The Importance of Being a Lifelong Learner with Paul Wakim

Welcome to the Uncontested Investing Show, presented by REI Inc. Magazine and sponsored by RZM Capital. Each week we focus on bringing you candid convos from the best in the biz. Here's your host, Tim Herridge.

Welcome back to Uncontested Investing. I'm Tim Herridge. Thank you so much for stopping back by today. I'm here with Paul Wakim. Paul, thank you for coming in.

Thanks for having me, Tim. I'm happy to be here.

So I'm going to jump straight to private conversations with you Let's do it. You live in Airbnbs.

I sure do.

And you don't own the Airbnb.

That's right.

You just travel the country nomadically. Yeah. Please tell us about yourself and about that lifestyle.

Yeah. So my, my wife and I graduated college in 2016. I'm 29. Immediately out of college, I got into real estate photography. That's how I cut my teeth in the industry. It's how I got into everything. That I'm into now. It's how I got into investing. All things real estate started with real estate photography after my wife bought me a drone. She was my girlfriend at the time, bought me a drone for my graduation present. So we built this photography company, got around to COVID. We can go back to all the technology and real estate investing stuff, but the way we ended up in Airbnbs was we built this real estate photography company. It was paying the bills. Shannon, my wife, was not having any face-to-face communication with any of our clients because it was COVID. And we said we have no reason to be in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where we're from.

Well, no one really does.

That's right.

I'm just—

you're right. You're not wrong. You're not wrong. I, I don't know. I go back and visit my family. I was back visiting my family last week and I'm telling my dad, like, you have no reason to be here. You work remote, like, You have no reason to be here. My brother, he works remote. I said, Matthew, you could be on the moon for all your clients care. Get out of Pittsburgh. Like, it's cloudy out today. It's this way 100% of the time in Pittsburgh. So I said, we're getting out of Pittsburgh. I picked up, drove to Boulder, Colorado, spent 2 years or so in Boulder, Colorado. We liked it, didn't absolutely love it. So we decided that we're going to pick up and live in Airbnbs as of last May, middle of April, May last year. And we've been spending a month to 3 months at a time in Airbnbs. The, the loophole that we take advantage of is that no matter where you are in the country, you're not— Airbnbs are allowed if you're staying for more than 30 days. If you're staying for less than 30 days and it's a short-term rental, 30 days or more, it's a long-term rental.

Midterm.

Yeah, there you go. So we have found Airbnbs in places like Bozeman, Montana, Bellingham, Washington, Bend, Oregon. We're in Moab, Utah right now, middle of nowhere, and we love it. Running the companies totally remote.

So you still have the real estate photography company. The other company is Townsquare. And what is Townsquare?

So Townsquare is an off-market property marketplace that my co-founder and I started as something totally different back in 2019, right before we picked up and left and went to Boulder. Mitch, my co-founder, actually came with us. He and his girlfriend at the time, wife now, came to Boulder with us. So we built Townsquare originally as an algorithm to predict who was going to sell their house next. Some people in the real estate investing industry might be familiar with Audantic. Audantic does a whole lot better job at predicting who's going to sell their house than I or my co-founder ever could. So we, we were going to predict who was going to sell for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. That didn't work out all that well when COVID hit because all the data that we were making predictions on got screwed up. So we pivoted a bunch of times, then landed where we are today, which is an off-market property marketplace primarily for wholesalers and real estate investors to quickly dispo— disposition their properties and get them sold.

Very good. So the first segment every week is the Bottom Line Up Front, where I ask you to spend up to 2 minutes explaining, telling the audience the most important things that you see in the real estate market today. Things you think they should be focused on and/or avoiding. Good. Yeah. Go.

So the biggest thing that I've learned in my real estate investing career and just general business career that I think is very applicable to today is that I don't know anything. And very few people know really, especially with the economy, what's going on. So I like to approach every single situation, whether it's with my investments of my money in real estate or the investments of my time in business, that I don't know anything and I need to constantly learn. So since day one of being in real estate investing and since day one starting this real estate technology company, the biggest thing that I've learned is take a step back, learn from experienced people like yourself, and keep my mouth shut. And just keep on learning rather than trying to act like I know what I'm talking about because nobody really knows where the market is going. You can look at bonds, you can look at where the mortgage rate's going, you can look at what the Fed is doing with interest rates. But at the end of the day, nobody really knows. And I certainly don't know. So I'm a lifelong learner and try to learn from people that are really experienced.

