Paul Wakim - Selling Your Wholesale Deals Fast with TwnSqr — The Max Maxwell Show

If you see something that is hard in front of you, if you're working at something that feels really difficult, you're definitely working on the right thing. Throughout my entire short career— I'm 28— throughout my entire short career in real estate, anytime that I've found something that's difficult, I've always kept going down that path because that's the only way that I've found success. So I would say Find the hard thing that you're working on, make it harder by trying to have bigger and bigger goals, and keep pushing down that path. Don't give up just because something's getting harder. That's the thing that you should be doing, because if you keep doing it, you're going to find success.

Hey, what's up guys? It's Max Maxwell and welcome back to the Max Maxwell Show. If you're watching on YouTube, I love you. If you're listening in podcast land, I love you too. Today's guest— now here's the thing, I don't just bring on like these famous people that everybody knows that's got a thousand interviews out there. I, I bring people that are game changers in their own right and do things that are due. And this guy, my guy Paul Wakim— I'm gonna say Wakim, I think that's the best way to pronounce his last name— um, is here with me today. And you're like, is it— are you, are you nomading right now? Is that like the best way to say it?

I would say it's the best way to say it.

Yeah, he's nomading right now, so he doesn't like live in a particular place. He's around the country, the western side of the world.

That's right. That's right. My whole team is.

Whole team is working remote. And before we get into the problem that he has solved, that is a huge problem in the real estate investing world, we're going to find out a little bit more about him and his background. But Paul, welcome to the Max Maxwell Show, man.

Thanks for having me, Max. It's amazing to be here. I couldn't be happier.

It's so cool because I was like, hey, Paul, you need to come here. He's like, all right, I'm in Montana. That's right. I got to row up a river 15 miles. To get to the nearest public transportation to get to this airport where 7 people fly out a month.

That's right. Send up smoke signals.

But I'll see you in a few days. But you're here, man. Thanks for taking the time out and coming and spending with me. I know you and I, we talk a lot through Zoom and FaceTime and all that stuff like that. So I appreciate taking the time out of your busy schedule.

Thank you.

Because crazy things are coming. But man, tell us a little bit about, you know, your life and some of the things that you went through.

I certainly will. Yeah. So thanks for having me. Yeah. And after the last 2 years of, being on Zoom calls and like only seeing this much of you versus seeing now you're in the flesh. It's, uh, it's great to have face-to-face conversations and be here. So thank you, man.

Absolutely.

Um, so yeah, uh, my name is Paul Wakim. I started Townsquare, this real estate technology company, technically in 2019 with my business partner Mitch. We met rock climbing in 2019. I was just coming off teaching myself how to code. I built a very rudimentary algorithm to predict who was going to sell their house.

Yeah.

In the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania market. Um, right before that, I was in the real estate investing space. I had my real estate license as a, uh, as an agent and realized, okay, I can learn how to code. There's all this data out there. I was getting, uh, acquainted with ListSource and pulling down a bunch of data there. I realized if I could create an algorithm to predict who's going to sell their house, I can buy and sell more houses. And at the time I had done 5, maybe 6 deals, but I really wanted to take it to the next level.

As an agent, right?

As an agent and as an investor.

As an investor. So you were wholesaling as well. You're doing some of that flipping, fix and flipping or wholesaling?

Yeah, yeah. I'll get into if you want. Yeah, of course. I can get into one of the craziest deals that took me 2 years to buy a house for a dollar that I turned around and sold for an $85,000 profit.

I will wait, I'll wait 2 years for that.

Yeah, yeah, it was nice. It was nice. So yeah, we, I taught myself how to code after being an agent, uh, and after being an investor.

And why?

So that I could predict who was going to sell their house.

And so very early on in this conversation, I am seeing this, this type of brain like I have, which is solve a problem.

Oh yeah.

Have a problem, solve it.

Yep.

And if the problem, if this, if the fix is my problem, it may fix other people's problem as well.

Yeah. Yeah. I wasn't thinking that deep at the time. I did have this idea of—

At first you just wanna solve your own.

