already there. So that makes it to where you barely have to touch the lease. It's automatically being drafted as that person showing interest and you're approving them to the background check, which is that second piece where we get more information from them. And then all you have to do is click a button to sign the lease and then send it to them to sign the lease as well. Now, future state for that, we would actually like to work with a legal team that has the ability to do midterm rental specific leases and do that for all 50 states. So the lawyer reviewed is midterm rental specific. It has those nuances that are medium-term rental, and it's a lease that caters to the midterm rental space, right? Because people cobble together everything in the midterm rental space is cobbled together from short-term and long-term. That's just how it is. People take a long-term lease and then they add a couple of things to it and then they keep adding to it. And that's the way to go until you get in trouble, like with a bad tenant that, you know, may be able to find a loophole there.

And I think the danger of the cobbling it together is like, I, where I'm in Portland, Oregon is very, it's very tenant friendly. So I'm really big on using compliant leases because of And again, with midterm, here's the thing with leases. Like, I just have to say, it generally never comes to pass because we have such high-caliber guests, right? So it's— this is not typically— we're not typically pulling up the lease and filing it. I've never had to do that. So it's almost like just best practice. Yeah. But I think people that are cobbling together these leases and pulling bits and pieces are not necessarily— if there were a legal issue, they're not necessarily compliant. And that makes me really nervous. So I think the fact that you're that phase 2, I think is so to have actually like legally reviewed. Yes. Compliance.

Yeah, you're right. I think it's a real, say you have a lot of pain points in the midterm rental space, but I don't think people really look at that as like a, like a danger zone, like a compliance or legal liability for a midterm rental operator. And so that makes it really difficult. I think the other piece with that is midterm rental operators are looking for an agreement that they can get. I've seen some people on, on the group say, just have ChatGPT write it for you. Oh, that's probably not a good idea either. But then does somebody want to spend like the thousands of dollars to get a lawyer-reviewed medium-term rental? So it leaves it to the bigger companies who have not done that yet. Right. To get a legally reviewed document for Bit2M rental operators is, again, we raised our hand and said, let's do that too.

Yeah, you're touching on all of the boxes that it's just like all of the pain points that would just, because I feel like those are the biggest questions. I'm trying to think of other questions. Like it's definitely pricing, it's definitely lease terms. What else have we talked about? Because I feel like those are like the top of mind things as far as like pain points.

It's funny because everything, and I'm in the background, I'm looking on my screen and I'm looking at the MetroPro platform and you can look at literally every one of these pieces and every single one of them has this pain point aspect. One that I'm getting a lot of responses on, I'd say like the biggest thing people talk about is centralized communication. And so that, that part is becoming really big, right? People use their phone to text or they're using Google number if they're sophisticated, again, to text, right? And then they're like getting on their computer or on their phone and then they're emailing and that's from a different place, right? Some people use WhatsApp, some people use QWO, some people use like Telegram, like all of these different things. And we're centralizing all of those into the platform, into MetroPro, where you can send your emails from MetroPro, you can send your text messages from there. You can send WhatsApp from there. We're looking into Qwo right now. That's a new one. We're definitely going to do Telegram as well. That's just something that within my dev team, they thought this would be a really great platform as well, because it's got features to it. And so yeah, all of those things are going to be built into the messaging. And so when you get into Metro Pro, you can actually go into the messaging tab. You can search for whoever the person is that you're talking to. It's separated by guests, it's separated by leads. So you can like separate those things out there. And then you can just pick who you're talking to and then start a message to them. That could be email, text, like I said, all of those things. And when they reply back to you, all of that stuff is also coming into the system. So you have little icons that show you whether you communicated by email or if they communicated by email, or if they communicated by WhatsApp or communicated by SMS. And so imagine you have 3 people that are guests in your property. You want to communicate with all of them. You try to put them on one platform. One person emails, the other person texts, the other person replies to you on WhatsApp. And then all of a sudden you're in all of these different places. And that just does a— it takes a lot of energy away. It takes a lot of brainpower away from you actually scaling your business when you're having to shift and then figure out, wait, where did I reply to them? Hold on, they said something somewhere and I need to get back to that thing. And so this centralizes all of that and it takes that pain point away because you can see who you're, who's replying and where they're replying. And it doesn't matter where they're replying, cuz it's, you're gonna be replying off of one central place. Yeah.