All right. So everybody stop watching because you don't know anything.

Yeah, I guess so.

No, but like, it's an element of humility, right? I mean, it's— I said on an episode recently, no one knows everything and everyone knows something.

Yeah.

And the way I think of it like that is at the times of my career where I've acted as if I was the smartest guy in the room, typically I make mistakes or even worse, I actually end up being the smartest guy in the room. Because anytime you're there, you're not focused on growing. You're not actually learning from someone else. You're actually, you should only be teaching at that point. So I hear you. So you wanted to make an algorithm and now you made an off-market marketplace. Why technology? What's your back? How'd you get into, I mean, clearly you want to be in technology. Yep.

Yep. So when I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, I have a degree. I have a half degree, almost a degree in biology, and I do have a degree in economics. I didn't do too great in college, but whenever I graduated, I dove headfirst into real estate, bought and sold a bunch of properties, did a bunch of wholesale and whole sale transactions, did some creative financing transactions. And then I realized I had this aha moment that probably isn't all that obvious, but I had this aha moment that if there's no seller, there's no real estate. If there's no one selling a property, there's no real estate. So all of my real estate agent clients that were paying me for photography, all of the properties that I was trying to purchase, everything pointed back to a seller. So if I could predict who was going to sell their property next, all these different things around me were going to hopefully work out. So I woke up every morning for 6 months at 3 a.m. and worked with a coach that was over in London at the time to learn how to code in Python. And it really opened my eyes to the world of what's possible with technology. You know, at the time I was like, okay, a drone is cool. There's some really interesting stuff going on there, but I didn't really grasp what it meant to have technology under your control. And coding taught me that, and it really opened up a lot of doors for me to talk intelligently. At least as intelligently as I possibly can with people in the tech space. So yeah, in 2017, 2018, I taught myself how to code, which got me into the world of making this algorithm. It actually led me down the path to do 3 projects that are some of my proudest achievements in real estate investing. One was a ground-up development of 4 really high-end townhomes in Pittsburgh. The other two were properties that are just crazy, two-year-long stories of purchasing properties from a guy in Qatar and then purchasing a property for a dollar and then selling it to my landlord the next week. So it led me down a really interesting path to expand my knowledge of things that I had never had any experience with, i.e., technology coding. But it also really opened up my eyes to the world of real estate investing and how What I know now is that there's so few really good services technology-wise for real estate investors. Everybody's trying to innovate in the on-market space. But what I've learned over the past couple years of doing this is that the place for real innovation is in the off-market world, and that's what we're trying to do. So long answer to your short question, but yeah, technology has taken me deeper down the path of real estate investing.

Well, this show's about you, so you can keep your answers as long as you would like.

Thanks.

These people get to listen to me every week. So one of the things I've said for a while when I'm talking to someone is the single largest common denominator in real estate investment transactions is real estate. And you just can't have a transaction without real estate. You can actually without a seller if you foreclose on it, but like you can't without the actual real estate. Like it's got— there has to be something that we're investing in. So I love the ideology on that, but let's skip. So Economics and biology, technology, photography, real estate. How did that happen?

Yep. So whenever I was growing up, my grandparents were the top real estate agent and one of the top developers in Palm Beach, Florida. Crazy houses down there. Some of the houses that my grandfather renovated are now on the market for like $80 and $100 million. Just craziness.

Shoulda kept those.

I know, right? So seeing them have success in real estate just always left an impression on me. And then through high school and a little bit of middle school, but through high school and college, I stayed in touch with— and everybody knows Rich Dad, Poor Dad. My rich dad was my best friend's dad, and he showed me the ropes on his couple hundred units of rental properties in Pittsburgh. So I always had this impression in me that real estate was something I was going to do. And I guess I didn't do too great in school, in college. So I guess whenever I got out, it was like the impression really came out as something that I actually should focus on.

