From Mortgage Origins to Real Estate Innovation: Todd Carpenter - Senior Vice President, Industry Relations, Styldod

We spent a tremendous amount of time talking about social media and teaching people how to do social media, especially the leadership team and the volunteers and how to respond to negativity.

And I would be kind of like put at the forefront and have to be an example for how to do this and take some of the hits.

You're listening to the Real Estate Sessions and I'm your host, Bill risser.

With nearly 25 years in the real estate business, I love to interview industry leaders, up and comers, and really anyone with a story to tell.

It's the stories that led my guests to a career in the real estate world that drives me in my 10th year and over 400 episodes of the podcast.

And now I hope you enjoy the next journey.

Hi, everybody.

Welcome to episode 414 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast.

As always, thank you so much for tuning in.

Thank you much for telling a friend.

I'm happy to have a new episode for you this week.

Even happier that it's Todd Carpenter, somebody that I've known for a long time, going back to the, oh, blogging days, that's how long ago.

He's now senior vice president of industry relations with styledod.

We're gonna talk to him about that.

They're doing some really cool stuff with images and mlss and compliance.

I'll just leave it at that.

You need to listen to this.

It's really good.

And we go take a walk through, like, memory lane about some of the things that were really important like 12 years ago that don't matter so much today.

That's funny how that stuff works, but it's a lot of fun.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Let's get this thing started.

Todd, welcome to the podcast.

It's great to be here, Bill.

It's good to see you again.

It's been a while.

It has been a while.

And boy, there were some fun times back in the day.

I think you, you're a part of that original re.net that was exploding around the country early in the OR.

I'd say 2005, 6, 7.

It was pretty fun.

And I know that you spend a lot of time in Chicagoland now because, you know, you had some, a couple of different stints at nar.

But I have to be really brutally honest, Todd, I do not know where you grew up.

I just always associated you with the Midwest.

So where was home for you?

Where'd you grow up?

So, yeah, I grew up in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, which is still my favorite state.

But my wife is from the Midwest.

And I love my wife, so we live in the Midwest.

That makes, that makes a lot of sense.

Growing up in Denver.

Did you go to high school there?

Was it.

Were you there that long?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I started my career in Denver.

I briefly moved to California around 2000, but most of my life up until Chicago was in Denver.

Okay, and a couple questions.

Does that mean you're a Broncos fan?

Oh, absolutely.

And after a very, you know, growing up, I was used to having a football team that won all the time, because the Broncos, from the 80s until, you know, about 10 years ago, they were up until Super Bowl 50, they were one of the winningest teams in the league and it's been pretty rough.

But we got Bo Nicks now and the future is looking better.

At least that's.

I was at the Broncos win over the packers in San Diego.

So yeah, that was.

I think the Broncos won that one.

Yeah, they did.

I don't think of Denver as like a sports town, but man, it's exploded.

You got the Nuggets, you got the.

Got the Avalanche.

Now you've got the.

The.

Help me out with the other one.

The.

The Rockies.

The Purple Team.

The Rockies.

The Rockies.

Yeah, you know, it.

It was always a sports town.

He lived there.

It's similar to like Boston where on.

My wife.

My wife, when we lived there for a year, commented that the best time to go shopping was Sunday at 2:00 because literally everyone in the city watched the games.

And in fact, even it drew the Avalanche there because the minor league team that was playing had bigger audiences than like seven NHL teams because it was so popular.

And then when the baseball expanded, they had like the major league baseball executives were in the city to interview the people that wanted to bring the Rockies there or start the new organization.

And something like 30,000 people showed up outside to chant like, take me out to the ball game.

Just to tell people.

And then of course, the first year the Rockies played, they played it at the Bronco Stadium, which seats like 70,000 people and they were drawing 70,000 people to those games.

They set the all time league attendance record for a single season and it's doubtful that will ever be eclipsed.

So it's definitely a sports town for sure.

That's cool.

I've had a chance to go to an all star game there.

I took my son.

This was 98, I think it was in Denver.

And that Loto or downtown area is just really cool.

I mean, it's got some neat stuff.

Yeah.

Big fan, big fan of the city.

Not so much the teams, because I was in San Diego at the time, so we'll just move on.

So you talked about, you know, you moved around a little bit for work, out of school.