Okay. So this reminds me of GoHighLevel. That's what you're creating is you, cuz everything is in one platform and it was very, but it was very hard to set up, but it's the exact It all funnels into that. You can text, you can do all that. Is that something that's— I'm sure you're familiar with that.

Yeah. So let's talk about that for a second. So there's GoHighLevel, there's Keap or Infusionsoft. If you got hundreds of thousands of dollars, you could go Salesforce and all that kind of stuff. You can connect everything through Zapier and I've done all this right in, in my previous life. I did all this for a decade, but the problem with all of these things is that you can— and I did this originally, like I just had a website and I used GoHighLevel, specifically GoHighLevel. And I use Zapier to connect those things. And I created this thing I call the Furnish Finder Hook, which basically responds to leads automatically into Furnish Finder. And we'll talk about that, but so I put all that stuff together. If you follow people that talk about SaaS products, software as a service, the danger of that is that if somebody changes an API, if somebody goes out of business, if somebody decides that they're going to switch the way that they're doing things, now all of a sudden you have something that's broken. And so you as an operator are now managing the platform instead of managing them. So you didn't minimize your problems, you actually added another problem to what you're doing. I say this kind of as a message to people that are thinking that you can use Claude or you can use ChatGPT or you can use these things. You can use those to get into your business, but you still have a system that doesn't do all of the things, and you still have a system that is not centralizing all of those things and doing everything that you need to do to run your operations. So again, that was another real big reason to build something like this, because with the company that I worked for before, they had that pain. And while we built the tool, we saw the results of building all of that stuff into one platform.

I think, so this is, I'm going to go in the way back machine. I used to be a web designer, right? Like hand coding HTML way back, right? And then WordPress came out and it was like this magical thing, but it would break. You hit the wrong thing. I blew up websites, things would expire, and it was this hodgepodge of add to add, and that can just blow things up. Yeah. I think people don't realize it's a fragile thing when you're doing it.

You have to know what you're doing and knowing what you're doing is, there's a depth of knowledge that comes from that. And again, it just ended up being the same where I had spent a decade building things like this. So turning it on midterm rental specifically, so I didn't have to deal with the pain of that. And because I was shifting this into being my primary profession, it just made sense.

Okay. I, I love all of this. So I'm curious, are you building in marketing capabilities to mark— to market to guests or to like database, like temporary housing providers?

Yes and no. That's not our primary focus right now. I see a future where we can build onto to do something like that. But our primary focus is to be that tool, the all— the— and I hate to even use the term all-in-one solution, right? Because a lot of people say that and then it's not what it is, right? And like, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing and have so many people excited about it if they had done that, right? I won't name any names or whatever, but there's all of these different platforms that, you know, they're, they do all that stuff, but they don't do communication. They do all that stuff, but then they don't like have an automated way to connect with guests, right? They do all that stuff, but then they don't have guest communications. While they're in your property, right? They don't automate the locks for you. They don't do your— they don't set up all of your stuff for bookkeepers to like automatically just have an export or have access to just that piece. And so all of that stuff was the reason that we were missing. So to get back to your— that's a long-winded way to say that at some point I do see the opportunity to get into that. But first we want to build the tool. And perfect that tool and focus on being that tool that all of the MTR operators really need to be able to run their business and focus on working on their business instead of inside their business. Instead of all of the guest communications, everybody wants to scale. Everybody wants to do more, right? They want to co-host or they want to get into arbitrage. They want to get into these other things. And so in order to do that, you have to have a system behind you that supports that. And that's the tool that we're building.

