Brett:

I'm excited to welcome you to the show with me Sean O'Toole. Sean, how are you doing?

Sean:

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Brett:

Excellent. Sean, by the way, is I believe, the founder of Property Radar, and their whole purpose is helping you to discover opportunity and property and owner data. I'm gonna have him tell his full story. But this episode, we're gonna be focusing on automating and integrating property and owner data. So Sean, take it away. Give us a little bit more about your story and your current focus.

Sean:

Yeah, so I was a three-time startup guy in Silicon Valley in the 90s. And after the .com crash, ended up flipping houses and commercial property. Over 160 flips, ranging from small houses to 30,000 square foot industrial to Taco Bell to all kinds of stuff. And then, just before the foreclosure crisis launched the first version of this company, which we called Foreclosure Radar, and we were in the right place, right time for the foreclosure crisis. And then as the foreclosure crisis wound down, we expanded to cover all properties rather than just those in foreclosure.

Brett:

Excellent, so amazing. So that's a part of that crash. By the way, I'm from the Sacramento region of Fremont. So at the time there in the Silicon Valley, Dad growing up Custom Homes room additions in the 80s. So we've seen the boom and the bust a bit. It's such an interesting place to grow up and to see the rapid change in technology, and systems, and processes, as well as being on the commercial real estate background, and seeing that kind of shift. So before we go into all of that, there's so much to cover. I'm really excited about all of the meat, we're going to be able to kick off the bone here for this interview, I want to take one step back, Sean, you know, I want you to go back perhaps before it could be the university days or even growing up, I want you to picture that moment of time. I want you to think about perhaps maybe a gift or two that you believe you were given, you know, I believe we've all been given certain gifts in this life. Some people call them strengths, some people call them superpowers, I believe their God-given gifts, and I believe these gifts are being given to us to be a blessing have helped or help to others. So I'm curious, maybe one of those one or two gifts that you believe you were given, and how does that help how you help people today?

Sean:

Yeah, I mean, there's just one period that made the biggest difference for me. My parents bought a computer when I was 10, to help run their business, their home business. Basically, after they were done at five, I got to jump on and start playing with it, taught myself to program ended up writing software professionally by 14, was selling computers by 16 and writing software and started my first software company at 18. And you know, that gift at 10 years old of getting access to a computer, at least back in 1978 was a huge game-changer. You know, just such a big, it's a little later than Bill Gates and some others. But it was back in that timeframe that was just incredible. My son's now 18, a freshman in college, and boy from the time he was zero to 10, I spent an incredible amount of time thinking about what do I do for him that gives him those same opportunities for the rest of his life.

Brett:

Amazing, by the way. You can learn more about Sean O'Toole at propertyradar.com and I'd still remember my dad bringing in the first Apple Computer. He was in construction and real estate and stuff. But he brought it in, I remember looking at this thing like you know, and just playing with it as a young kid to never got into the coding or anything like that. Part of me there is curious too with your kids if they take after you or not. What part of your personality or your strengths really was able to excel at the coding.

Sean:

You know, my dad was a logic and philosophy professor, and I was good at math. So math plus logic plus computer was just like, kind of a perfect world for me. So I really just kind of instantly grokked it. And, you know, as you remember, it was that late 1970s was first Apple twos that folks started to show up with, there wasn't a lot to do, like, it was a flashing cursor just waiting for something. And you really had to, you know, it took a while for there to be any games or really any and even those were terrible. So, you know, programming the thing was kind of the thing and for whatever reason, I dug in.

Brett:

Yeah, that's really I love that math, push the logic plus the computer, it was like it was your language to speak and your dad to help you teach and inspire that and to let you go loose on the computer. Love that. Okay, so now let's dive right into how you help people now with propertyradar.com. But I want to know this, what's the most rewarding part of what you do? And then simply, what is property radar?

Sean:

So, the most rewarding part of what we do is, I mean, over the years, we have helped thousands of folks. I talked about Richard. Richard was kind of wiped out in the .com crash, you know, he was at retirement age, and was really kind of lost, and found us, found our software in Foreclosure Radar. We basically taught him how to flip foreclosures, and he used our software to find those deals. Definitely a few years of hard work, but I got a really nice note from him. Probably 2012, basically saying, you know, that was, he was so depressed in 2008, after the crash, and really didn't, he thought he's gonna have to spend the rest of his life working. And, you know, he said, you know, basically, thanks to you. Not only have I replaced all of the money, I lost in the crash, but I've expanded on it. And I now have, I don't remember what it was something like 20 rentals, and I am far better set than I was. I never would have done that if the crash hadn't happened. And if we hadn't found your, your product, so. And we have lots of those stories, and those are the ones that really keep me keep me going. You know, there's a lot of people selling public records data, which is essentially what we do to big business. You know, Home Depot knows when you take out a home equity line of credit, and they start hitting you up for the barbecues and the home remodel projects. But your small local folks don't. And, you know, if you're at a large commercial brokerage and you have access to costar, that's awesome, super expensive. But if you're a smaller broker, you know, smaller broker or whatever, or that's just a lot of money for you, you know, we give you access to the majority of the same data for a tiny fraction of the cost. So helping those small businesses compete in a world that's increasingly owned by big business is definitely what gets me up in the morning.