Todd was real estate the first thing you were thinking about?

Was that where you were headed or was it something else?

Well, it wasn't, but, you know, my mom was a real estate agent, so I was.

I was born into the industry, I like to say.

My booster seat literally was an MLS book that I would sit on when I was a little kid.

And I knew how to change a combination on those lockboxes.

You know, when I was like 12 years old or something, she got into mortgages.

And honestly, you know, like, I know most of your audience is going to recognize this.

Like, real estate's really hard, and there's good times and bad times.

I mostly remember the bad times.

And I swear to myself, I would never take a commission sales job because you have those ups and downs and it's.

It can be frustrating.

So I wanted to be an auto mechanic, of all things.

Okay.

While I was going to school, I got a job at the Sears Auto center.

And I wanted, you know, usually you start out like busting tires or something like that, but they didn't have any of those positions open, and they put me on the front desk.

And so about two years in, I realized I'm making more money than almost anyone in the building selling stuff, and realized I was actually a pretty decent salesperson.

And so now it's.

And I'm dating myself.

But now it's 1991, and the biggest refi boom of all time is happening.

You know, today people complain about the rates being in the sevens, but in 1990, the rates were in the 13s, and so we're refinancing people down to like eight, and it's, you know, saving them hundreds of dollars.

So my.

My mom basically says, look, you should finish school.

But on the other hand, I know you can do this and you should come do it.

And so I worked for her for a year as a loan officer.

And then I didn't love working for my mom.

I love my mom, but I didn't love working for her.

So I went to work with another company and originated loans for several years.

Eventually I got into wholesale mortgage.

And then in 2000, I went to work for a startup in San Jose, California, called Myers Internet, and they were eventually bought by mgic.

They built websites for loan officers and some real estate agents.

And the big thing about it is it had like an Online loan application form.

And that was the craziest thing of all time.

Right.

We also did Internet leads where people would come in and they would just fill out this.

You know, a loan application has a lot of private information on it, and they just like randomly fill them out.

And then we'd sell Those leads for 50 bucks each to several mortgage brokers.

It was kind of a crazy time before there was, you know, an understanding of loan or, like, identity fraud or things like that.

So obviously it's a lot more secure now.

But that was my first taste of startup technology.

But yeah, and so then, you know, after a.

Worked there, I came back to Denver and got back into wholesale.

But the banks I worked for, they didn't really get technology either at that point.

The Internet is still kind of new, and they had these really complicated websites, and if your customer just wanted to download like a rate lock form or a cover letter form or something like that, some simple form that doesn't have any private information, they would have to go to the bank website and log in with their ID and find it.

And, you know, it was very complicated.

So I created this website called lenderama for my 50 clients that basically just mostly just had forms that they could download that was so much easier for them to do.

Right.

And that's sort of how my first website was ever born.

And then eventually I turned it into a blog.

So.

So did that get you.

Did that.

That takes you up into the time where social starts happening as well, Right?

Because that's.

Because that's your.

It feels like that's the.

That was your entrance into NAR, for sure.

So, yeah, actually, you know, it was 2005 when I launched that blog.

That was still four years before I went to NAR.

But the.

The premise of the blogging was really based on how successful some conservative bloggers had been in discounting 60 minutes during the election the year before.

And there was a story that 60 Minutes had about George Bush not fulfilling his National Guard duty.

And it turns out within a couple of days, these conservative bloggers had figured out that some of the evidence had been.

Had been mocked up.

Like there was some letter that was supposedly typed in the 60s or 70s, I guess, and it had been printed with Microsoft Word, so it obviously was fake.

So, you know, I wasn't really like, I didn't want to have a political blog, but I was really impressed that this new technology had sort of shifted.

Because you think about 60 Minutes, that's like the.

Almost like the most authoritative news broadcast there is.

And here these guys, you know, I think an executive of CBS said, oh, some guy in their pajamas in their basement writing, writing a blog.

And I thought, well, I have pajamas and I have a basement.

I could start writing this.

And so I start writing this blog for mortgage officers that's part of my website and it becomes my website.

And I thought, oh yeah, the, you know, I have like 50 mortgage brokers who are my clients and if, if 20 of them read this, it'll help me.

It's a one way just to stay in contact with them.