Oh, so many things. I love all that. Yeah. I feel like, yeah, you start getting into this thing, you start co-hosting and then I just thought of a question. What was it? Oh my gosh. I don't know. So is, is this, and the other thing I think we haven't directly said this, it, there's all the tools really are short-term focus right now or long-term. There's really nothing like the PMSs. They're very much about short-term rentals and nothing is really geared toward— they're, I think they're trying to get into that space, but nothing is specifically with this much intention for midterm. So I love what you're doing.

Thanks. Thanks.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's special for sure.

And are you, I, I think the, I don't know why I just thought of this, like Furnished Finder, everyone loves to hate it, but it's a great platform. Are you going to build any kind of, I don't know, integration tools or with messaging or how? I'm just curious. And it's like, side thing, but I feel like that's another pain point of like communicating and message unmatched leads and all that fun stuff.

I would love to, I would absolutely welcome a conversation with Furnished Finder to connect into their platform and other tools or like other OTAs. Right. And I think that for midterm rental, the two biggest obviously are Airbnb and Furnished Finder. And so I would love to be able to connect into both of those and primarily to make it easier for our clients, the MTR operators, to just have that information simply put into a system. And even without doing that with Furnish Finder, we found a way to have that lead information go into MetroPro. That way you didn't have to type in or manually enter a bunch of that information. And so we're working that out with some of the bigger things that people use, which would be like Zillow, Airbnb, Fridge Finder, VRBO. And so all of that stuff would actually go into the system. So you would just basically have leads pop up. And then in your lead channel, I'm looking at it now, so I get it right. You have new leads, contacted, following up, converted. Or lost. And so there's that CRM aspect that we built in. And my background is also CRM. It's really strong in CRM. And so you basically have this, these, what we call pipeline stages that you don't have to think about. You just move them through what, you know, what's the, what did you do? Well, you're following up with them. Okay. Then mark that you're following up with them. It's that easy. And I've seen people, we're going to We're gonna do a little bit experiment. We're gonna just unleash the tool on people and say, figure it out. And that's good because then it tells us that it's intuitive. Like people can figure it out without reading a, a rule book or playbook for it. And so yeah, the goal is to really connect into platforms like Furnish Finder. I would love to sit down with them. I would love to connect with them and be able to just make guest communication even with into Furnish Finder a thing. So then ideally a future state would be that when you're replying, you can reply directly in the Furnish Finder or by SMS or by email, whatever you wanted to do, whatever they wanted to do, the guest.

Yeah, I think bringing that kind of business overlay to your operations is so important because I think we do have to do follow-up and we get leads from different places. And if you're not tracking them, Like I'm trying to get better at that, but then I have to go import it into my CRM and I'm usually on the go. So I don't want to, I don't want to go HighLevel and put the content. It's so many clicks.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I live in a world where all of that stuff is actually just automatically put into the system for you. You're not doing it. The guest is doing it. And so all of that information is as accurate as the guest is done. And then you can start off focusing on basically who your leads are and how you're converting them. And I'll tell you, Shona, like personally, like this has been an eye-opener for me because I didn't realize number one, how many leads I'm getting and who I'm processing, but who I'm needing to follow up with. And sometimes where this could potentially have fallen through the cracks, because I'm thinking to myself, like, man, I put it on a sticky note, or like you said, I would be traveling and I would put it into my phone. Or if I'm really being sophisticated, I use my phone and say, hey, set a reminder for 11:00, like whenever I thought that I was going to be home to do that thing. Yeah. But it's out there, like it's already there. It's waiting for you to look at it and have the time to do it. We want to make this like the 5 to 20 minute tool, depending on the size of your business. We want to make it the tool that takes the least amount of time, like cutting down your work time by 50 to 70%. No, no joke. 50 to 70% of your time that you can just save by having this tool, right?