That's right. That's right. At first I was thinking, all right, I can figure out how to predict who's going to sell their house so that I can buy more houses. And then I talked to a couple investors in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania market where I was, where I grew up and where I was investing. And they were like, oh, like, this is pretty cool. Do you think I could get some leads from you? Like just pure data. And then the light bulb went off and was like, okay, people might actually want this. So beginning of 2019 through 2019, Mitch, my co-founder of Townsquare, and I, we worked on a better version. Mitch really worked on the better version of the algorithm, uh, and then right before the pandemic, we hit 95% accuracy, meaning—

amazing—

we could pull a list of 500 people, any 500 people, and then in the next 6 to 12 months, those 95% of those 500 people would sell their house in Allegheny County around Pittsburgh. And then the pandemic hit and all the data got screwed up. They shut down real estate for 4 and a half months in the Allegheny County market, and, uh, the algorithm was no longer useful. So we pivoted into a retail real estate model where we took Townsquare to become a marketplace for retail sellers to connect with retail agents. And it was good, but it wasn't great.

So let me, let me back this up. So you pivoted because of, uh, the pandemic and the, the algorithm that you have basically built with a 95% accuracy became almost useless. Yep. And then you decided to pivot into something that has retail sellers.

That's right.

To connect with retail agents.

That's right.

Okay. So it's more, it's, it's a, it's a like a lead platform almost.

Exactly. Okay. Exactly.

Okay. I'm understanding now.

And, uh, it worked out well. We had 77 homeowners come through the platform throughout the year and a half-ish that we ran it. Um, and everybody was happy with how it was working, but Uh, our primary advisor is a technology startup guy, and he's like, guys, this is not something that's scalable. This is not—

what, what problem were you solving?

Real estate agents connecting with homeowners that are outside of their network, and homeowners connecting with qualified real estate agents.

Got it.

Okay. Which a lot of companies in the prop tech world do much better than we were doing. I mean, 77 houses over a year and a half is not something to write home, uh, something to write home about.

If it was your own leads, maybe so.

That's right, that's right.

Yeah.

So, uh, late last year, October 5th, I think, I was at a conference in Vegas, and I was pitching this idea of connecting homeowners with real estate agents. But then I was also pitching this idea of some of the homeowners on our platform at the time were connecting with giant institutional buyers. You know, we had institutional buyers coming to the platform and saying, you know, Mr. Homeowner, I'm not an agent, but I will buy your house outright. And they were psyched about the idea of finding a homeowner that didn't have an agent already and was interested in selling. A hot lead.

You basically put them direct to sellers.

That's right. That's right.

And probably the sellers enjoyed that too. Yeah. Didn't have to show their house, didn't have to list it. They got a fair offer, what they considered fair, and they just was moving on.

That's right.

So now you're the aggregator, now you're the marketplace.

That's right, that's right. So I pitched this idea of— to all these venture capital guys that were at this conference. VCs. That's right, that's right. I pitched this idea of you can come and post your property and connect with agents, or you can connect with buyers. And the only thing anybody was concerned about was, I can connect directly with a buyer because What we realized was everybody has an agent. Everybody has a great agent. And I mean, to agents' credit, that's a business that is just—

does everybody have a great agent though?

I would say so.

It's a whole nother conversation. You know, I got, I got flamed on, on Instagram for really, you know, putting out a challenging proposition, right? Because Maybe everybody doesn't have a good agent. Yeah, maybe the agent world will go away eventually. Or the majority of people that don't reinvent or innovate themselves, that will go away. But I know that's off topic.

Yeah, no, no. Yeah, real quick on that, I think that the world of agents is really interesting because I think that there's ways for the on-market world, the agent world, to leverage technology and innovate. But they're going to have to break down some of the barriers that are currently up in order for innovation to occur in the on-market world, just like it's occurring with companies like Townsquare in the off-market world. Like you and I have talked about offline, it's, it's difficult to innovate in the on-market world because of the barriers that are up.

The monopoly that's there.

Correct. Yeah, correct. Yeah.

The data of the monopoly, which isn't— it's a public thing. It's being challenged in federal court and they've lost several times.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's actually one of the things that we faced was we were going to provide agent data to homeowners to help the homeowners make a better decision on what agent they should or should not work work with and, you know, who's the best agent in their neighborhood and who's really the best agent, not the one with the best marketing, but who really has the stats. Yep, yep. And the data providers we went to whenever we were transitioning out of this retail world, they said, listen, you can't do this. The MLSs will pull our data if you rank real estate agents. And we were kind of just like, all right, we don't know what to do now, so let's throw in the towel.

So, so it's crazy that when you really want to put a transparent platform that truly ranks agents based upon their true activity, and I'm sure it's the closure rate, the list versus closing rate, days on the market, days on the market, list price versus close price.