Well, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, I really want to dive into Townsquare and your exposure to the market and kind of really share what people are thinking. So stick around. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back to Uncontested Investing. I'm Tim Herridge. I'm still here with Paul, and Paul I got to ask, economy, biology, economy, photography, development, algorithms, off-market wholesale real estate. In essence, the simplest form of any of that, but probably the most desired. What led you and your partner to the Townsquare idea? How's it going and kind of what are you seeing in the market?

Yeah. So what led us here is we went from predicting who was going to sell so that we could buy and sell more properties, keep more properties, have more investment properties. And that taught us a lot about the world of wholesaling and real estate investors and what they're looking for and how to deal with sellers. But then we pivoted out of that space into building technology because of COVID We pivoted out. Pivoted out of that space into building technology for retail sellers and the on-market world. I loved the business model. It didn't work out for us. Funny enough, some guy just raised $25 million on the idea. He has a site that says coming soon. So probably a good thing because we wouldn't have been able to compete with somebody raising $25 million on the idea. But we went back to the world of wholesaling real estate investors because as people in technology or in startups, we're looking for the place where we can really innovate. And what we learned in the world of retail real estate technology is that there's, there's really no room for innovation because the National Association of Realtors has realized that they control all the data. That's the thing. That's the key. They control all the data. And what is technology built on? Data. Right. What is technology built to capture? Data. So if you can't build technology efficiently, you know, HomeLight and Zillow and guys like that, they've done pretty good, but they play really, really nice with the National Association of Realtors. So we decided to go back to the world of off-market real estate and go and work with the cowboys, the wholesalers and the real estate investors who buy and sell transactions a lot because there's a lot of data. And there's very few regulations and a lot of room for improvement and a lot of room for innovation. So that's why we are where we are today. My co-founder and I, our team, we're also really passionate about building investment property portfolios. So yeah, that's why we built Townsquare in this space.

And when you look at kind of— I'll do this backwards. Sure. The failures or shortcomings or things you're not happy with Is it— do you have— is it customer adoption? Is it kind of people are stuck in their way and they're not even willing to consider it? Like, where are the struggles in that business right now?

In the existing business model?

In Townsquare.

Yeah. So old business model, the biggest thing I learned in business was to figure out what's not working sooner. You know, we sat in that old business model and realized people weren't signing up, people weren't using the platform because people didn't want the product that we were trying to put out. We'll see how the guy that raised $25 million does it. So I learned a lot through that. Now things are going really well. The reception from masterminds that we're a part of has been, yes, please, I need this product. So learning from the two different worlds has been humongous for me. Hearing sellers in the old world say, yeah, this is interesting, but I'm not really interested to talking to real estate investors at the masterminds and they're like, wow, when can I get my hands on this? It's very clear to me that we're in the right space. So we have— we've had over 1,200 people sign up since July whenever we launched our first MVP, minimum viable product. And then depending on when this comes out, you will be the first person I talk to about the brand new relaunch that we're doing. So July through October, we gathered a bunch of feedback on the MVP. Then in early February, mid-February, we're totally relaunching. From October until right now, our development team has been totally rebuilding the platform based on the feedback from all those people that said, yes, please create this or help me with my business.

So do we need to time this episode with that? Or like, I feel pressure. Oh my gosh.

No.

So that's excellent. 1,200 users-ish. And how many properties is that?

About 450 to 650 per month.

Per month. Okay. So you are collecting data.

That's right.

Are we going to have an off-market comp engine coming soon?

Yes, sir.

Are we?

Oh, yeah.

I've been waiting for this. Like, It's, it's, it's what we need is— heck, one of the problems with the short-term rental databases and the data surrounding that, or lack thereof, there's no real transactional data. You don't know. I mean, you can look at AirDNA and it's really just a front-end scrape of Airbnb and VRBO and all that. And so then you kind of have to guess. And then a lot of that's driven by the number of people the house sleeps. Well, if you have a Victorian house on Town Square like I have, like that's worth a little bit more money than the 3-bedroom ranch in the middle of Fox and Jacobs subdivision. That's right. Like, I mean, but AirDNA says they're the same. Yeah. And so when you get into these investment transactions, comps have always been an issue. How is Town Square different than maybe that one of these other platforms or two that people use. So first, I ask it that way because I don't want to act like I'm putting them down or whatever. Yeah, no, no.