But eventually I was getting two or three thousand unique visitors a day and it was only a site that loan officers would read.

It's like, here's a blog post about how to get approved for FHA loans or to track the LIBOR for adjustable rate mortgages or things like that.

So I suddenly sort of became a social media expert just because I was one of the very first people to do.

Sounds like the Jay Thompson story a little bit as well, right, Jay?

About the same time, yeah.

You know, and so one of the things I did is I started looking for other blogs.

So right when I started, only a couple weeks later, I found loan officer Dan Green had a blog called the Mortgage Reports.

And I was like, how is there already another mortgage blog?

I thought I was the first one.

And we had started almost like on the same day.

And I was like.

But the real estate was sort of lent itself to blogging more than mortgages.

Because I feel like people that get into mortgages generally have more of like math based mind.

And people who get into selling real estate have more of a creative based mind.

And there's plenty of examples where that's the opposite.

But you just have to be more creative.

I think when you're working with customers and showing them a home.

And it's not just the simple math.

You'll save $250 if you refinance at this rate, blah, blah, blah.

And so I started looking for real estate blogs and Jay was one of the very first ones.

I found someone else who's been on your show, Inez Higuettis Garcia.

She was one of the earliest ones.

Jim Duncan, who is one of the co founders of Nest, great real estate brokerage, he was one of the earliest ones.

So there was quite a few of us.

And that still kind of predated social media as we know it.

There was just bloggers.

There were a lot of bloggers out there.

Active Rain was, it comes to mind.

Active Rain, that all popped up and I met Quite a few other people throughout through that network as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it was sort of an evolution to real estate because I had just decided I should track who else is doing this.

And then in 2007, there was two bloggers out of New York, Joe Ferreira and Rudy Bachrati.

And they had a blog called the Celsius Blog.

And they.

They were going to go to Inman Connect in San Francisco, but they decided they were going to do this tour across America and try to find all the other bloggers that were out there and meet with them.

And they rented an RV and put a bunch of sponsorship stickers on it, and they were going to come through Denver.

So I reached out to them and I was like, well, what do you have planned for Denver?

And they're like, well, why don't you plan something?

And so I built my very first real estate event.

It was called Blog Fiesta.

It was in a.

Because I found a cheap space in a Mexican restaurant in the Tech center in Denver.

And we had tacos and talked about blogging.

And at that event, Crystal Craft, are you familiar with her?

She was a blogger in Denver and she really helped me reach out to all the other bloggers, especially on Active Rain, that were in the area.

And I think like 30, 40 people showed up to this.

Joe and Rudy were kind of blown away.

It was like the biggest event up until San Francisco.

And then we all went to.

A lot of us went to San Francisco and Inman had created an event called Beer for Bloggers.

And it was just like all the people.

This is still like before social media really is hitting.

But there was like a lot of the early people at Zolo, like Drew Myers and David Gibbons were there, and I met Nicole Nicolay there, and I met Dan Green in person there.

And Jim Duncan, like just mentioned Dustin Luther.

And so that sort of became like the beginning of that re net that you talked about.

And Jay.

I met Jay.

Yeah.

And so that was sort of.

I got the taste for doing events I still hadn't really even thought about, like, nar.

But then I met up with another real estate person, or not, sorry, mortgage person, his name's Jason Berman.

And we decided to create our own technology event because really, like real estate tech, mortgage tech, none of that was about social media at all.

No one knew how to address this.

This is all so new.

So we were going to have an event in Tag along with a bigger event called Blog World in Vegas.

And while we were planning that event, another friend of mine, Andy Kaufman, he came up with this idea for Re Bar Camp.

And so we jumped right into that and started helping him with that.

And all this was 2007, 2008.

This is really cool.

I'm just sitting here just reminiscing.

And me, I actually went to a Blog World event in Vegas because Nick Bastian was going to be there, and Jay Thompson and Dean Willett, and this was all the Phoenix guys that were, you know, trying to do the same things.

It was very interesting times.

Do you see an opening at nar, or does NAR reach out to you?

How does that happen?

You know, it's pretty funny because while we were promoting Reblog World, man, putting on events that people pay for is.

Is very difficult, especially when you're doing the very first one.

And so literally, it was like hand to hand combat.

We were reaching out to people.

