Oscar Jofre  00:34

All right, well, good afternoon, everyone. And welcome. My name is Oscar Jofre. And welcome to once again one of our great KoreSummit webinar series for 2021. It’s amazing we I’ve actually had to count how many webinars we’ve done this year, thanks to all of you, we are almost going to do almost 80 webinars where we’re target four. That’s amazing. Thanks, everyone for coming out. And we hope that the educational programs have been useful for you in your journey. And raising capital either using regulation CF, Regulation A, or regulation D, our goal has always been, the better everyone is educating how everything works, the better prepared you can be in your capital raise, rather than coming into a room that’s full of darkness, we’re putting a light on it. So you know, the A to Zed, and today is just one of those other sectors that we feel needed a special attention. That is going to help us all get a better understanding of how it all works. And that’s in real estate. Real Estate today is amazing. It’s very powerful. Everyone’s talking about it. Everyone wants to be involved with it. But it’s a lot of different dynamics. And today, I’m really excited about the people that we brought on board today to have a great discussion about real estate and how it’s going to work and how you can participate as a company in utilizing these regulations. So as a reminder to everyone today, as well, we have all our KoreSummit webinar series that are available to you 24/7 on the YouTube channel at KoreConX. You can also visit KoreSummit.io website, we have the entire library there, along with all the bottles of all the speakers that are speaking so you can contact them directly, their LinkedIn link is there, including their email address, we do not want to create any friction for you to reach out to the people you want to speak to as quickly as possible to move forward. as well. I should remind you that we are also hosting a number of webinars series before 2021. That’s right, we are going to finish the year doing some really interesting things. We are going to have webinar series that are going to talk about cannabis. That’s right, our next one is cannabis. Right after that we’re going to do digital securities, collectibles, and we’re going to finish the year off with dare to dream. That’s right, that’s the title dare to dream because that’s what this has been. This has been a journey for all of us for a number of years. And we just finished coming off celebrating equity crowdfunding week, with a great group of startup starter out in California, fantastic week for everyone in the ecosystem. And for everyone at large. The regulations are hitting major milestones, the triple digit growth month over month. I mean, this is an amazing historical moment that’s happening. And today, it’s just this is a sector that is really going to captivate everyone. And I’m really excited to bring someone because, hey, I got to learn about real estate too. That is going to provide us that kind of needed overview of what real estate really is. And I know she taught me a few things just the other day and just having a early discussion. I’m really pleased to introduce you all to miss Sarah Richardson, CEO and co founder of True Realty. And, Sarah, I welcome

Sarah Richardson  04:21

Thank you for having me. This is so exciting,

Oscar Jofre  04:24

isn’t it I you know I’ve been thinking so much about what you you started talking to me about the different types of real estate and any just got my mind tingling, how an industry ended up coming. Well, I’m not going to steal away from you because I want everybody to hear from you, providing that insight before we dig into the preparation. So as they say, Sarah, the floor is yours. 

Sarah Richardson  04:49

The floor is mine. 

Oscar Jofre  04:50

The floor is yours.

Sarah Richardson  04:53

Well, yesterday we were speaking a lot about you know how big of an industry real estate really is. I mean it’s a multi trillion dollar industry and there’s so many different facets to real estate. You know, I focus primarily in residential real estate brokerage, right. But there’s also you know, residential investing, and then there’s fixing and flipping, and then there’s residential property management. And that’s just the residential sector, you know, you’ve got the commercial sector, which is even more vast with Office and industrial, multifamily land, everything that encompasses a commercial from a property management in a reap perspective. So there’s property technology, which is now the fastest growing technology sector in the world. And a lot of Prop tech is what you call it is scaling. And a lot of different VC funds seem to be raising funds, specifically geared around prop tech investments. And I know that’s something that we’re looking at internally, as well as how can we scale our business nationally on a prop tech model so that we can reduce friction, and we can improve such an old archaic model and an industry that’s been around for a couple 100 years. And it’s really still operating, in a lot of ways as it was a couple 100 years ago. Did I lose you Oscar.?