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It is more. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Shoda. It is more. It's a lot more. It's crazy how much more. And I'm— you gotta understand, I'm saying that from the perspective of I've been working in this tool and with this tool in my business for probably about 3 weeks now. And all of these new features and all of these new things that like keep coming up, I'm working. I'm piped in with like live feeds into our dev site, right? And then our other people that we're bringing on, they are piped in with their live stuff in our live site. And so I prefer to stay in dev because that's when all of the new features come out and I can test them live in like real time. So your question was, is this a PMS? And I would say no, it's not. A PMS is a property management system. And this is actually, like you said, like, I agree, it is more, it's actually an operations system. I wouldn't say it's an operating system because that's a different thing. It's hardware and all that kind of stuff. And maybe we get to that at some point, but it is your operations system. And so it is, again, we want to really set ourselves apart from PMSs because by definition, as it stands today, PMSs are not solutions that are all-encompassing. They are not end-to-end solutions. And so we're coining that phrase as well. This is an operations system that literally does your end-to-end, all the way from your lead to your checkout, your turnover, your restocking, your vendors, your cleaners, your maintenance. It does all of those things.

So I'm like crying a little bit. Same points.

It's like, you know what's crazy, Jonah? Like I do too. There, there's, I'm pretty sure it's this like Peanuts thing or whatever, like a little short where Snoopy and Woodstock are like making a snowman and Woodstock starts rolling the snowball and then gets rolled into it and That's really the experience that I'm having even as a co-founder of MetroPro. Like, just the dev— I would say the biggest piece is having really sophisticated developers who know AI. They're not embracing AI, they're not testing AI, they know AI from a different realm, blockchain and all that kind of stuff, and Bitcoin. And so we've just got like these master developers that really know what they're doing and they're putting all of these pieces in. So it's really this snowball effect. It's crazy.

Yeah, I'm so excited. I hope I get chosen for this. Fuck, this is so exciting. I have to ask about AI. It's obviously everyone's talking about it. How, I mean, from a user and I guess a user interface, how is that being integrated? I'm sure on the backend, but is there like communications or how is that being?

Yeah, so there's a, that's a great question. I, there's a couple of things that we're doing with it right off the bat, right? And the first one is gonna be guest communications, but the problem that people have with AI and guest communications is they're worried that it's not going to sound like them. And so we're working out a way to know our operators, like kind of an interview to know our operators and how they speak, or maybe get some of their templated responses and things like that that they would upload into the system. System for their own messaging and like that kind of automation. And so they can trust and rely more on the AI to sound like them and answer questions for them. And so you kind of have to imagine that you have to have like a property playbook, right? Where's the Wi-Fi? Where's the fast food? How do you plug this in? How does the dishwasher work? All of those different things, you have those somewhere, right? And if you don't have them somewhere, then we imagine creating like an onboarding wizard or that something like that. And then having all of those answers, you then can allow the AI to respond for you and say, the dishwasher soap is here because you always put it there, or the Wi-Fi password is here and it's this, and you can also find it there. Those kinds of things. Like, here's our guidebook with links to restaurants and recommendations around your area. All of the different kinds of things that you really just don't need to be bothered with anymore. The other place that we're going to be putting AI is in the reporting. And so for the reporting tool, there's going to be two different pieces of that. One of them is going to be an out-of-the-box solution. So if you're running one, two, or three properties and you don't really know exactly what you need to be looking for, whether it's your ROI, your vacancy, your occupancy, what you can do to improve your vacancy. We'll have an out-of-the-box solution with some reporting that automatically shows you that. But we are also developing an AI-based side of that where you could toggle to and create your own widgets based on what you want to see in your specific reporting. And I think this is going to be a feature that is for those people that are either tech savvy or they have multiple properties where they want to not only be able to set those up, query the database and say, who, what, which properties are my lowest performing? And get information that way. The operation system.

So I have another question. Are you going to, with a PMS, right? Like you put your property in, it syndicates out. Is that this model or is it different? Different.