If they left a comment on the blog or mentioned Ari, Blog World or any of that stuff, we would reach out.

And one of the people that had.

She had come to the site in one way or another was a lady named Hilary Marsh.

And she worked at nar.

And so I connected with her and I was trying to get her to come to the conference.

And she ran the.

At the time, it was called realtor.org, it was the, you know, the main website for narrative.

So I sort of knew her, but not very well.

And then on monster.com, nAR listed that they were looking for a social media manager.

And I was like, man, who do I know?

Like, instead of applying through Monster, I was like, who do I know at nar?

I know Hilary Marsh.

So I reached out to Hillary and I'm like, what do you know about this job?

I'm interested.

And she's like, I'm the one hiring for it.

And so almost like from day one, I had inside path to get that job.

And it was very weird because up until then, I still saw myself as a mortgage guy, mostly talking about mortgage.

And so now, just because I had been doing it longer than anyone else, I'd become like, this social media expert.

But it was really, like, only to facilitate the mortgage side.

But at that point, I knew if I took a job at the national association of Realtors, I was gonna meet, like, a tremendous number of people I was gonna open a lot of.

And so I campaigned really hard for that position, and I moved to Chicago in order to do it.

Today's, like, remote world was not really existence back then.

Everyone worked in the office, and so it was just like a tremendous opportunity.

Because one, I was there to sort of like, evangelize social media to agents.

And the reason being for that was that the communications team wanted more agents, more members to be vocal about their market.

And remember, this is like, right after the housing downturn is really hitting 2008, 2009.

And so the press is talking terribly about our industry, and rightly so in some cases, but they wanted more voices about what's going on in local markets all across the country.

And what better way than to leverage over a million people that are passionate about this and people who know their markets.

And so we spent a tremendous amount of time talking about social media and teaching people how to do social media, especially like the leadership team and the volunteers and how to respond to negativity.

And I would be.

I would be kind of like, put at the forefront and, like, have to be an example for, you know, how to do this and take.

Take some of the hits.

Similar to Jay Thompson when he went to Zillow, and, you know, you're kind of like the one getting punched, but that was fine.

And.

But then the back end was to train all of the staff, especially on how to use social media, because NAR at that point was very much like a command and control type communication.

They were.

I mean, they literally were speaking from an ivory tower at the time.

There was no ability for the members to kind of like, talk back in public.

And suddenly this social media thing popped up and, you know, again, Jay Thompson had created a blog called NAR Wisdom, and it was very critical of nar.

Some of the, you know, like, NAR had sponsored a giant Rose bowl float right during the housing downturn.

And, you know, there was.

There were a lot of like.

But suddenly they weren't used to, like, this public criticism.

What do you do about it?

And now I feel like it's sort of native to everyone to understand how online criticism happens.

But it was very new to them.

So it was a lot.

There was an internal side and an external side to that job.

I'll bet you some of those conversations were pretty rough.

I would just think internally, even right where you're trying to say, look, we can't.

We can't attack.

We can't do this, we can't do that.

We've got to be, you know, we've got to find this.

This place where we're taking care of those people, because those people are members, even though they're criticizing, you know, and.

What was interesting about it was that there were many departments at NAR who were wanted to use the social media because they could break out of whatever the official line of what the NAR community communications team was saying.

Like they would be able to get their message out on their own without, without that command and control.

And so the communications team, which is where I was, was actually like the most anti social media of any department there because they were losing control of what they had always had control of before, which is totally understandable.

So that there were a lot of internal politics where I luckily had the endorsement of the CEO Dale Sitton at the time.

Like he had made clear, like we're going to do what Todd thinks about this stuff.

But it was kind of almost adversarial in some instances because people just weren't used to this new force and the two way conversation.

Luckily my boss Hillary, she got it, she understood it, but there were other folks there that just were totally uncomfortable with it at that, at that point.

There's in, in your timeline, you decide to go back to Denver, we'll call it, and, and, and work with Trulia, which at the time, this is still, we'll call it early days.

Right.

I mean this is, they're not a part of Zillow at this time, are they?

Yet?

No.

Yeah.

So they're doing their own thing.

Peter's trying to get Spencer or whatever, they're trying, whatever their, the battles were.