Oscar Jofre  06:21

No, no, no, you never lose me. Listen, the floor, the floor is yours. You obviously be the big discussion that I often run into is with real estate with everyone is that there is a bit of confusion. There’s so much information out there, as you often see there is people coming at it from the point of view, hey, this is a real estate project. And I don’t to be honest with you, I didn’t even realize there were so many different facets to it until you and I started talking about it. So when it comes to let’s just talk about residential because there seems to be a hot, hot space there right now. And we’ll run into the you mentioned another one prop tech. I’m really curious about that one. Yeah. So let’s talk about that particular sector. Why is there so much buzz going on in there? Why is there such a big opportunity still, when, you know, I’m just curious from that perspective?

Sarah Richardson  07:21

Well, because it’s a trillion dollar industry and they’re big ticket items. I mean, really, residential real estate is a smaller ticket than even commercial real estate. And when you’re dealing with an asset class that’s so expensive. A lot of people want to get involved, including the government’s you know, your you’ll see, taxes and every municipality that’s all geared around real estate, everybody, including investors, including homeowners know that it’s the largest asset class in the world, and one of the largest industries of the world. So everybody wants to be a part of it in some capacity, and we all need a place to live, right? Residential is probably the most innovative side of the real estate space. I was in commercial for about a decade and commercial real estate and they always said that commercial follows rooftops and what they mean by rooftops, residential rooftops. So residential real estate leads innovation. So all of the you know, the CRM that we use for residential real estate, different lead programs, the list goes on and on with the different technologies that have been developed in the past decade to service brokers to service real estate agents to even go directly to the consumer. Everybody’s heard of Zillow, right? Everyone’s heard of Zillow. Zillow is the largest prop tech company in the world. And so Zillow really paved the way for residential prop tech. Property technology is really what prop tech means. And so since Zillow, we’ve had the red fins of the world, realtor.com has been completely digitized. And there’s all different kinds of new technologies popping up. And so many different venture capitalists that are raising funds specifically for prop tech ventures. You know, it’s a very, very siloed industry, real estate. And there’s so much more improving that can be done to improve the consumers experience, to improve the agents experience to improve me the brokers experience with the agent, and with the consumer. And there, we still have a ways to go in terms of Prop tech. And I think that that’s why there’s so much money coming into this space right now. Because there’s things that I can think of things that I know I need to improve a certain process that people much smarter than me are probably figuring out and hopefully they find me someday, so I can utilize their services. And right now as a company, we’ve got about 12 different technologies that we use from an operations perspective as well as offering technologies for agents to use This can be a little overwhelming for a realtor. Because real estate agents, the median age of a real estate agent is 55 years old. It’s typically their third, and which is surprising, right? It’s usually their third, or their fourth career. And so with that comes a complication with technology, because we have slower adoption rates, because the population of the professionals are a lot older. And it’s a relationship driven business. And there’s nothing that we can do to change that. So the technology that, you know, that came out in the early days was replacing that relationship. And I think that it’s changed forms, prop Tech has changed its form now. So instead of replacing that relationship, it’s enhancing that relationship. It’s making the relationship stronger. And we like to call it a set it and forget it mindset where the technology, the prop tech that’s being developed, is helping brokerages and real estate agents automate a lot of their marketing and administrative support. So that can enhance and be in front of clients more often. Because we don’t ever see that ever that portion going away in our industry.

Oscar Jofre  11:12

You know, part of me, I’m going no way. So what I’m hearing from you right now,

Sarah Richardson  11:18

No way about what? 

Oscar Jofre  11:19

Well, it just it seems to me that I kind of always thought and I guess this is the assumption. And here hence the opportunity on real estate where we’re always saying that in real estate, just the asset itself, the asset classes is the opportunity. But even within the asset class, the way it’s managed, the way it’s distributed, and all that that whole industry, it’s still undergoing massive improvements to make it even more efficient. 