Brett:

Amazing, absolutely unlocking basically the next chapter for one of your customers, Richard, right. If his life where he went from 2008, you're not sure what's going to happen, you know, losing the job, to shifting and pivoting to buying rentals. And not only is he replaced, you know what he lost, but now he's far ahead of what he was before. For him, it's definitely one of those blessings in disguise. But he's using your software on a daily basis to unlock pre-foreclosures, unlock opportunities, find deals. Is that a fair summary there?

Sean:

Yeah, he was buying at the foreclosure auctions versus pre-foreclosures. But yeah, absolutely. Right.

Brett:

Excellent.

Sean:

So we have plenty of pre-foreclosures and plenty to buy other off-market deals and plenty doing commercials. So I mean, it's there's a lot of mortgage folks looking for, you know, folks who want to refi or, etc. So or eliminate PMI. So there's a whole bunch of use cases, public records are just this really fertile ground that most people don't realize. And if you're in the real estate business, you're so blessed because public records let you know every potential customer by name, and use hundreds of criteria to focus your marketing efforts on the ones most likely to do business with you.

Brett:

Perfect, so actually, I want to try to do some hands-on, if you're ready for some hands-on

Sean:

Sure.

Brett:

‘Cause I'm not a property radar customer and I want to talk about automating integrating this type of data because I am a Commercial Real Estate Broker, Multifamily Broker here in Sacramento. We're caught at constantly trying to build a database, you know, Excel files, CRMs, you know, search for LLCs, you know, trying to do all of those things, especially in the old-old age, very manual. And of course, then costar helps to add great service in your MLS, I also have costar and it's expensive. So I'm maybe your ideal client, as well, capital gains tax solutions, we're also sourcing and trying to help people who have highly appreciated primary homes, because of the deferred sales trust, we're able to defer capital gains taxes, not using a 1031 on sale, the primary home, and so constantly trying to find out where we can target best. So walk me through that, how do I integrate your property radar, and then automate all of that together? Does that make sense?

Sean:

Yeah. We can actually start with the highly appreciated homes, right. So that one, the data on homes, there's a couple of places where it's going to be better. In our system. We have good estimated values on homes, whereas estimated values on commercial properties are very difficult without rental data. That would be a difference between us and costar did, you know we're not trying to go and figure out the leases on a property, right? We're going to have the core public records, but not the least data. So not very good valuations on commercial properties, but good valuations on residential properties. On all properties, we do a good, pretty good job of going through and figuring out what the current debt is on the property. So really easy to say, you know, find me properties that have, you know, a value of Y and this much equity, those high, highly appreciated properties, where the folks have a lot of equity, where, you know, they might want to learn about the kind of options that you have, because maybe they want to take some of that equity and redeploy it without having to pay out taxes. I'm personally in that situation where my house has gone up a tremendous amount. My kids are off to college. And I could be willing to downsize. But no way, I'm gonna downsize and pay the tax bill, right. So I'd be a perfect example of that. So super easy to set that criteria up in whatever area you want to market to. And find those highly appreciated assets, find the equity, and then make a list. Now, you can either make that list kind of one time and export it, right, not very automated. And one of the things we do that's more unique, though, is once you set that criteria up, anytime something new matches your criteria, we can automatically send it to your CRM to your marketing automation system, to you know, whatever else it is you have, if you want, you can just get a mobile notification on your phone, right-click, click through the property details and call the owner. Right, because we do pull in phones and email addresses for most owners.

Brett:

Wow. Okay, so that's much simpler than I even thought, right? So, for example, you said an $8.3 million deal in Palo Alto and he owned the property for 20 plus years. He had a huge gain above and beyond his 121 exclusion. And exactly, he wasn't going to sell until he found this. And so then he found it. And he's like, oh, my gosh, I've been in the business 30 years. He's actually a top realtor as well with KW. And he's like this is remarkable. And he goes, you should be telling everybody, I'm like, Yeah, I've got now the next layers, I got it. Now we got to dive into target marketing, right. And so he set the criteria, we say now,

Sean:

Own more than 10 years, you know, more than safe, $4 million, $3 million in equity, whatever it is, you can actually make that list for all of California, or, you know, potentially, we do require you to one state at a time because doing these criteria across all 150. It just takes too long. And so but you can do it, you know, in 10 states or one state, whatever you want. Then you can set up that integration to automatically push those into your CRM or whatever.

Brett:

So if you are right there, I want to say right, because we can set it and forget it. And it goes into the A into the CRM and then from the CRM, you know, I guess you could tag it. Here's a tag for a high-end primary home. And that tags and automation sequence or it could be a mailer, a direct mail, B.