But you, it wasn't on the social side, was it, was it more data driven at this point or was this come a little bit later?

So it was the year that they IPO'd, so they were right there about to become a unicorn.

And it was also a time when both Zillow and Trulia were very unpopular for some of their, some of their practices about how they put up listings and how they attributed listing agents.

And there was a lot, a lot of angst.

And of course investors don't like angst.

So I was basically put on a team.

I mean literally we're like the listing security team.

We're trying to make sure the brokers are still giving us listings.

And I was leveraging some social media, but a lot of like industry relations type work to connect with big brokers and also a lot of mlss and try to get them to be more aligned.

And honestly like a lot of it was because we were about to IPO and we were trying to figure that piece out.

And then after I left, truly was acquired about a year after that from Zillow.

Okay, so and then that, that brings you back to nar.

Now this for sure, this is A rat.

A big change.

Right.

Because generally people who are in the communication, social side of stuff.

Well, once again, you talked about it would be the creatives.

They're thinking about that stuff.

Right.

But you've already laid out for us that you were more of the math guy when you were having success as a lender.

So it kind of makes sense then that back back to nar, you go heavy into the data side of things and really, I mean, that's what a lot of people that they think of you as that only because they've met you, you know, after the truly time.

That time at ner, we got ioi.

I mean, there were some really, really cool stuff going on when you were back there.

Yeah.

So Trulia, you know, that just didn't work out.

We were, I was, I was trying to tell them about the right way to do things in the real estate way, and they were focused on the right way to do it in the tech way.

And you know, ultimately I think they got what they wanted was this acquisition from Zillow.

But when I left, I owe it to Dale Stinton, the CEO, and Mark Les Wing, who was the cto.

They reached back out to me, and while I don't have the data chops or the programming chops to be a data scientist, they did know that I was really good at explaining technology to people who don't understand technology.

There you go.

And so that guy in the movie Office Space who's like, I'm the one that talks to the engineers.

Engineers don't have good people skills.

Yeah, that's kind of neat.

I don't want to jump to conclusions game.

But anyway, yeah, so they had this new initiative, and that initiative was to learn way, way more about their members than they previously did, to use Big Data data science to figure out how they can get people to take more education classes, give more money to the pac, reach out to their senator more often, you know, anything that NAR is trying to do as an organization, it's not even really real estate related.

It was more like member organization.

And just like social media at the time, Big Data was scary because now we're going to collect a whole bunch of data about these members who might feel like their privacy is being invaded.

And they needed someone to build that team, but they also needed someone that could sell that.

And by sell it, I mean sell it to the leadership, the volunteer leadership, the president, the incoming president, and explain why it's, you know, what we're doing is not the same as some of the online retailers today.

But we are collecting this and here's what we're going to do with it.

And beyond, just like the actions of the association, we were buying data about political persuasion and household income.

And there was a lot of data, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of data to, you know, especially to make the advocacy team more effective.

And they're right.

They're by far one of the most effective advocacy associations in, in America.

And so it was really more of a sales job.

And.

But I hired like our original data science team and we had to go to each department at NAR and figure out their systems.

A lot of them didn't connect to each other.

And we had to put all this, what's called the data lake, which is how you can create machine learning and start to build cohorts and algorithms in order to identify who has the highest propensity to get their E Pro certification or whatever and then go sell them that stuff.

And again, also a difficult transition for the staff to suddenly just do things in a whole different way that they hadn't thought of before.

Being more data driven about all their messaging and things like that.

So similar evangelist role, similar to social media.

What timeframe are we talking about here?

When did this get started?

I went back in 2013.

So that was.

This is over 10 years ago.

You're talking about stuff that now everyone today kind of knows the term machine learning.

You've heard about it through AI and, you know, and all these other things that are popping out there.

Yeah, that was a long time ago.

That seems like it was almost like NAR was an early adopter of the strategy that we gotta know, we need data points and we gotta know how to use these.

And I know, I'm sure there were others that even earlier were doing that, but probably in the real estate space.

This was unheard of at that time.

I mean, outside of like CoreLogic or Zillow, there were very few companies with these kind of technology chops.

And of course, we were doing it on a far smaller budget.

I mean, there's only like 300 employees at NAR, and half of them are really more like advocacy people and things like that.

So.