Will, again, is going to be the thing where we focus on being the tool. And if there's opportunities to do something like that in the future, we would definitely be open to those opportunities because really at the end of the day, it's what the operators want in the system, like how they want that to work for them. So yeah, we'd entertain that, but I think we're probably going to spend the remainder of this year focusing on how we can really maximize the development of this being like a fully like operations tool for midterm rental specific. So we've got a lot of things on the roadmap for like current state and we want to develop into future state. MTR pricing, vacancy calculators, different things like that that are gonna really help MTR operators like succeed.

And I imagine the more users, the more data you're gonna have to play with that and get that insight. That's really, that's so exciting. If someone's listening to this and they're like, oh my God, I want in. How do they find you guys? Like, how do they sign up? I know you're in early stages, so what's the best way to get on a waitlist or how that works?

Yeah. So right now we've basically figured out almost all of our first cohort, which is going to be 25 people. We're going to take a total of 50 people that we'll accept into the second round cohort. We call it the Founding 50 or F50. So for anybody who is interested in this, they can go to metropro.com. That's M-T-R-O-P-R-O.com. And on that page, you can see all of the things that we're working on. There's like a video that explains why we're working on it. It gives you some of the before and after, like what's going on today and how we're going to change that through MetroPro. And on there, you can click on a button that says early access or be a member of the founding 50. And so we will essentially be looking at people in that group. We'll pick that 50 and then anybody that's not selected there, you're not really out because we will be communicating with anybody that's signing up on a regular basis. So they will get to see behind the scenes conversations that we're having with founders that are giving us real feedback. About the tool and different pieces of that. And so we're going to be building this really out in the public. And so anybody that signs up for this has an opportunity to become one of the founding 50. But if you don't get that, you're number one, you're waitlisted. Number two, you get to be close to the build. You get to see all the things that we're doing and have a visual on that, have a line of sight on what's being built and when it's being released. And then we will definitely plan on having a release to all of our waitlist people. Before we actually launch it live, before we start advertising, before we really market it to other people. So we'll give anybody that's on that waitlist first dibs, first opportunities to actually have access to the tool once it's released.

I love that. I love that you're, I love that you're working so closely with operators too to get that feedback. It sounds like you're really, I don't know the development term. I want to think and say agile, but I don't know what it is. It sounds like you're really. So if someone has We all have our cobbled systems, right? And it's like hard, it's, I feel like switching software is like pulling teeth, at least for me. So what do you recommend someone like kind of ease into, or what would, what do you think the best like route to go is if you're like, I've got my systems and I'm switching, is it just pull the bandaid or?

Yeah, I think a lot of people are gonna take different approaches to that because I, I thought about that too and I thought, I think I think some people might be thinking, I'll dip my toe in the water, I'll add one of my properties and just see how the tool works and go from there. And sure, you can absolutely do that, right? But how did you get into the tool that you have now? Did you do the same thing there or did you do something different? And so I think people are going to find their own way to do that, and the system is built for however you want to do that. We will have an uploader tool. So if you have more than 5 properties, we're actually building it to where like you could do it with just 1 property. But if you have more than 5 properties, we have an uploader tool and that'll automatically upload all of your properties. You still have to check them, make sure that everything is correct. Just like with anything. Um, there could be something that didn't transfer, maybe something you didn't realize you said over here that you didn't want anymore. And so you update all of those things and then you're off to the races. From there, it really is managing all of your leads, managing all of your bookings, doing all your background checks, getting all your leases signed, requesting all your payments, all your recurring payments, guest communication, talking with your vendors, doing your turnover, automatically setting your locks and codes, all of that.

Yeah.

So yeah, dip your toe in the water if you want to, or jump right in, get rid of all of those tools because who's going to want to stick with 5 different tools when you can just have all of those things in one. And I think the biggest driver for that, Shauna, is going to be the cost savings. We don't necessarily have pricing nailed down completely yet. But you're paying for like a DocuSign. You may be paying for a lease. You're paying for your background checking tool in one way or the other, whether it's time or that you are paying to have those guests in there, whatever it is, like those are all hard costs that you have. I think one of the things that I really like personally about the tool is the DocuSign feature that I didn't have to go anywhere and that it was automatically set in there. Yeah, I think the short answer is however you want to jump in, dip your toe in the water, or just dive right in, we'll be there for you. We'll be ready.