There's been a couple other platforms in our space that quite honestly, Tim, they've paved the way. There's, you know, you need somebody in the space that's doing the first thing first, developing. Exactly. And we're honestly in a fortunate enough position to follow in the footsteps of these companies that have been led by impressive individuals to create really great technology. Now, I think that I also have second mover advantage or third mover advantage that I'm definitely going to take advantage of. And my development team is definitely taking advantage of.

Well, oftentimes the pathfinder gets shot.

Yeah, I mean, yeah.

And you don't survive. Yeah. And I've done that with a very large company. And, you know, it was always— you had to like give pep talks to your team like, you don't understand, what we're doing has never been done before. So we're going to make mistakes and it's not going to work out and people are going to be unhappy and we just have to commit to be better tomorrow than we are today. Yeah, I mean, that's just— but oftentimes the pathfinder gets shot. I learned that the hard way.

But we're, we're different in the way that I'm, I guess, very much of a libertarian in that everything you do, especially with your investments, you should have complete control over and nobody should be able to tell you you have to do this thing. So the key difference between any other platform and what you can do on Townsquare is any asset that you upload to Townsquare, that is a property or a list of contacts that you have that you want to send that property to, you have complete control over who has access to it and how that's used. So, for example, one of our competitors in the space, you upload a list of all the contacts that you want to send your deals to instantly. Everybody has access to it. On Townsquare, you can decide if you want your buyers list or your list of contacts to be publicly available. Everybody has access to it or totally private and nobody knows you even exist on the platform. We offer everybody that continuum of options so that you have complete control at your disclosure who, who has access to your assets and what types are adverse selection is something that I have to deal with as a lender.

Oftentimes I'm talking to someone, we'll even say at one of these masterminds, and I'll be like, they'll be like, I'll give you a shot at a deal. And inevitably they send me the deal that nobody else would lend on.

They're telling you they'll give you a shot.

Yeah. Yeah. And then inevitably Eventually, like, they're like, oh, well, I've got this house, it's on 7 acres. Well, there's actually 6 houses, 2 mobile homes and a meth shed. Can I get a fix and flip loan? And you're like, no, oh, well, it's not going to work. But it's like, okay, so what I'm going is, are people trying to sell the good houses on Townsquare or are they just putting the stuff that nobody else wants?

So the ideal scenario obviously is that people are trying to sell the good houses and what we're doing to make sure that happens, to make sure that only good houses show up on there are a couple of things. So when you bring a property to Townsquare, you can just post it with one photo and the bedroom count if you want. But we incentivize our users to post all of the information they possibly can with what we call our completeness score. And we gamify the process of posting a property.

Yeah.

So that you rank at the top of the search results on our marketplace. So there's 5 different sections for filling out a post. Each section has fields within it. If you satisfy every field in all those sections, you get a 5 out of 5 on your post completeness and it shows up at the very top of the search results in your market or across the U.S.

So in essence, by being thorough, that's kind of how I get featured, if you will.

That's right.

And because the asset is what you're after, you're— well, not— the asset's what makes the marketplace valuable. Yeah, right. Because people gather for what they want. Right. And I got you. I got you. So who pays? Do I pay as a wholesaler or do I pay as a buyer?

So it's totally free if you just want to post your property and it's totally free if you want to make offers. We call them proposals on properties. What we're building is, you know, the data is important to us. What we're building is a way to capture all of the off-market property information. And to do that, we're building tools on top of our marketplace to support the real estate investors, the wholesalers, the buyers, everybody. If you want to take advantage of those tools, if you want to take advantage of those tools and not just post your property, if you want to put your buyers list up and send your buyers emails about your deals using our email technology, which I would argue is the best in the industry, we've spent way too much time figuring out email and how to do it perfectly. But if you want to use those tools on top of the marketplace, you pay for that. So the main customer that we're monetizing right now are the wholesalers, the real estate investors who are posting the properties and who want to take advantage of our tools. But you don't have to. You never have to pay to post a property on Townsquare.