Yeah, so, but it was sort of a learning experience.

But also, you know, dating back to when I was in mortgages, that first wholesale mortgage job I had, they had this new technology that they had contract.

It was called a company called Washington Mortgage, and they had done a deal with Fannie Mae to be one of the beta testers for this program called Desktop Originator, which is Literally how online.

Every online loan today is running on something similar to this program.

But basically there was a computer program that pre qualified people figured out what their credit risk was.

And that was sort of my selling point is that I had this new program like the company I worked for sold a lot of vanilla type loans that there was nothing really special about those loans.

And so if you didn't have the lowest price, it was very hard to get the deals.

But we had this new technology that was getting more people approved for conforming loans and I really adopted it.

And that was the point where I realized that I was good about talking about technology and pretty much my entire career after that was what is my tech edge.

And so when we get to this, you know, to the data science piece I was learning on the job, but I already understood enough about it, especially from working at Trulia.

Their AB testing of the website and things like that were amazing for the time.

And so it's just been, I've always tried to like look ahead, see what is on the on the horizon, determine if it is something that is going to be impactful or not.

And nothing is like a shiny diamond, but everything has a role.

And so, and how do you leverage that?

And then how do you talk to salespeople who are more busy selling homes or originating mortgages than have the time to learn about these things?

And so yeah that was, that role was really like I knew that that role was only going to last three or four years because eventually I will have, I eventually trained my first hire to know enough about the internal workings of NAR that he almost didn't need me anymore.

And that's really when, when the new CEO came in, that's when I transitioned over to Second Century Ventures.

Which is, is that, is it a subsidiary of NAR or is it funded by nar?

What's the exact connection?

It's a, it's a wholly owned subsidiary of Narrow and they originally.

So second century represents the second century of NAR.

So on the 100 year anniversary of NAR, they created a bunch of new initiatives and one of them was this venture capital fund and they are the only provider of funds to that, that this, this subsidiary.

And the idea was let's we're a not for profit, let's take some of our revenue and put it in a place where it can hopefully make more money.

But also like let's invest in the real estate tech that's out there.

One of the very first investments I love to talk about, I get like, I just did the tiniest bit of credit for it because Constance, who was running Second Century Ventures at the time, she asked me like, what do you think of this company called Docusign?

We're thinking about investing in them.

And I'm like, docusign's awesome.

You should totally invest in them.

And then they did.

And that investment was several years in the making, but turned out to be a fantastic investment.

And so Second Century Ventures has paid back NAR the initial amount of money that the member dues funded it.

And it runs completely on its own.

It's still owned by nar, but it doesn't take any member dues.

It generates its own revenue.

It's one of the ways NAR actually makes money as a, that's not non dues related.

So they've invested in several hundred companies at this point.

And it's also a great way to not have another Zillow, you know, like you Zillow.

Zillow is this great company and great technology.

But for the longest time there was a massive adversarial relationship between NAR and Zillow.

And I feel like Dale, who was the former CEO and Bob Goldberg, who helped create Second Century Ventures felt like, hey, we need to align ourselves with these technology companies and not be adversarial with them.

If we get to them early and explain why, you'd really be better off doing it this way, you're still going to succeed, but you're not going to have the, the back and forth of, you know, having so many brokers mad at you.

And every prop tech company, startup out there now wants, wants in.

They want to be a part of the ioi, they want to be in the pitch battles, they want the exposure.

I mean, it's what Second Century's done is impressive.

Super cool.

It's been a lot of fun to watch it.

So, yeah, so when I came onto the team that was 2017 or 18, Bob Goldberg had just become CEO and he wanted to have a conference that was just focused on tech.

Not just like the annual conference and have a tech channel, but a tech focused event.

And so based on all the stuff I had done with Ari Barkamp and Blog World and all those other things a million years ago, they kind of put me in charge of coming up with the concept and thinking up like the pitch battle and all that stuff.

And then there was a huge team of people to actually execute that first one.

But I was really involved in that in the first place.

And that was again to try to expand that tent and just have as many tech companies as possible, who.

They don't necessarily need to get NAR's endorsement.

They just want to know what are the best practices of working with the industry and all the politics involved in the industry.

And so tremendous amount of time was spent with me helping those companies do that.