I love that. I mean, you addressed— I was going to ask about pricing. So we talked about that. My next question is, is it an app or web-based, or I'm just curious about how that works with the—

Yeah, that's a great question. So yeah, our first phase is going to be web-based. So you can operate, you could use it on an iPad, like a bigger screen, like an iPad or tablet. And you can obviously do it on the desktop. But we are working very aggressively to create a mobile app version that will be a lot different. Right now it's a little bit mobile-friendly and you can do things, but we already have operators that are asking for that. We have operators that are asking for a co-hosting suite, and that was something that was on our roadmap to have a different set of tools that are more robust, more access and more management kind of tools for multiple properties. Two of the biggest beta testers that we have in the group, one is in the LA area and he has 40 properties, and then one is in the New Jersey area. And he has 25 properties that he operates, and your smile is 'cause you know who they are.

I know.

And so they are the primary people behind, behind the build from the co-hosting side, as well as just like the overall user experience and design.

And I think this is a side note, I feel like that is another thing that there's so much need for co-hosting 'cause there's not many people that really specialize in midterms. So I feel like if you had that, there's just, people don't really know how to do it. They don't know how to set it up. So yeah, I mean, we've cobbled together. That's how I've done it, right? My reports and sheets and— Yeah. So I'm curious, will guests access this app or do they have a login or is it really just for the operators? How does that work?

So it is for the operators, but we do have a couple of different pieces for, for guests. And so there's multiple layers of this. So for the operators, you'll have a personal property page because a lot of the different tools that are out there do offer like one page where you can share that link and it's got all of your properties. So we are offering that. We call it a personal property page. And then when you click into that, you also have the property page. So that's all the details, all the amenities, all of the things that they would need. Much like you would see with Airbnb or Furnished Finder. But then as you have somebody that is interested in your property and booking it, they actually have what we call a guest page or a guest dashboard. And so that guest dashboard was a feature that we knew we had to design to make sure that your guests felt like they knew what they were doing. So we have two user experiences that we're going for here. As an owner or operator, you know exactly what to do step by step to get them approved, to get them background checked, to get their lease set up, to ask for their payment. You know what you need to do through that whole process. And on the guest side, with our guest dashboard, they can go to just one place on the guest dashboard and they know when you sign the lease, what's coming, coming up next that you approved their request. All of that stuff is on a dashboard for them. So you imagine the travel nurse or the digital nomad that wants to book all of their stuff for the next 6 months or something like that. They can do that. They can request all of those bookings and then they can see their itinerary on their guest dashboard and know exactly what's coming up. They know when their payments are coming up. They know where they're staying next and All of that stuff is right in front of them. I love that you have a show and tell. We'll have to do a show and tell.

Like, definitely maybe on the livestream. We'll do that when you launch. Let's do that. One more question. I used to be a graphic designer, full disclosure, and I think aesthetics are super important. How are you— the UX, I don't know if that's the right term. Back in the day it was UX, like the interface of it. Is that like, how are you guys navigating that? Just curious.

Yeah. And it goes back to the expertise on our team. So we have a really good friend that we've known for decades and we got him on board to do the graphic design. So if you take a look at the logo for MetroPro, you can tell that there's 15, 20 years of depth of graphic design experience in that. And yeah, so we've got a great graphic designer. The UX and the UI stuff. Again, I've done that for the last decade. And so we're really making this thing very easy to touch, very easy to like, very intuitive and very easy to figure out even if you don't have instructions. So yeah.

I love that. Cause I feel like a lot, that's just, I know with Furnish Finder, that's everyone's biggest one of their pet peeves. It's just intuitive.