So what type of feedback— very curious— are you hearing from the market about what's needed, what's next? And kind of like, where's the appetite, right? Yep.

Yep. Small local buyers is what everybody's asking for. I was on the phone with a great partner of ours, a guy from Charlotte, North Carolina, earlier this week. And I was like, you know, what's going on with your institutional buyer contacts? What's happening with the Tricons, the First Keys, the Amhersts of the world? And he said they're literally just buying properties to keep their construction crews busy and everything is tied to the Treasuries right now. What's the 2, 5, and 10-year Treasury yield? Everything is tied to that. When we see those go down, those big institutional buyers will get back in the market because then their LPs will say, okay, I'm willing to put my money into this more risky asset, real estate, rather than just bonds. So what we're hearing from everybody, the feedback that we've received really for the past 3, 4 months is we need more local buyers to come on the platform because the mom-and-pop flipper or the guy that's looking for a rental property or an Airbnb, I mean, I'm sure you guys see this in RCN, those guys are still in the market, whereas the institutional buyers are kind of on the sidelines. The flippers maybe not so much, but the, the guys getting the DSCR loans or the short-term rental loans, they're still in the market. So that's the feedback we've received is, hey, we know the institutions are on the sidelines, but please bring us more local buyers. So we have a whole bunch of processes built out that we're going to start pulling triggers on to make that happen.

Very good. All right. So we're going to take another break and then we'll come back to the Money Minute and some rapid fire. Sounds good. Stick around. We'll be right back.

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Welcome back to Uncut Test Investing. I'm Tim Herridge. I'm still here with Paul. Paul, it's time for the Money Minute. Imagine there's an entrepreneur out there that— he remembered this segment. Imagine there's an entrepreneur out there that's only going to get 30, 60 seconds of advice all month. It can be the young Paul, it can be the old Paul, it can be the investors out there, you know, that are struggling, the ones that are killing it. You can talk to whoever you want, but you got to get like 60 seconds, the best stuff you have. So only advice they get all month. You ready?

Yep. Go! So the best advice I have for any investor, and especially the young coming-up investor who's really trying to work as hard as they possibly can to make it in this world of real estate investing and everything you see online with people making it big, is take a break and go outside. I know the guy with the man bun is sitting here telling you to go outside. I can't stress it enough. One of the biggest things that has had an impact on the success of my businesses and on the success of my investing, both my money and my time, has been spending time with my family and friends and the people that I care about outside for at least 15 to 30 minutes a day. That's it. You're not saying go camp for a week and then you're going to come back and have some business revelation. But there is hardcore science behind going outside, spending out, spending time outside, away from your computer, away from your phone. And it's made the biggest impact on my success and my general well-being and mental well-being. So yeah, go outside, spend some time with the people you care about outside.

So that's excellent advice. I'm someone I've been traveling a lot the last year or two. Um, had breakfast with my son this morning. He wanted to know kind of my favorite city of this year and my favorite restaurant, because you've seen me, I buy a lot of food. Uh, and I get my best work done on the plane. I don't connect to Wi-Fi. I sit in the same seat every time. It's like, it's very intentional, but it's because I know that that will most likely be the only 2 hours of the next however many days that I'm left alone.

Yep.

Other than when I'm asleep.

Yeah.

And the same way I enjoy that, I— some of the best days have been when I take my son hunting or camping on the weekend.

Yeah.

Like, just to get away. And my wife says that I'm blessed that I can carry the weight of the world on one hand.

Yeah.