Well, now, Todd, you're with one of those kinds of companies.

You're with Style.

Dodd.

I, I know the basics of what, what the company does.

It's.

It's a big piece of.

It is going to be helping realtors really show off the property in the best way possible.

Right, right.

I mean, that's what, that's what.

That's ultimately the end result.

Tell me about joining them.

What's going on there?

Yeah, so it's really exciting company for me because it again is, you know, that, that next technology.

And even before I went to second Century, I was working for.

When I did the Data project, I was working for Mark Les Wing and he had a lot of his team trying to write papers about emerging technologies.

And we would publish them on.

We had a team called the center for Realtor Technology at the time, and we would publish these papers through them.

And I wrote up.

It was 2017 and I wrote a big report.

It was sort of, you know, you're taking like a futurist view of how artificial intelligence was going to affect the real estate industry.

And my concept was kind of centered around 2001 A Space Odyssey with the HAL 9000 being like this omnipresent robot that is all over this spaceship.

Just like omnipresent robots are existing in our homes now with your iPhone and the Nest thermostat.

And there's so many these smart home things are starting to affect it.

And so it's fun to even look back on that story because some of that stuff has not actually happened yet.

But a lot of it is starting to really come to fruition, the idea of artificial intelligence really impacting our industry.

And when I go around to like when we would working for Reach in second century, we would encounter a lot of companies that said they used artificial intelligence, but not really.

But styledad, they started as an image editing company.

So they had, you know, for lack of a better word, like a ton of people who knew how to use Photoshop and they would declutter a listing photo or they would add some furniture to a listing photo.

And in fact, styledad still does that, a lot of that.

But what they realized is that artificial intelligence is the next step for that, is that all of these things can be done with artificial intelligence.

So they doubled down learning how to use these models.

And a lot of them are free, you know, from like ChatGPT and Alibaba.

And so they figured out how to do a lot of that work with a robot.

You know, they.

They can declutter a picture very easily.

They can look at a picture and.

And figure out what's in the picture very easily now.

So when they got into real estate, what they realized is that, or within the US Market is that a lot of this could really be helpful to an mls.

And MLS have a tremendous amount of compliance issues that they deal with every day, which is why MLS data is the best data, because it's very likely to be accurate, because there's a whole team of people at the MLS making sure that the data is correct.

And then there's all the other members of the MLS who complain when there is something that's not in compliance.

And about half of the compliance issues these days are in the photos.

So in some mlss, you cannot have, for instance, a license plate on a car showing in the picture.

Right.

Because it's a personal identification, or you can't have a person in there.

And there's a lot of reasons for that, and that's pretty common.

And there's almost always a person in the bathroom mirror when they're taking pictures of the bathroom.

Right.

Anytime there's a mirror, there's a person.

Sometimes you can't have animals like dogs or things like that.

The biggest one is real estate signs out in front front.

People take a picture of the real estate sign as a way to get around how the listings are done.

Or they'll straight up put like a business card or information about how to get in touch with them directly in.

The photos of that granite countertop or something.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, so there was all these compliance issues that MLs have to deal with, and they realized that they could help the MLS do that.

And so the last couple years, they've been working with CRMLs out of California who invested in them to come up with a great compliance tool that allows when you go to upload your images into the mls, instead of waiting for someone to complain and getting a fine or whatever, you know, the agent will immediately see that these three photos are out of compliance.

And at the same time, because we are using artificial intelligence instead of someone with Photoshop skills, we have fixed the image already.

And so we show them a preview of the fixed image.

So if there was a picture of the house out front There was a real estate sign.

Here's a preview of what this picture will look like without a real estate sign.

And then all you gotta do is give a couple credits and approve it.

And then now the compliance team at the MLS no longer has to deal with that.

The agent doesn't have to worry about a fine.

The broker doesn't have to worry about getting a phone call.

There's, you know, there's, you know, it just like drastically avoids a lot of those compliance issues.

And, you know, mls, they don't want to find their members.

No.

You know, like the last thing they do.

No, it's not, it's.

It's weird.

The people that pay you, you're going to, you know, take some of the, some more money.

But, but I get it.

I mean, ultimately, if everyone else is playing by the rules and a few people aren't, you got to do something, right?

And so this just sort of like avoids all of that.

