Modern Deal Coordination for Agents with Vijay Gopalswamy, Founder and CEO of Trackxi

Nate Smoyer (00:03.182)
VJ, welcome to the show.

Vijay Gopalswamy (00:05.791)
Thank you, Nate.

Nate Smoyer (00:07.214)
Good to see you. It looks like you made it safely back from the Geek Estate retreat in Bend, Oregon. I don't know about you, but I struggled to want to go back to life. I was very content with my rhythm of a short jog and hot tub out in the snow.

Vijay Gopalswamy (00:26.431)
Definitely the retreats kind of disconnect you by purpose and that's awesome. I had a four hour drive to reflect back to Portland. That helped me to kind of slowly ease into my reality. But yeah, if you took an airplane you land and yeah, it could be different for sure.

Nate Smoyer (00:42.222)
Obviously for everyone listening here, if you weren't familiar, Geek Estate is a online group hosted by Drew Myers and about 25 PropTech founders, investors and leaders and myself somehow descended upon Bend, Oregon. We were at this resort for a few days of unplugged, you know, workshops and masterminding. It was a really good time. And that's where Vijay and I got to have spent some time together. And of course now when we have you on

TechNest, I'd like to introduce you to everyone to you. So I've got Vijay Gopalswamy. He is the founder and CEO of a company called Traxy. They're a deal tracking tool designed specifically for real estate agents, their teams and transaction coordinators. And you know, there's actually a lot of talk about real estate deals. There's been a lot of talk about real estate deals for the last few years because we've gone through such highs.

and lows. And I think right now we're at a bit of a trough still. Is that still what you're hearing from agents on the ground as well as in your own business? You've seen that around you?

Vijay Gopalswamy (01:52.703)
Absolutely, Nate. I think we had the highs and high highs right after COVID. But right now with the interest rate, it's just kind of a damper for sure. And the market itself is like pretty, there's a lot of interested buyers. And because the sellers are low interest rate stock situation, they're not selling. And the interest rates are at 7%. So the buyers are kind of on the fence. So there's a lot of pent up demand kind of keeping increasing, but the market is definitely slower than

past almost 10 years, pretty much.

Nate Smoyer (02:25.582)
Now, you're the founder and CEO of this tech platform and we're gonna get into that a little bit, but your personal career and history is real estate, proper. What's the transition been like to go from agent broker to try and lead tech platform to solve agent broker challenges?

Vijay Gopalswamy (02:49.343)
Absolutely. So I kind of started in a corporate job before this, but I've been realistic for about 15 years. Kind of started as a hobby agent, kind of become a part -time agent, kind of become a part -time agent with the team. And then I could make corporate job, dove into this full -time. And then a little bit later COVID hit. And then it took a little bit of a pause and I did some mortgages in the meantime. But, and then I was trying to scale after COVID.

Nate Smoyer (03:03.534)
Mm -hmm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (03:18.879)
The real estate was kind of up in high gear. So when I started to scale, that's when I hit a problem. I could not scale because I was into the details and weeds of transactions. I was not able to manage my client relationships, the communication with my clients, what my team is doing, all that, especially in a virtual environment where my team was all working from home. I didn't have a tool to communicate with them, organize with them. And then I started looking for a tool like that.

And I couldn't find a lot of tools in this space specifically for this purpose. And that's how I accidentally became a founder of this company.

Nate Smoyer (03:57.07)
You're like, I just wanted to solve a little problem and then dove into kind of untangling some twine here into a much larger problem. I can say, you know, per first hand perspective, having both, I would say flawlessly executed deals, but also absolutely just stumbled my way through it. Even with, you know, transaction coordinators or some sort of supporting team.

there's just so many moving pieces to a deal that can kill it at any time. And I mean, I even remember my very first deal, which I still don't understand how I was given the listing. And then it's, you know, we had an offer first day on market and here we're about to close. And I get a, I get the settlement statement from the closing company. And I read the statement, which apparently was

unusual because the title company told me they're like, no one ever reads that thing. Well, we, they were charged, they were double charging us one of the concessions. and, so thankful that I was a new agent with only one deal. I had time to read that because there's just so many things that can fall through the cracks. So this really seems like, the plenty of agents have a need for this. So maybe we can get real practical here with this VJ and maybe you can go into.

Vijay Gopalswamy (05:09.983)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nate Smoyer (05:26.798)
talking through some of the capabilities of the feature sets and how they align to the problems that you're trying to solve for.