You're not allowed to do it.

You're not allowed to be transparent.

Yep.

Yeah. All right. We'll leave that for another day.

Yes. Yes, certainly. So I was at this conference and all anybody cared about was 'Oh, you have buyers coming on the platform at the same time that you have agents coming on the platform. That's pretty cool.' So I met with this guy from Denver who had just got off raising a couple billion dollars to buy single-family.

With a B?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Himself raised a couple billion dollars. Super successful, amazing investor in the Denver market. And he— I met with him and he said, 'You need $50 million a year just to compete with Zillow and get mindshare.' And I'm sitting there with very little money in the bank saying, all right, we're spinning our wheels on Townsquare for the past couple years. I'm not going to be able to raise $50 million on this. So we totally made this switch after I had this conversation into the world, went back to our roots, into this world of off-market real estate to help real estate investors specifically with connecting to the large institutional buyers. And our theory from November until February of this year was if we go out and we aggregate all of the off-market supply, that will attract these gigantic institutional buyers because they don't have access to a clean—

they don't have boots on the ground. They don't have boots on the ground.

Well, they don't have boots on the ground and they don't have an MLS analogous software for off-market properties.

Even their way they buy properties are broken.

That's right. Yeah, that's right. So we had this idea from this guy that I met with, plus a couple other institutions that I was talking at the time with. That we could go out, talk to all of our contacts across the country, all of the wholesalers, all the real estate investors, all the landlords, all the REIA groups, and say, hey, post your properties on Townsquare and we'll do the legwork to go out and find those institutional buyers that are looking in the Charlotte market or looking in the Atlanta market. And we did pretty well with that. Um, the problem was the monetization. How do we make money off of that? Getting into the transaction, trying to put something on the closing statement. It's a complicated process. So we realized, technically we realized way back like last year, early last year, that there's this opportunity for us to support real estate investors. But back whenever we realized in January of 2021, we were kind of still in that retail mindset, retail model. So we put this idea on the back shelf. And then February of this year, we decided to pull that idea off the shelf and say, okay, we need more real estate investors posting properties on our platform. We have this killer idea to support them and support their businesses. Let's do this, which I'll explain.

Mm-hmm.

Let's do this to get more investors to post their properties on our platform to support their investments and support their business for the broad goal still of let's give these gigantic institutional buyers access to the off-market, just like they have access to the on-market retail world. Mm-hmm.

So you wanted to aggregate the off-market properties to whoever was gonna buy 'em, and, and this target point, it was institutional guys.

That's right.

Okay.

That's right. Yeah. Our theory, my theory as we run this company is if we can provide value through our technology to the real estate investors who currently don't have any great marketing dispositions technology, then will bring them solely because we have a tool that doesn't exist and provides them a lot of value, bring them and their properties to this valuable place that we've created, Townsquare, and then also provide value by creating those relationships for them with these gigantic institutional buyers.

Yeah.

So that's what we're doing.

So here's, here's the thing that got me so involved with Townsquare. When you guys reached out to me and I looked through over the product, and I joined your advisory board on just what you guys should be doing, was that, listen, this is a huge problem in our industry. Yeah. And not only can we solve an issue for some of the institutional guys, we'll solve this problem for everybody that has a business. Because the way I look at this business, there's, it, it, it's in, you, we and I agree on this, it's in 3 sections. And most, you, you, you're not gonna be able to find a company that's good at all three.

Yeah.

You, you rarely find a company that's good at two.

That's right.

And so what I mean by that, when you're an investor, whether you're a wholesaler or whatever it is, if you're a wholesaler, you have three sections in your business. You have marketing. Yep. Which is what you do to attract your sellers. Mm-hmm. And reach out to them. You have acquisitions, of that, which is a part of marketing, but lends itself. So acquisitions and transactions.

Yeah. Tracking the deal.

Yep. Tracking the deal. Transaction coordination.

Yep.

And then you have dispositions. Now, most of the coaches and the videos and everything you see, cause I know I've been doing it probably the longest out of most people. There's a few OGs out there that got, been doing this longer than me.

And the software. Yeah. There's software for each of those pieces.

There's software for these pieces, but not only that, there is Everybody talks about how to attract sellers, how to get something under contract. People rarely talk about and have mastered how do you sell? Because it's hard. You know why? It requires relationships.

Yeah.

It requires XYZ. And so why has nobody created technology behind disposing your deal?