And then at the same time, we, because we're.

Now we have those photos, we can make recommendations about, hey, this room would probably look a lot better with all, all this terrible furniture in it.

So for this many credits, you can take the furniture out here, you can take the rug out here, you can add hardwood floors here, you could add modern furniture if you wanted to.

But the tech is so good.

I mean, it can look at a picture.

It knows that that window can't move.

It knows that this counter shouldn't move, but this bed can definitely go away.

It understands what a mirror is.

You know, it understands the reflections in the mirror.

It can take a picture of like a piece of furniture online and understand already what the 3D view of it is just based on pictures of thousands of other pieces of furniture.

So it's really, at some point it's gonna be very difficult to have humans do this work when robots could be so effective at it.

Right now you get sort of a mixed output.

Like this picture of the room might have furniture in this format and the next picture it might be slightly different.

So if you're trying to do a listing, like if you're a property owner or like a apartment buildings, you probably want to still hire a human to make sure all the pictures are uniform and look exactly the same.

But if you're a listing agent and you're just trying to show some furniture in an empty house, it's awesome.

It works great for that already.

And it's just going to keep getting.

Just in the few months that I've been there, it's gotten Better.

It's absolutely amazing tech.

And the thing I like about it the most is that because we're building it in this way, it's really aligned with real estate agents, it's aligned with the mls.

It's not this controversial.

You know, I don't have to really be a punching bag at this company as opposed to, like, wow.

People like, yeah, people like what we do.

We don't have to worry about it.

There's probably an offshore Photoshop person who's mad at us.

But otherwise, you know, it's very friendly to the real estate industry, and it just helps real estate agents and brokers be more effective and have less compliance issues, which I think 99% of the agents that ever have a compliance agent issue didn't mean it.

You know, they weren't intending that.

So, yeah, it's great tech.

All right, Todd, I'm kind of running short on time, you know, and I know I'm taking your time.

So I did want to find out with ccp, you know, where.

Where do you stand here?

There's some very, very big voices.

James Dwiggins, you know, has been really forefront with this with Next Home.

What's your take?

Well, my take is based 100% on anecdotal evidence.

I had a compass agent when I purchased a house a few years ago, and that house was not on the MLS yet, and it was listed by a different compass agent.

And turns out we got a steal on that house.

And then when we went to sell it, we talked to the compass agent, and we talked to a different local agent.

And the different local agent had an approach that I thought was better, that was, you know, maximum exposure, which from my Trulia days, I believe in.

And we.

We made far more money on that house than I ever imagined.

And so it seems like CCP is very good for a listing agent.

And if you're the right buyer's agent, maybe the other way is better.

But I think overall, consumers are better served by maximum exposure.

And that's just how I see it.

I like that.

That makes sense.

I have to ask you the same final question I've asked every guest since Jay Thompson, who was the first guest on this podcast.

Which is what one piece of advice would you give a new agent?

Just getting started?

Yeah, I guess there was a.

Tom Ferry once said, if there was something you could go back and know more when just starting in the industry, what would it be?

And I'd say I would want to know more people.

Right.

I think the real key to being an effective real estate agent is not like whether or not they understand AI or use social media or have a great CRM.

It's really that focus on your network and you have to be willing to leverage your network, ask for referrals, go to church, maybe not sell there, but you just end up knowing more people and people will refer you.

And it's really all about your sphere of influence and banging away on those relationships.

People are the most important part about this industry.

I love that answer.

Todd, if someone wants to reach out to you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn or I'm still on Twitter.

I'm like five of us left but car on Twitter.

Toddyledod.com is my email.

If anyone would like to reach out and find out more about Styled, I'd be happy to talk to him.

Awesome.

Todd, this has been great.

I was waiting for the TCAR moment because that's first of all, only four letters in a Twitter handle.

How did he do that?

It was awesome.

Apparently was early enough, but yeah, being early.

Yeah.

But yeah, this has been great.

I really appreciate it.

I hope to run into you somewhere around the country.

I'm not doing as much back with fnf, but it's been wonderful chatting with you here and best of luck for you and the family.

We have a new addition arriving shortly, so congratulations on that.

Yeah.

And pleasure talking to you.

Thanks so much for doing this.

Absolutely.

Bill, it was great to talk to.