Vijay Gopalswamy (05:35.615)
Absolutely. So a little bit about the landscape. When I started coming across this problem, I looked at all the tools available in the market. And if you, I'm sure you know this, there's a lot of tools, CRMs, marketing, lead gen tools with AI and audio dialers and video dialers, all kinds of capabilities. There's a lot of customized tool for real estate industry in that space. That is to bring in clients to into their business for an agent, right?

Nate Smoyer (05:58.766)
Yes.

Vijay Gopalswamy (06:03.903)
And then there's a big box pause. And then the other side, there's a lot of tools for a brokerage, how to run a brokerage effectively. And there are also tools called transaction management tools, but they're essentially a checklist or a compliance management tool where an agent puts in files and the principal broker approves it. And there's a compliance portion if somebody comes and audits it, the files are there, et cetera, et cetera. So it's more on the brokerage side.

and the agents happen to be users of that tool. And what's in between is all the agent and teams do every day. This is like running your day, everyday schedule, tracking addendums and tracking contractors and tracking lock boxes. And where's the appraisal? Where's the inspection? All these moving pieces. Where's my signing? When are they signing? Where's my buyer number two? All those moving pieces. And my breaking moment came in.

but I forgot to remove a staging furniture from a listing because we had not been staging for a few years because everything was flying off the shelf. And so we don't have it as an item to check. And we had a big four people team, but we forgot to check the staging equipment. So we go there at 4 .30 to drop off a key, the closing, the buyers are going to come and pick up a key at five o 'clock. The house is fully staged and everything is there, still there. All right.

Nate Smoyer (07:07.918)
Right.

Nate Smoyer (07:26.734)
no, what'd you do?

Vijay Gopalswamy (07:28.511)
we hired four U -Hauls and hired all my teenage kids. And then we moved it and truck in 25 minutes. And it's one of the things, and like you mentioned, each deal, there could be challenges in any number of ways. Buyer, seller, lender, closing company. I had a situation where the money was wired to a wrong title company. Yeah, wrong title company, right? $950 ,000 of it.

So things like that, a deal could stop or do anything at any point of time. So there's a lot of moving pieces. And what we found out was there's not a professional tool for agents and teams to manage this. And a lot of the agents, what they do is once they're in contract, they toss it off to a TC who is somewhere, right? And they manage the whole transaction. So all the complexities, the important pieces are managed by kind of a outsourced team, if you will.

Nate Smoyer (08:14.286)
Right.

Nate Smoyer (08:17.87)
Yes.

Vijay Gopalswamy (08:24.927)
with the tool they kind of cobbled up together. That's the landscape I saw, and I want to solve that.

Nate Smoyer (08:29.966)
Yeah, a lot of custom builds within like an Airtable or a monday .com kind of thing.

Vijay Gopalswamy (08:35.455)
I mean, those are very, very professional TC companies and agents. A lot of them, they just have a checklist or a whiteboard, or some of them just use Google Docs. Not even Google Docs, Google Calendar to put some reminders. That's it.

Nate Smoyer (08:46.638)
yeah, that's a lot of moving pieces, manual checks, manual, which is not much different than pencil paper. You might as well just use pencil paper at that point. Yeah.

Vijay Gopalswamy (08:56.863)
Absolutely. And the pencil paper, the only thing is you cannot share with anybody, you cannot share with people. You have it, you have to take a picture and text it or email it.

Nate Smoyer (09:04.718)
So, you know, in your discovery, obviously, like initially you were like, okay, I need something to help me track my deal flow. Not necessarily deal flow, but the status of deals. But from there, you know, there's your preferences, but how have you also been able to bridge that and be open to some of the pains that other agents are communicating back to you? Because I know this can be difficult from, especially from the founder perspective who has first person experience.

your thoughts on what is easy or hard or what's a problem or challenge is going to vary from other agents. So I'm curious, you know, what are some of those challenges, but then also how have you been able to maybe put aside some of your own preference for the tool you started with to accommodate many of the needs that are coming from the market?

Vijay Gopalswamy (09:53.791)
Just FYI, you're breaking off a little bit. I don't know if it's my side or your side. Just want to let you know.

Nate Smoyer (09:58.478)
Yeah, if you don't hear a question, let me know. I can repeat the question. But otherwise, I'm marking clips as we go if they do signal.

Vijay Gopalswamy (10:02.271)
Yeah, no, no, this is good.