Yeah.

Very similar to the on-market world where they have a way of disposing the deal. And so when I came in, I said, this is, this is something I wanted to build myself years ago.

Yeah.

You said overwhelmed.

Yep.

I said, but you guys are way further along and I am more than happy to advise you on what I think everybody would like. Cuz my thing is I keep my ears to the street. I'm not too good to read comments. I'm not too good to do a popup and just have people talk to me and listen. I really love these people that listen to this stuff. Yeah. I really love when people change their, their family tree. I love when people build generational wealth, and this is the introduction into real estate and beyond.

Yeah.

And so when you guys said you're solving this problem, I said, I'm in. I put my 2 cents into this and you've been able to build something crazy.

Yep.

To sum it up.

Yep.

It like, just real quick, what does Townsquare actually do?

Yep. So Townsquare is a professional platform for real estate investors that truly treat their business like it's their profession.

Mm-hmm.

To come on and share their properties with other investors in a structured way. And as we dive deeper into it, you can monetize the most valuable piece of your business after the deal, your buyers list, your list of contacts. You can monetize it through Townsquare like you've never monetized it before. So going back to what I was saying, it's a platform to support real estate investors in their business, make new connections, and do it in a structured and very transparent way so that you have full control over the entire process, just like you do in the real world. We're bringing offline processes online.

You're— and you're standardizing them, making them, making them transparent and, and just easy accessible.

Yep. And control. We want to give the, the real estate investor the ability to control their most valuable assets. Control your post, control your property, decide what happens with it. And control your second most valuable thing, your list of buyers that are entrusting you with their contact information. So we've built some really cool tools around that that I'm excited to dive into.

Yeah. Using REISkip is very simple. All you got to do is register for an account, choose a payment method, upload your list, and you don't have to use any crazy Excel templates. Drag and drop your headers over and press start and voilà. Watch the magic happen. What are you waiting for? You want to talk to more sellers? All you need to go is to reiskip.com and register for account today. So what I was most excited about was two things. And the first thing was, one, how do we help a smaller wholesale, less than 10 deals a month? How do we help that person become more efficient in their business?

Yep.

Most people focus on stage one and stage two of their business. They never really focus on dispositions. And this platform that you created allows them to upload a property within their own database and send— use the pretty templates and the links to send to their own buyers.

That's right. That's right.

And then if they're saying, hey, I got a deal in Winston-Salem, they can search who's the big dog in Winston-Salem and send it to Max. Let's say me and say, hey Max, share this with your buyers list.

Yep.

And let's JV this deal.

That's right. That's right.

But the kicker, unlike any other platform has done this before, that wholesaler doesn't get to see who my buyer is because it's private. Yep. And they don't, I don't monetize their buyers list either. Yeah. It is the hard work that I've put in over the years that I get to do the JV with somebody that I've, you know, met on your platform, but then get to use my buyers list.

That's right.

I know I'm getting ahead of myself, but it's just like, this is like, It's so simple in the sense of the thought.

Yeah.

But nobody has been able to do it in an ethical way that benefits both ends of the party.

That's right.

So you're saying, so essentially when somebody gets a good deal on the contract, they can move that deal in 24 hours.

Yeah.

Without having boots on the ground in whatever market you can be in Texas and wholesaling in Ohio and vice versa. You can be in California moving deals in Charlotte.

Yep. You could be an investor in Winston-Salem with your own flip property. Maybe you don't want to post it on the MLS. Maybe you don't want to call up your own buyers. Maybe you want to find somebody who has a big list of contacts here in Winston-Salem.

Mm-hmm.

All you got to do is go to Townsquare, create a post, contact that person who's hosting their contacts on Townsquare and say, hey, Max, I want to do a deal. 123 Main Street looks like this. Here's my pictures. Here's my post on Townsquare. You approve it and it goes out to your list of people. Whenever that comes back, if somebody is going to buy it and there's a $20,000 spread on that, you and that person at your discretion decide how much you get for bringing the buyer and how much the seller gets for bringing the post.

Yeah, every JV deal is negotiable.

That's right. That's—

this is, this is amazing. So for, for somebody like myself, been in the business for 6+ years, I've aggregated a huge buyers list in the last 6 years in the triad, right? Yes. It's Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point. Yeah, spent a lot of money, spent a lot of money on employees aggregating these relationships. What benefit do I get using this Townsquare?