And it's because you may have heard me say that we're not saving lives, right? Like, I mean, this business seems life or death sometimes because it's so much money and you're $10 million in debt and got to rush to get to closing day. Yeah, but I— nobody about to die, you know, there's nobody bleeding out on the floor. Like, let's just chill out. And one of the best things I do is I have this 2-year-old Labrador, Maverick. If you watch my social media, you see him on there all the time. And around lunchtime every day, I go outside and throw the ball with him. Yep. And that dude is just pure joy.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, just tail, body, everything's wagging. I mean, tongue. I mean, And you could throw it until he died. Like, he would do it until he literally died.

I have a chocolate lab. I know how it goes. Yeah.

And like, you will forget all of your worries in about 5 minutes of just being out there playing with him and he's throwing the ball and, you know, he's just— sometimes if you haven't played with him enough and now we're like talking about dogs, like he'll get the ball and he'll spend 3 minutes like I call it prancing around the yard just with the ball. And you're like, wow, yeah, how nice. Yeah, yeah. But now I'm with you, man. Like, I mean, that time, like getting up and walking out there and just disconnecting from that screen or the phone or even the people inside your house.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's invaluable. And somebody said the other day to me, they said, oh yeah, you love this, talking about networking stuff. It's not just good at it.

Yep.

I mean, if you let me pick, I'd be in the woods by myself 100%, right? But I like money too.

Yeah.

And I'm good at networking.

So supporting your family.

Yeah. I mean, buying ranches and trucks and stuff like that makes me happy too.

That's all. That's right.

Now, that was great advice. So I'm going to call this a rapid fire.

Cool.

Biggest objection you get about Townsquare from investors when you're talking to an investor like you should sell your houses. What's the biggest objection you get?

An investor who's going to put their property on the platform. To this date, the biggest pushback we've received is why can't I access other people's buyers lists? So that's coming.

Oh, why can't I access other people's?

Yeah. So.

Oh, because if they say they can share it, Right now there's no way to access it.

That's right. Right now, the only thing you have the ability to do is send your deal to your buyers lists.

Yeah.

And the only thing you have the ability to do is JV or do a partnership with other users to access their buyers lists. There's no public access where I can come to you and say, Tim, it looks like your buyers list is public. My buyers list is public. Let's exchange. I'm going to send to yours. You're going to send to mine. That doesn't exist until the next couple of weeks whenever we release it. So that's been the biggest pushback is like, It's odd. It's not something I suspected. It's probably one of the biggest things I've learned in this disposition space is that you would think— I know it was supposed to be rapid fire. Sorry.

Fine. It's fine.

You would think that, you know, people say my buyers list, I've spent the last 15, 20 years building it and nobody should have access to it. You would think that's the case, but it's not. There are a couple of companies out there right now that are proving that that idea wrong, that buyers are not really a commodity that people want to try to monetize. I mean, some people do, some people want to do JVs, but the like holding the buyers list close to your chest and not giving it up to anybody, I think those days are gone because there's so much data available.

But as a buyer, as someone whose email and email list is repetitively sold and given to other people, Yep. I find it very annoying. Yep. So how do you combat that?

Yeah. So we think about our customers. There's two customers at Townsquare. First and foremost is the seller, the wholesaler, the real estate investor who's bringing the property to the platform. And a close second, if not as important, is the buyer. So a couple of things that we'll be coming out with. Again, you're— this is the first show I'm talking about this on, so I'm excited.

Just so you know, This episode will air probably the first week of March, so it's likely already be out. So you can talk as if it's there.

Awesome. Okay, cool. So with Townsquare, our buyer clients are arguably our most important, and you will not receive an email from somebody if you're on a public buyers list on Townsquare. You will not receive an email from a user unless you've gone through a 3-step check process to make sure that that deal is legitimate and that it's a good deal and that it has enough information for you to even be concerned with opening your email.

If I've been through it or the property's—

the property's been through it. So the property has to pass a 3-part checklist in order for it to be sent to somebody who's on a public buyers list so that you don't just receive 25, 30, 50 emails a day of just garbage deals that nobody's ever going to consider.

Become horrible. Yep.

The other thing—

and so my request is let me request a digest if I would like a digest. Let me say if you send me anything that's out of these 3 counties, I'm unsubscribing. Yep. Give me some more control over that because I am very interested in deals. I look at a lot of the wholesale deals is almost market research. Yeah, right. Like, like what's going on in my area. But when I am constantly barraged with deals in Houston, Texas, when I've never— well, not never— it's been 10 years since I bought a house in Houston.