Vijay Gopalswamy (10:07.711)
Yeah, perfect. So it's good. So yeah, so initially it was a tool to help me. That's what I was in look for, right? And then I looked for it and I couldn't really find it. And I did a Excel type and I went to Monday Asana type, did some macros to help me. And then I was just so frustrated. We want to solve this. So initially I challenged my team to develop a tool for myself. It was a small team. It was a, hey, help me for my business. That's how we started.

And then I was like, why should I do this? I'm not the only agent team in the world. So I talked to 20, 30 different teams and agents and they're all the same board. They're like, well, yeah, the brokerage gives me this other tools, but I have this CRM, but everything else I have four assistants to track it. Big team, right? Or one person is doing, I don't know, 10 deals a year, not a big deal. They spend probably two, three days in each transaction.

to manage them, call them, just remind them, right? But if they get busy, they don't do a consistent follow -up, right? So the inconsistency was bothering me. So, I mean, we are selling property that are $500 ,000 million properties. And if we do an inconsistent follow -up for that service, I felt like it's a disservice we do for buyers and sellers. So I didn't feel good about it. So once we kind of get past that, I said, okay, let's expand this and see if we can solve a problem for a larger scope of people.

Nate Smoyer (11:14.286)
Mm -hmm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (11:34.911)
not me and my team. And then we definitely listened in probably 20, 30 different teams and agents, and we took in all their inputs. My situation was very, very close to what they wanted, but of course, each agent runs the team slightly differently. So we took in all those inputs and we started building it, saying, you know what, let's build something. And then we are talking to a lot of TCs. So who do a lot more transactions? Probably some of them like, we have a TC that does...

Nate Smoyer (11:35.118)
Mm. Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (11:52.846)
Yeah.

Nate Smoyer (12:01.87)
Hmm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (12:04.799)
They did 2 ,500 transactions last year, massive DC company. So we get a lot of inputs from those guys as well. So we're just constantly seeking for feedback and implementing the feedback in our product. And we are constantly tweaking it.

Nate Smoyer (12:19.534)
You know, you actually bring up a really interesting point here in discovery. And this is something, you know, I have thought about a lot from like the landlord -renter side, because that's the side I've spent the most time working on. You know, if you're building landlord tools, that's cool to talk to the landlord and to focus on landlord tools, but you have to also think about how the experience is between the landlord and the renter. And here you have a similar relationship, right? You're building a tool and selling it to the agent.

but then also talking to transaction coordinators because even though they're not the ones making the purchase decision, they're the ones oftentimes tasked with some of the biggest pains and problems to be able to help the lead agent in -house. Did you ever come across some conflicting feedback as you were having these conversations with agents and the transaction coordinators?

Vijay Gopalswamy (13:11.295)
Absolutely. We had a few teams like that. And then the TC was saying, hey, you know, we want this, this and that. And then we talked to the agent. They were like, I don't even know what my TC does. Let them take care of it, right? They had it off and that's one type. And the other type is like, no, no, I don't want to do it like that. I want my team to run like this. Right? So they have conflicting things sometimes. It proves the point. There's the lack of transparency and communication between an agreement between the teams.

Nate Smoyer (13:25.006)
Mm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (13:40.447)
between the assistant and team and agent itself. So it was uncovering a lot of their discussions and say, hey, is that what you were doing? Yes. Okay, no, that's not what I want you to do. Do this. So the tool was opening up conversation they never had before.

Nate Smoyer (13:40.494)
Yeah.

Nate Smoyer (13:56.654)
That's very cool. And I think that says a lot. And I think that's a solid lesson for other founders to kind of take away here. Like if there is another end user or other people that are part of the process, they may not be the ones making that purchase decision of a tool, but that discovery with those individuals that are going to have an impact on how well it's utilized is still just as important. I want to shift a little bit here to kind of like a,

more of like a industry or larger, broader topic. You're familiar, obviously, with some of the lawsuits that are happening and of course, commissions being that primary point of topic. And commissions are something that you have to keep track of and work with to know what's happening for your deals. Kind of a multi -part here, but have some of those settlements and discussions around commissions, has it had any direct impact on...

how people are thinking about tracking their deals. Have you seen change from any agents and what are you doing even to help agents figure out what they must do to help their deals still get to the closing table and not really be distracted by some of these legal proceedings as details are shaking out.