Yeah, yeah. One thing before we get to that that I want to touch on is whenever we think about the business, like you said, there's 3 parts on a broad scale. There's the marketing, there's the acquisition, which is usually done by a CRM, and then there's this dispositions piece. Townsquare breaks the dispositions piece down into 3 parts. The first part is You can replace MailChimp, you can replace Constant Contact, you can replace the whatever platform you're using with Townsquare.

So you're, you're, you're also being able to email your own deals out.

That's right. With, with our lowest tier for $150 a month, you can upload your list of contacts, 5,000, and send your deals to those contacts and use our structured process, sign documents, communicate with those contacts right on the platform. Email it out, everything for $150.

Hold on, Paul, let me break, let me break for a second. So you're saying that for the lowest tier, $150, $150, I get to replace my MailChimp?

Uh-huh.

MailChimp, by the way, Matt can tell you, $350 a month. Yeah.

Yeah.

Right. And it's, and it's not the best product UI-wise.

Yeah.

So you're saying I could also use that as a mail going out? Would my, would my mail, would my emails get marked as spam in any type of way?

No. So that's a big, big concern.

I know. I'm telling you because I have this issue.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my, my co-founder Mitch, he's a genius to say the least. I mean, laymen like myself that look at these technology guys, everybody looks like a genius, but Mitch is truly a genius.

He figured it out.

We figured it out. I'm confident that emails will be delivered and I'm not going to say too much, but yeah, you figured it out. We're working on some crazy stuff that's going to come out by the end of the year that will improve this deliverability even more. So your emails will be delivered.

So I can I can remove my current way I send out deals to my current buyers list.

That's right.

And I— you now have a nice templated way.

That's right. And you can collect all those buyers. They don't even have to have a Townsquare account. So you send out your deal to your buyers. Somebody comes, they submit an offer as a guest. You get their offer, you get their contact information in a table that shows you all the people that have saved or RSVP'd or submitted an offer to your post. And then If they sign up for a Townsquare account, you can chat with them. You can sign documents directly on the platform. It's a whole structure.

You're saying I can remove my DocuSign as well?

That's right. It's all included.

All right. So you're saving me some money here, but also giving me— so now, so this is truly a disposition software.

That's right. Nobody has innovated that last and final block of the real estate investor's process. There's innovation in the finding of deals. There's innovation in the organization and the acquisition through CRMs. But nobody is truly innovating properly in that final piece of dispositions for real estate investors.

Okay.

So the, the second thing, you can send out your deals to your contacts all through Townsquare. You can do that structured process we touched on.

Yeah.

The other thing you can do is you can just send it out to the marketplace, and any institutional buyer, any high-volume buyer, any serious buyer who has come to Townsquare and created an account, they can create a buy box.

And these buyers are vetted by you guys?

That's right.

So any random buyer that has came through and been vetted and signed up for Townsquare and went through the vetting process that you guys put in place.

Yep. You send them a deal. You could—

that's just a marketplace.

That's right.

Which is behind a wall. So it's not out in the public. It's behind a wall.

That's right. That's right.

Yeah.

It's not totally public.

There's a couple of different reasons that get technical, but they know if you've been watching me, you know why it's not public because you got to skirt some, some upcoming legislation.

That's right. That's right. So that's the second thing you can do. And the third thing is you can send your post, your deal. We call it a post. To a community of investors around the country. You don't even have to be in that area with your deal. So if I get a deal in Winston-Salem, I can find you on Townsquare. I can see that you have 25,300 contacts uploaded on Townsquare that are interested in properties like the post that I've just created.

Yeah.

I can send it to you, and then you vet me, you vet my deal, you vet my contracts, you make sure that you're ready for your buyers to see my post. And then you can send it out as my third marketing mechanism. You can send it out to your buyers. One of your buyers comes back and says, yeah, Max, that's a sweet property. I'll put an offer in on that. You, you don't have to share your buyer's contact information with me if you don't want. We sign a JV agreement, we sign whatever agreement you want that makes you feel comfortable directly on the Townsquare platform, and then you can share that buyer with me if you want, or you can act as that liaison in between. And take control of your, the entire process.

Yeah. Typically when I do a JV deal, because I know that we have such a smooth process, we sign a JV agreement, typically 50/50, right? And then we take over the closing process because I have the attorneys in my office to close those deals. Cause I know it's in my market anyways. That's why you're hitting me up. And then so that JV agreement signed on Townsquare, you're using one of my buyers. We offload this deal in a record amount of time. And you're getting money that you never was gonna get anyways, just because you didn't have the contacts in the city.