Sean:

It could be a voicemail drop. If you've got a high volume of them and you maybe have a call center, you might throw it into a dialing system like a Mojo dialer, a voicemail drop system, like Drop Cowboy or Sly Broadcast, Direct Mail. This single-piece direct mail is pretty interesting, right? And that's something that you know, most people that are used to doing kind of direct marketing and real estate, you have to put together a list, you need 500. Then you send a piece of direct mail, right? There's a lot of power, though in this one-off, direct mail stuff. So you set up these lists, a new one gets added, boom, you know, one piece of direct mail gets sent off. And you know, there's companies like Law lab, and Print Genie, and some really nice ones in like the handwritten notes. If you go to zapier.com. They're a catalog of integrations. So we integrate to Zapier, and then any of the 2000 integrations Zapier has. But there are companies like Addressable that do really nice handwritten notes for you know, that you’re for your target audience, I would think that would probably be the way to go a little more expensive than a postcard, but a lot more personal.

Brett:

Yeah, no, I absolutely love it. So all of that now, how do you as property radar help implement that? Is it more so we're setting up the initial to get the data? And then you know, in other words, the done for you service? Do you guys have a service? We'll help you map this out for you know, this charge to get all of this going? Because to me, I'm going, oh, my gosh, I'm like, Sean, I'm so busy already to tell you that. Are there training videos or how do you do that?

Sean:

So we got a ton of training videos, for sure. Right? We will help you set up lists. we'll provide some assistance with the rest. However, we don't do all those integrations into your sales system. And all of that at the end of the day. We're a SaaS company and not a services company, but we do have partner companies. And we're always looking for more that do that for folks. And there are companies out there that specialize in doing these like Zapier integrations and other types of integrations, that can set all those things up for you. And it's, you know, fairly reasonable.

Brett:

Yeah. Anyone that you want to mention on here, that would be that one go-to that you like for that.

Sean:

I've got some partners, they didn't kill me for flubbing this, and I should have a list in front of me. I'm afraid I'll miss one.

Brett:

We'll put in the show notes. We'll get it from Sean later. So that's fantastic. So full circle here. Property radar, we get that we get the initial list going the criteria. And then we set up the systems to automate, you know, for a voice dial or dialing system or drop, you know, drop a voicemail or single direct, and we stepped Zapier, now you got all that? So now you have the lead coming in. Right? And of course, now you try to close those leads. Where do we take it from there? What's the besides? You know, now we double our efforts, right? And perhaps, you know, scale to different states or different areas? Right? What if you're in entrepreneur shoes or commercial real estate broker shoes or luxury realtor shoes? What do you do from there?

Sean:

Yeah, I mean, for most folks, right, bringing those leads in, and the rest, now you're going to kick off your normal kind of sales process, whatever that may be. And, you know, we're really focused on helping you find that now, where we will help is when that call comes in, we're going to have a full profile on that property. So you'll see how often they refinance. And all the kind of details, maybe co-owners, other things like that a lot of folks, especially in the mortgage space like that, because they can kind of pre-qualify the deal. And they go, Well, hey, what about this loan back here? Is that pin paid off? So they don't get surprises during the transaction? You know, a lot of luxury realtors, you know, we're here in Lake Tahoe. We get people that walk in the door and say, Hey, I'd like to go look at this $10 million lakefront house. Well, that's a hobby for a lot of people where they just want to go look at $10 million lakefront houses. I mean, they're not really qualified. Unfortunately, that's a pretty awkward situation for that agent. But if you're the agent, you can go you know, hey, okay, you know, what's your name? Let me look and let's talk about this and where do you live now? You can go search, see what kind of property they have. Right? If they've got a $500,000 property in Roseville, you can talk about how they need to be qualified before you can go see the house. If they own a $20 million house free and clear in, you know, Los Altos Hills, right. You can call your husband and say, I don't know if I'm going to be home because I'm going to do whatever it takes to make these clients happy, right. So you know that there's that kind of range. So being able to pre-qualify now, can't use this for credit data, right versus you know, where it's public records data. It's not a credit service, but you can really save yourself a lot of time and kind of pre-qualifying deals, you've got somebody calling, you know, asking about an exchange talking about their property, go in really quickly and just do the smell test, right? Is their property really worth what they think it's worth? Is this going to be worth my time? Is this a good investment? So, I think all of those things, that kind of due diligence side of our business is another big piece.

Brett:

Excellent, absolutely. Love it. Now, I'm just curious too, about shifting gears a little bit now as capital gains tax deferral options. You're a real estate investor yourself, you know, a Silicon Valley, and even luxury homes, in incline village style, all of those types of things. So what would you say is your biggest frustration that you or client or partner has faced, friend or family member, When it comes to capital gains tax deferral options or lack thereof?