Yeah. That's the really tough part. And it has to be, it has to work well. It has to work very quickly. And I can say this about MetroPro. When you get into testing it, Shona, and when you get into looking at this and we can again do like, I'll invite you to like, we could do a separate screen share and look at all of this stuff. But if you played the guest and I played the owner, when I did something on my side, you would see it literally in seconds on your side and like the speed of the system. There's something to that, right? And yeah, the user interface and the user experience was super important to me for the same reasons that you mentioned. It just adds to that like mental, like energy drain that you don't need to have to do, like the job can be easier and we wanna make it that way for people.

I love that cuz it is, it's like that extra click or if I'm somewhere and the number isn't, I can't click on it. I'm like, I literally have to get a pad. I just, there's those little details. Kälzer. It sounds like you guys have put a lot of thought into the whole experience and the functionality, which I think is really unique from what I'm hearing. So I can't wait to check it out.

I'm— I'll tell you, I'm super excited and I'm super proud of what we've built. It's not just me, it's a whole team of people and I got a bunch of just really talented people in the room. It's fun. This is not work. This is passion.

When you love what you're doing, right? Yeah. And you're just, I think also, like, I firmly believe as MTR hosts, we are in the hospitality, we're in the service business, right? If that translates to your experience with signing up and all just the backend of things, I think that just continues that. So I love that. Yeah.

Yeah. That's great.

We covered a lot. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you're excited about? Let me just ask as we wrap up here?

Yeah, I, like I say, I think that the big piece would be if you are at all interested in learning about this more, like you want to know, you want to try and get into the cohort, we're still open for that at the time of this recording anyway. And so go to mtropro.com, metropro.com. And sign up that way you are close to the build. You see what we're doing, you're informed, and then you're also given early access before we actually launch it live. And I guess the other thing that I would say is if there's any questions, people can find me on Facebook under Drake Alaviz. And it's, I think, yeah, it's my spelling is on my name on the screen here, or you can get ahold of me at andre@metropro.com. That's M-T-R-O Pro. It's just missing the E. So I always have to spell it out for people. That's also on the screen. And then we also have a Facebook page that we just recently opened up. And so we'll be also going through the build. We're building this thing live. We're sharing a lot of the details. So there'll be videos, there'll be behind the scenes, there will be thoughts and ideas that were given to us by the group of F50 people. And so that's also MetroPro on Facebook and there's a MetroPro Facebook page.

Okay. That's, I love that. I think it's all about community too. Especially operators. If, is it, if you're an operator that understands the value of this, you're gonna be among like peers. So I'm sure.