That's right.

So that moves me. Part 3 moves me to the whales. Yeah. Let's call 'em whales.

Yeah, let's do it.

Let's call 'em whales. The big dogs. You guys out there listening to this podcast that have been in this business for a long time, built a huge buyers list. And you know, I, I read this book where Jeff Bezos turned one of his company's liabilities, right? He, he turned, um, his data, which is now known as AWS, his cloud, all— all right. So this book mentioned that Jeff Bezos spent a lot of money on cloud computing, a lot. And he was outsourcing this cloud computing to another company. So he decided to bring it in-house and then use it as a product to sell to his other customers like myself. We have tech products.

Me too.

That live on AWS. And actually your favorite apps probably already live on AWS, such as Airbnb, Uber, all these, they live on AWS. So the AWS makes up 20% of Amazon's annual income.

Yep.

So he turned what was a liability on his bank sheet, on his, uh, uh, profit and loss statement to an actual profit because he now offers it. So I say that to say this, if you spent years building your buyers list, mm-hmm, you can now upload your buyers list onto Townsquare in your own confined portfolio.

That's right.

Here's one of my thoughts, because I know of, I know of something similar. Are those, do I keep, are those, when I upload my 33,000 buyers, let's just say number, are they mine or does this get shared with everybody that's on the platform?

So everything for us is about control. You have 100% control over if you are just using those buyers to send out your deals, if anybody even sees that you have those contacts, and you have full control over who gets access to anybody who raises their hand and says they're interested in a deal. So to answer your question bluntly, no, nobody has access. You have complete and utter control.

So you don't take my buyers list and aggregate it into this pool of OmegaList?

We do not.

And other people can't. So if I'm a small guy. Yeah, right. And I upload my 150 buyers list. Yeah. Does that get shared with the whale?

No.

So that's privately mine. Full control, transparency, control.

Full transparency, control in a structured way.

All right. Now I'm a little bit more secure. So as a whale, I upload my 30,000, 33,000 buyers list.

Yep.

And I get to either use this list to send out my own deals just like everybody else. Yep. I get to post my own deals in the marketplace.

Yep.

And I— or I get to JV with other wholesalers that want to use my buyers list that I spent. So this is an example of, cuz I have dispositions, people who get paid to make relationships.

Yep.

And that goes into our company's buyers pool. So that money that I'm spending to acquire buyers now becomes an asset to where I can then monetize it with anybody else who wants to do deals in my market, who's virtually wholesaling in my market. Now get to say, hey Max, I see that you got 33,000 buyers and what's the sale of market?

Yep.

You mind sending this to your buyers list? And if somebody buys from your list, I'll JV with you.

Yep.

So essentially I can sit back.

That's right. We call it hosting, hosting your list of contacts privately. That's right. With full control.

Okay.

Full control.

So there's, there's, I love this. And, and this is something that was when you guys came to me, you already had this idea.

Yep.

I said, listen, the hard work I put in, I don't want to share my 33,000 contacts. Well, you burn them.

You'll burn them.

Yeah. So I don't want my guy getting 17 emails a day from 17 other wholesalers and maybe 5 of them are the same property.

Yep.

With 5 different prices on it.

That's right. From 5 different people.

So I said, listen, we gotta, we gotta hone this in and make sure it's private. And that's what makes the difference.

Yep.

In any other software and that you completely created a disposition. So for the basic guy, $140, $150 a month.

$150 a month or $1,200 a year.

$1,200 a year for a guy to have a software that is completely his disposition. And for the whales that want to monetize, use this as a platform with emails and monetize their lists, you're looking at 12,000 a year. So $1,000 a month.

That's right.

Trust me, it's well worth it. Between, between my MailChimp, between my, um, these other services that I'm using to get buyers list out, like creating pretty links and all this stuff. Yep. We're at $1,000 a month anyways.

Yep. Yep.

But I don't get to monetize it.