Vijay Gopalswamy (15:14.463)
Absolutely, very appropriate question, Nate, for the industry. So yeah, when we started, this was not a point of discussion. I think I was aware of this lawsuit, but like most agents, I didn't even know what the scope of this is. And then as we kind of started using onboarding customers and everything, it was coming into light. So our platform is to track a deal, like a buyer or a seller deal, right? So our philosophy is right now, it doesn't really matter who does it.

somebody has to track this, right? It could be a buyer agent, could be a seller agent, could be a dual agency, it could be one agent, could be an attorney, it could be, I don't know, somebody else. So the buying and selling a home is going to happen in this country for sure, not in the world. And we are tracking our tool is to track the process. So who does it? It's not a question. And do we need to track it? Absolutely, yes. It's going to be there forever. It's probably going to increase in complexity. And a couple of things we do. One...

Nate Smoyer (15:46.222)
Mm.

Nate Smoyer (16:07.982)
Mm -hmm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (16:12.831)
We have a business planning section in our tool where we can set targets, how many transactions you're doing, how many commission you're planning to make this year, and our tool tracks that. That's one thing. And then also in each transaction, there's a buyer set commission, seller set commission fields where you can put in if you're a listing agent, you can say, hey, this is my commission, this is the commission I'm offering to the other agent. But we're not publicizing it anywhere. It's an internal, like think of it like an Excel tool that you're tracking this.

Nate Smoyer (16:40.782)
Mm -hmm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (16:41.023)
I get an X percentage from the listing side and I share some of this for the buyer side. And if that's zero, that could be zero. Our tool does not really do anything with it. It's just a place to put it in so you can track it, manage it. That's all it does. And then going from the business side of it, yeah, I mean, the things could change, the buyer compensation could change, the addendums could come into play. And I think having a conversation ahead of time is something that's in the process, right?

Nate Smoyer (16:55.598)
Yeah.

Vijay Gopalswamy (17:11.135)
Before, I think buyer agreements were there, and I don't know how many people were using it. But now what our tool can do is clearly we can add a step in our transaction deal, and the tool will remind and also have compliance check stating, hey, I'm an agent. I did this. Have a conversation. This is an addendum I signed. So we can easily add a tool, a step like that. That's a huge, huge thing that Traxie can do for agents and teams.

Nate Smoyer (17:20.75)
Uhhh...

Nate Smoyer (17:30.734)
Mm -hmm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (17:39.007)
And also we have capabilities for a brokerage or an MLS or association to push templates. You can say, hey, make sure these 10 steps are followed in each transaction, right? So you can train them, guide them. There's all these capabilities, which I think is a very critical thing to do going forward. And our tool is in the forefront of doing that for agents.

Nate Smoyer (18:01.166)
Yeah, yeah. I appreciate you going into that. I know it's not really directly related, but obviously if, you know, this is what customers are asking about, it means that agents are asking questions and, you know, we're people on, on many different depths on, on the, the buy and sell side or hearing constant whispers on this topic and kind of unavoidable. Similarly, another unavoidable topic that we have to delve into anytime we talk about data, we're talking about tracking.

automations, it opens the doors for discussion on AI, how AI is being leveraged and used. And I think this is still something that agents are trying to wrap their heads around of like, what do we need to know what's out there? So curious, have you guys have been experimenting with AI applications as well as, you know, how do you, you know, what do you even see as the applications for the potentials for AI use when it comes to deal management and tracking or those transactions?

Vijay Gopalswamy (19:02.271)
Yeah, great question, Nate. And I think, you know, we are kind of the new kid in the block, being a startup founder. We are about two, three years old in the business. So when I looked at all the other software out there in this space, and PropTech in general, a lot of them, they were built for a purpose. And a lot of them looked like they were built in late 90s or early 2000s. It's all very text -based, menu -based software.

Nate Smoyer (19:17.614)
Mm -hmm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (19:29.599)
very powerful, used by probably hundreds of thousands of agents and brokerages. Very, very good. But I think as an industry, we did not evolve too much into it. So what our team set out to do is we want to be the modern, easy to use. It should be an iPhone of the phones, right? It's very visual, very intuitive, very, very, that's where we started. That's our core DNA of our design. And we even have a patent pending for how we do the design of our software.

and the process. So that's where we started. And the second thing is on the same line, our biggest thing is where can we eliminate waste? Right? So whatever the human being is doing as an agent or a TCR and assistant to repeatedly do anything, it should be at least a template or an automated process. Right? It should give 99 % of the information and an agent or team member should come and review it to make sure everything's correct and send it. That's the bare minimum.