Yeah.

And I have zero interest in buying a house in Houston. Like, it makes me want to come to your house and slap you.

Yep.

Even though you don't have a house, you live in a different house every month. Virgo, very hard to find.

A truck.

That's why we found the reason for the Airbnb thing. That's right. Running from the angry buyers. No, I'm just kidding. So, all right.

So to that point, though, I don't mean to interrupt you, but to that point, the buyer being an important customer, important user to us, what we're building for you as a buyer, even if you're just doing market research, is the ability for you to quickly go into your, into your user interface and say, hey, I don't want to receive emails about anything except for things in this area. Draw a little circle around it. 3-bed, 2-bath.

Yeah, let's make that happen.

That's, that's, that's part of the release. Oh yeah.

Oh, I love you.

Yeah.

So you've got a new release coming out. Is that something that the platform is going to get updated every 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, a year? What is the, what is the future kind of roadmap? Yeah.

Yeah. So we have an 18-month-plus roadmap of features that our users have requested and features that we think are useful. This big release that we're doing right now has really been 4 months, really 8 months in the works, but 4 months in the development. So from here on out, we're going to do incremental releases, probably at least 1 or 2 every month of new updates. So anybody who's interested in giving us feedback, we'd love to hear it because it'll be integrated into that roadmap.

What's the, what's the outcome? What's the exit?

Yeah. So we are looking for an exit. I'm treating this like a pure tech startup. I'm raising money from venture capital firms. And the ideal scenario is one day somebody, a big incumbent company in this industry, realizes, you know, much like you said, maybe on the show, maybe before the show was, it'd be great if we had the ability to comp properties. What you're really saying is it'd be great if we had access to data on properties that were not sold off market but were for sale off market. And could compare those to properties that did sell on market or I'm sorry, did sell off market, specifically in nondisclosure states like Texas. Yeah. So I think that there's going to be a big incumbent acquirer one day that's going to come in and say, I want to see all the people that say their property's for sale off market before they close, before they go to RCN for lending or before they go to a title company for closing. I think that that will eventually be the fate of Townsquare, and that's what I'm building the company. It's what my team is building the company to do.

How big is your team?

It's me, my co-founder Mitch, Director of Sales Kevin, and then our salesman Taylor. And then we have employees overseas that are some of the most amazing, hardworking people I've ever met in my entire life. Yeah, it's unbelievable.

We are blessed to have a very large offshore component and We are one of the unique companies that treat them as if they are part of the company because they are.

Yep.

Versus somewhere else, the way other people treat them.

Yeah, I'll say that.

Yeah. So it makes me proud.

Yeah, me too. We have some employees in Pakistan that are— I think they would outwork virtually every single American you put them in front of. Right.

So we're going to run out of time soon. Do you have any parting thoughts, parting shots?

I appreciate you having me here, Tim. I— it's been a privilege to know you and get to know you over the past couple of months since we've joined Masterminds together. And I'm looking forward to our partnership with RCN. And yeah, as a part of the release that we're coming out with in the next month or so, we'll have RCN lending on the platform.

So we'll— yeah, well, there we go.

Yeah. Working with your team.

Breaking news to the executive director. We're doing business together.

That's right.

That's excellent.

Yeah.

Good. I hope that works out for both. Me too. Me too. Yeah. Well, man, thank you for coming in from Moab, Utah.

That's right.

I'll be in Utah next month. You'll probably be somewhere else by then. No, no.

In Moab for 3 months.

Well, like I said, thanks for flying in. Yep.

Thank you.

We're out of time. That's it for today, folks. Thank you for stopping back by. Remember, your network is your net worth. And today you've been growing both. We'll see you next week.

Thank you for listening to Uncontested Investing. Questions about today's episode or the podcast? Email podcast@rcncapital.com and make sure to follow REI Inc. Magazine on LinkedIn and Facebook and RCN Capital on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. See you all next time.