That's right. That's right. One of the things that we heard from our customers, our customer advisory board, people that are helping us like you, is they've said, so I don't actually have to put any deals on Townsquare. I don't have to actually sell anything to get value from this. And I'm— yes, that's exactly the point. If you don't want to post a property on Townsquare, if you don't want to send it out to your list of buyers. If you just want to sit back, like you said, have your buyers list there, have your contact list there, you will be recognized in the community of people on Townsquare as an authority in the market where you're at, and you can just sit back and let people send their deals to you. And then that full control piece comes back again. You can vet the person via Townsquare Rooms, a chat. You can vet the person sending you the deal. You can ask them for contracts. You can accept or decline the post. You can do all of this stuff before any of your buyers even see or hear about the post that's trying to be sent to you. Full control over everything. And you can monetize your list in a way that is not possible right now.

You got a— you created a JV central hub station, a network. Yeah, network. Town Square.

That's right. That's why it's Town Square. It's a virtual town square of real estate investors all working together.

This is amazing.

I think that it's safe to say that because there's a complete and utter lack of this dispositions process made for real estate investors, the process is broken, and it has been since everyone got into this real estate investing industry in the early 2000s.

I agree.

So we're here to solve that problem of how do you quickly, efficiently make connections and disposition the properties that you need to sell.

I love it, you know, because this right here is going to solidify somebody's business. What I've always seen and how I created Venture Atlas and why I have 80 desks in my office is to help the other half. I call it like from the 1-yard line to the 50-yard line, that's where most people are pretty good at their business. But from the 50-yard line to the end zone, people are terrible at it.

Yep.

That comes with transaction coordinating and actually disposing of the property. And a lot of this is gonna be solved in Townsquare to where you can have a full robust robust business for another $150 a month.

That's right. That's right.

That's the part that I love about it. It's no crazy high barrier to entry. You're gonna get in there. Are you gonna do like training so people fully know how to use this?

Oh yeah. Yeah.

So I think we should do one together too.

Oh yeah. That would be great.

All right, cool.

That'd be great. Yeah. We have a full team of people that are on staff ready to answer any questions. Mm-hmm. We've built out tours directly in the platform. So when you sign up at townsquare.com, T-W-N-S-Q-R dot com. Yeah. You get a tour of the entire platform in an automated way. You have the little intercom button in the bottom right-hand corner to ask myself and my team any questions that you have about the entire process. We have training videos. Everything is there ready for you to go.

Paul, is there a way that we can, like, for people that are watching this podcast or listening to this podcast, is there a way that we can give like the first 100, 200 people Like, let's work 'em up.

Yeah.

Can you, can you give 'em a, we'll, let's, we'll create a, like, create a discount code named Max.

Yep. You got it.

And give 'em like, let's say 20% off.

Yeah, let's do it. That sounds great.

You know what I'm saying? Because like, if they're like, I like being the first to run into a software and if these, if you're listening to this show, you're watching this show, I think you deserve like you're, because no, you've never talked about this out there. This is the first time I'm talking about this.

Yep.

So let's do 20% off and use a code like Max. Let's do it. Cause this is gonna, this is gonna change the game. Where do you see this software going? Where do you like, obviously you roll out, you roll out a software. I've, I've created softwares before you roll out a software. You just gonna be a bunch of people on there. You're gonna see some problems come up as a software and a technical person. But what are some, can you, what are some cool things that may be on the horizon that you, you don't have to go diving deep.

Yeah.

But some cool things that you be like, yo, this is coming.

Yep, yep. So one of the coolest things that I'm totally comfortable talking about that will come out in the next couple months is because you can use Townsquare for the whole marketing piece of your business, the whole dispositioning piece of your business, we're going to give you tables and analytics of your entire marketing process. You're going to be able to see how many emails were sent out by you, how many emails were sent out by the person you shared your post with, How many opens? How many clicks? How many page views? How many RSVPs? How many saves? How many offers? And then once you have all that information, by the end of the year we're gonna make some pretty awesome improvements to how you communicate with people on Townsquare and with the people that are making offers on your properties so that you never have to worry about somebody's making me an offer via email, somebody's making me an offer via Townsquare, somebody's making me an offer via text message. Message. All of that will be in one place. Directly—

centralized communication with the buyers, the JV, in one place, particular to this property.

That's right. That's right.

Fire.

Yep. And then beyond that, what you can do in Town Square, we call it rooms.

Mm-hmm.

In your Town Square room, you and I can communicate, go back and forth about the deal. You can make sure I'm legitimate. I can upload documents to you. We can sign all of that great stuff. We're working with a digital closing company that knows how to do off-market transactions in high volume.

Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. So you're going to provide a closing attorney or an escrow company to close these deals from within the app that you guys already vetted?

That's right.