Yeah. You know what? I'm glad that you said that, Shana, because that is one piece that we didn't talk about that I think is really important in our build, and that is the community. And I think that there are some pieces that we've had to go to Facebook for, or we've had to do our own work and research for as mid-terminal operators. Because community is really a big thing with me, with us. There's different groups that you can get into and Facebook groups. Where you could get answers to your questions. And we're not trying to take anything away from those groups per se, but we are wanting to build something into MetroPro where you actually have that centralized as well. And so we're calling it Community Corner, and within Community Corner, there's also going to be a Vendor Village and these different things that pop up there. Metro Match is going to be one of those as well. And so all of this is meant to be all for the community. So Community Corner basically means that you can communicate with any of the other owner operators, and you as an owner operator get to pick whether you want to be visible or not. And so that's going to be something like if you want to be behind the scenes and that's not really your thing, cool. You just toggle the switch and you say, I don't want to participate in that. Otherwise, what you open yourself up to is a whole group of people that have the same operations that you do that are working through those things. And now you have them in the system. Vendor Village is basically going to be where you can put all of your vendors in because you need to, right? You need to have your vendors in there so you can assign those tasks and then all of those things get automated. And so that could be your cleaner, that could be your maintenance person. You set those things as you're— I know, right? You set those things as you're putting the guest information together. They're coming in on May 1st, they're checking out on July 1st. And so July 1st, you automatically have your cleaner that you've selected. Maybe you anchor that information to the property. Maybe you have one cleaner for that specific property. So you never have to do that all the time if you anchor that there. And so the guest extends, right? I always lock guests out because I don't change the locks. That's one thing that I'm super horrible about doing. And so The automation will be meant to change all of that as you go. So the guest extends to July 31st, it automatically sends a note to your cleaner, says, hey, it's July 31st. Do you want to accept this or decline it? That way you know if you have to get someone else, but you're not doing anything otherwise. It automatically changes the locks, different things like that, that we're trying to work out. So with Vendor Village, there's also a layer of community there because All you have to do is select share. There will be like a button that says share, and then your vendor, you then can give them a star rating and you can write a review for them. And now your vendor is public access. So you don't have to go to the Facebook groups and say, who has a handyman in this area that could do this type of thing? It's all there. It's within the group. And, and then I'd say the last piece about that is we want to be able to encourage the community to communicate with each other. And that's something that other platforms really discourage. They— I don't— I think that there's just something there. They want to own that information. And this is opposite of that. It's an operating system, and we want to give you all of these tools to help you succeed. And if that means reaching out to other operators or looking into their vendor list, like you just have this directory. So you imagine being a first-time owner, you've know how to do your pricing, you're looking for a handyman and you can look through a list of people, you know that they're rated, you can contact the person that rated them or suggested them and ask a few questions if you want to. So all of these things are the things that we are looking to build into MetroPro in that community corner for guests and for operators.

That alone is, and people are weird about sharing, like they're, I'm always like, hey, I wanna keep them busy. Like they do good work. I wanna support them. That's, that's just That's so much value and community and just support because yeah, there's, once you, yeah, I love that. I always like to, I always like to refer people cuz I'm like, I don't always keep them busy and I want them to feel like I'm supporting them and giving them work and yeah.

Absolutely.

Really smart. Oh my gosh, I'm so excited about this platform. Okay. A couple rapid questions. Okay. Top, uh, life or business advice you would give someone to live life on their own terms or business?

Yeah, I would say invest in yourself and specifically performance coaching, which is why I'm here talking to you. It's changed, literally changed my life. And invest in yourself, get a performance coach, get out of your own way so you can achieve that thing that you want to do.

I've never heard that term. I've Mindset, but I'm gonna have to look into that. I love that cuz we, yeah. Thank you. All right. Okay. This one's kind of silly. What is your superpower?

I'd say my superpower is my knowledge and my experience, my skillset, at least right now.

Yeah.

All of the things that you, that I've learned, that I've developed. I got kicked out of a job, like they said, hey, we don't We don't need you anymore. We're downsizing our company. We're restructuring, but you get to take this skillset with you. And yeah, that's been, I think it's my superpower. Yeah.

I love that. Okay. Next thing, a book or a podcast or a resource that you'd recommend for other entrepreneurs, I guess I would say, or operators.

Yeah. So I think that it all goes back to empowering yourself in a business. And I focus on kind of the business stuff. So I'd say any of Alex Hormozi's 3 books, $100 Million Leads, $100 Million Offers, or $100 Million Money Models, any and all of those books will help you to improve.

Okay. This has been so much fun. Hopefully— are you going to the MTR Summit? I sure are. Okay. I will see you there. I love that. It's such a great community. I feel like it's— I feel like operators in general, we're all like, really excited and it's just a great community of folks.

Yeah. Looking forward to it.

Yeah. Thanks so much. I'm going to share this and yeah, I'm really excited to try out the software because it just, it touched every time you said something like, I need that and I need that.

Check, check. We get that a lot. We're getting that a lot. So thank you very much. I appreciate it. And thanks for the opportunity to be on and to talk to your people. I really appreciate it. I'm glad to be on. I love being on.

Yeah, this was really fun. Take care and I'll talk to you soon. All right.

Okay. Thanks. Thank you.

Bye.