Sarah Richardson  11:43

So that means way more, it needs way more if you think about it, you’ve got the the broker or the agent who I like to call the quarterback of the transaction. And that real estate agent is a lot of times referring the mortgage officer or the mortgage company referring the title or the escrow or both referring the attorney, referring the inspector, the home warranty, all of these other players that have to be a part of a 30 day escrow is ridiculous. And none of these people are talking, they’re all just all the information is flying directly at a real estate agent. And they’re juggling that conversation. They’re juggling those relationships. And that’s a good thing because they’re hopefully working with that real estate agent frequently. However, there’s so much more that can be developed in terms of creating less of a silo and creating a better, more transparent conversation. I think that there’s a lot happening with blockchain as well, that can enhance security. Right now the thing that scares me as a broker owner, realtors don’t care about this, what I’m about to say something I care about, because I take the liability of a realtor on, but $220 million, were lost of the consumers money last year, and 2020 to wire fraud. This is where a fraudster will pretend to be the escrow officer or the title company and send a link to our buyers or our sellers and say, Hey, send your down payment here your 20% down payment send it here, and then they run with the money. 2000 Yeah, it’s that’s it’s staggering. They’re expecting that to go up another 50 to 60% in 2021. And so this is something that keeps me up at night. Because if that happens to one of our consumers, or somebody that we’re representing, it’s changing their life, statistically, these people will never buy a home ever again. So that’s something that technology can fix. By securitizing a transaction in a smart contract. We can, we can protect everybody that’s in that contract or in that encrypted blockchain environment, invite them into this environment so they can operate and send back links and communicate with one another. So they know what’s coming. They know when it’s coming, and they know where it was sent from. And there are certain things that are starting and we’re partnering with these companies to help protect our consumers help protect their banking data, so we can be a more secure and trusted brand.

Oscar Jofre  14:18

You know that that’s rather interesting, because obviously the private capital markets are why we’re here today, it’s the same thing we have. All of us have to work with so many different parties, broker dealers, escrow providers, payment rails, the investors, we need to give them the trust that the security they’re buying. They’re investing in a real estate project. How do we know it’s a real piece of property? Right, this is, you know, they did

Sarah Richardson  14:42

Yeah, there’s title fraud. That’s exactly right. There’s title fraud as well. I mean, there’s people stealing That’s

Oscar Jofre  14:47

right. Yeah, yeah. The actual title itself, which, you know, if if that all becomes but it is great to hear that within the sectors as you’re mentioning within the sector itself. It is also going through its major upgrade, which is great. And that was Nathaniel coming in, it’s good to see him. The but you know, I’m even more excited about real estate now than I was. I mean, look, I saw the opportunities in real estate, both obviously in the multi from the real estate component, meaning the actual investing into the the sector, whether it’s commercial real estate, or the the family, sorry, the residential sector. But now within that sector, there’s a whole, as you said, prop tech, that the things that are going to make it manage it, so the people investing in these companies are operating in a way that their investment’s secured, this is something really interesting that I, you open my eyes to that, that I understand why we’ve been talking now. Yes. 

Sarah Richardson  15:52

I just want to be in business in a few years, you know, I think that there’s no insurance policy in the world that’s going to cover me when one of my clients loses a couple $100,000 because a fraudster sent them a fake link. And so that’s something that a lot of other, many of my competitors, this isn’t even on their radar, they don’t care, I don’t even know if they even have an idea on how to align with a software or a prop tech company that can build a solution for them. Whereas I’m always looking for that next thing to protect, to make sure that we’re in business, and we don’t get put out by you know, some kind of legality that will the due to a fraudster

Oscar Jofre  16:29

agreed and you know, that’s the one of the things that I would say, that I’ve noticed over the years is that we’re finally thinking all of us as an ecosystem, and they’re, you know, real estate isn’t over there anymore. If people are going to invest on it, they’re going to be part of this ecosystem. And I like the way you’re thinking about the fact that if we can securitize that, that property with the proper records and it’s authenticated and triple that authentication flows through to the buyer, which then somebody wants to raise capital for it, we streamline it to get people to not be afraid of making that investment into these companies. Because, you know, something doesn’t give up. The actual chain itself is the the greatest authentic good because it’s immutable. And it’s been authenticated all the way. So absolutely, I’m excited about that. And it’s, I just never, you know, like always, you know, the more you discuss things with people, the more opportunities arise. And listen, we You and I are going to have more discussions on this. I thank you again, for coming in this afternoon. given us a bit of an overview of real estate, obviously, we’re going to dive in with the our other participants this afternoon, that are going to bring a great insight into which you know, Sarah started with is that here is a sector, that’s all great.