So this is truly a disposition software platform, A to Z. So if I live in Texas and I want to close a deal in North Carolina, you got an attorney because we're an attorney state. You got somebody that will do the deal, close the deal for us.

That's right. That works better and faster than anybody else.

That's what I'm talking about, man. Yep. Yep. It's crazy to see, you know, when I started this business in late 2016, I remember taking screenshots of maps as I'm driving, and that was our Driving for Dollars app. Like literally Apple Maps open with a pin drop.

That's right.

And going home. And it is crazy how far this business has went in just the last 6, 7 years.

Yep.

With technology. And this is one of the final pieces that I think will give somebody software-wise that is affordable, accessible, transparent. That's gonna give somebody a full-rounded company.

Yeah.

It's gonna give them the tools they need to be full-rounded. Yep.

Yep. That's the plan. That's the plan. And we have a whole lot more on the horizon.

Yeah.

We, uh, my team and I have been at this, like I said, for 3 years. Mitch, my co-founder, and I, we've been grinding away for 3 years trying to make sure that we're doing the right thing and making really powerful software. So, I, uh, I'm excited to have this out in the world, and we're going to keep working our tails off to make sure that we're bringing as much value as possible to this section of the market. Because again, our big goal is let's connect this section of the market with those giant investors that don't currently have access to this off-market, these real estate investors. So we're going to keep making tools, keep providing value, and make sure that we're actually making an improvement on the market pushing it forward rather than backwards.

And that's a good thing. So let me, let me kind of like ask you this question because as, as someone who uses a lot of software in their business, what in short, what are you completely dedicated to this? And I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you why is because, you know, uprooting some of your business and moving this third part of your business into this software, I wanna know that the software company's dedicated for the long run. That you guys ain't here for no cash grab and bounce. You know what I mean? Like, that's, that's very common in this, this industry or industries in general.

Full of hype.

Full of hype. I ain't gonna see you running around on private jets in the next 6 months and, and like, and like, you know, wanting to be this other person.

No, I think it sums it up pretty well when I say you can find me on LinkedIn and nowhere else. I don't have a social media presence. My focus is on town square and providing value. My team's focus is on town square and providing value. We're here, like I said, to push the industry forward, not bring it backwards with flashy Instagram posts that— yeah, I'd rather spend my time working, bringing value, or rock climbing. That's right.

That's what you haven't been able to do much lately because you've been at a computer.

That's right. For the last 3 years, all hunched over with back pain, but we're making it happen.

You know, there's, there is a question that I asked all my guests. I don't know if you watched any other podcasts.

I have.

Well, you maybe already know what I'm going to ask you, right? So, and this can be unrelated to this or not related at all. If you had 1 minute to make an announcement to the entire world, what would you say?

I would say that if you see something that is hard in front of you, if you're working at something that feels really difficult, you're definitely working on the right thing. Throughout my entire short career— I'm 28— throughout my entire short career in real estate, anytime that I've found something that's difficult, I've always kept going down that path because that's the only way that I've found success. So I would say find the hard thing that you're working on, make it harder by trying to have bigger and bigger goals and keep pushing down that path. Don't give up just because something's getting harder.

I love that.

Because that's where the success is at, cuz it's harder for everybody else. I know I probably sound like a broken record cuz a lot of other people have said something similar, but if you've found something that's difficult, that's the thing that you should be doing because if you keep doing it, it, you're going to find success.

I love it. I love it. All right, guys, there you go. The game has changed once again. I'm gonna leave the link down below in the show notes, or if you're watching on YouTube, down there as well. Townsquare is here to help you with your disposition needs. You got— you need buyers, they got them. You want to send stuff to your own buyers list, you can do that. I'm excited for this new software to hit the market and come out. It's up and running right now because this will help you become a better investor. This will allow you to solve the problem of saying to me all the time, how do you find a buyer? How do you find a buyer? For virtual wholesalers, this is going to help you dispose of your deals from market experts in that particular market that you're working in. And so I can't wait to hear a lot of the feedback you guys have. Don't forget, I'm gonna leave the link below with the code so that you can get 20% off because you're listening right now. And Paul, I appreciate your time.

Thank you. I appreciate being here. I could not be happier to be working with you.

This is awesome. He's here. This is a real deal, guys. And I'll see you guys next time. Don't forget to give me a 5-star rating wherever you listen to this podcast on. If you're on YouTube, give me a thumbs up and subscribe if you're not. And I'll see you guys next time. Peace.