What I saw in the industry, the super organized people, they were just using lots of files, a lot of copy pasting, a lot of writing emails, a lot of writing templates. So that's one thing we want to avoid. And the next thing is, how can we automate everything that comes repeatedly? So anything you do repeatedly as an agent, even once a week, we want to automate it. So we started talking about this AI about three years ago. So one of the things we are looking at is, if we get a sale agreement that's 20 pages long,

Nate Smoyer (20:46.35)
Mm -hmm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (20:58.559)
How can we digest all that, automatically help the agent to create a transaction? That's one thing. Or if an agent wants to know, hey, what's the closing data for this property? Can I just ask a query, put a voice command, and just ask it? The system can search and bring that. Those are the few things we are looking into. And we have probably four or five experiments going on right now. And one of the things is that the AI is everywhere right now. You cannot go to coffee shop without talking AI anymore.

Nate Smoyer (21:02.798)
Yeah.

Nate Smoyer (21:20.334)
Yeah.

Vijay Gopalswamy (21:27.967)
So what we want to do is we don't want to have shiny object syndrome right now, but we are very deliberately looking at each use case and say, does this make sense to put AI here? Can AI solve this?

Nate Smoyer (21:39.246)
I love the search engine piece. I mean, just the search engine for like a reporting because there are some metrics that probably aren't defining for how you operate your business, but they can reflect, it gives you an opportunity to see how you're operating or even like, you know, if you are running a team, like you have multiple agents with you, you can actually do some comparison, like who has higher concession rate.

Or do concessions seem to be impacting, you know, your ability to close? Like you could see that that was in the contract. One of my favorite tools, and I still think is an underutilized tool that's built into most contracts, is that many states have in their MLS agreements, the inspection contingency in where, you know, it's, I think it's by default like 10 days, but at the end of the 10 day mark,

It says, if you need additional time, you can just request it. You get additional five days. So in the, in the Northwest MLS forms, that's what it was. And so what you could do as an agent, if you wanted those 10 days, but you wanted to come in more competitively, just ask for five days instead of 10. So now it looks like, we're more competitive, but the contract already has it pre -negotiated in to get the 10 day, the additional five days. So you get a 10 day anyway. And I think that you could, you could start looking at agents.

You know, if there's a different, who's doing more deals, look at some of their contracts while they're on the buy side. And I think AI enables for like some very unique queries that are specific to agents and teams. I don't know. I think that's a cool, that has me very curious of how that would work. It seems like you're going down an interesting path there. It seems like you would have a lot of that data that would make it really accessible to query.

Vijay Gopalswamy (23:28.223)
Absolutely. You're breaking up quite a bit, Nate, but I understand the question. So yeah, totally. So once we have this data about the transaction, you have all the people in the transaction, all the tasks in the transaction. And if you have consistency, you do a hundred deals like in a year, you can see patterns and trends and what got listed for what price, what was sold for, based in the market. Everything about you can be automatically done in a system, right? Once you have the data. And we want to really enable the agents.

Nate Smoyer (23:43.086)
Mm -hmm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (23:57.279)
not only like a brokerage or a franchise or an MLS to have access to the data, we want the agents to have the data and say, they go to listing appointments and say, hey, I show a graph, I pull it from Traxie or something, right? I say, my average days in the market is four days, right? I had this one thing is 50 days, but my average is four days, right? Things like that is very, very easily accessible, but an average agent doesn't have the knowledge, skill or the time to do that repetitively for marketing themselves.

Nate Smoyer (24:11.822)
Mm -hmm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (24:27.295)
What we want to do is once we have enough data, we want to make that available to each agent.

Nate Smoyer (24:34.542)
Yeah, that'd be cool. That'd be cool for agents if you could say like, you know, 50 % of the time I get my buyers a discount on purchase or whatever, something like that. I don't know. I don't know if it's a valuable statement to make, but maybe it is, I don't know.

Vijay Gopalswamy (24:43.519)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, once you know the data points and all the things, you can use it however you want to use it, right? And our platform, we want to eventually aggregate all that and again, empower the agents so they can have their value that they can show to the buyers and sellers and also bring transparency to everybody else in the deal, right? Like title companies and lenders and attorneys and everybody. Give the transparency what's going on in the deal.

Nate Smoyer (25:12.814)
Speaking of promotion and marketing, I do wanna ask you, for real estate agents, they are beat up constantly with tools and features and services and agencies and everything under the sun. They're a very identifiable audience. Their contact info is everywhere, so it's very easy to find them and reach out to them. Both, yeah, some people do it legitimately in a lot of...

There's a lot of spam messaging, let's be honest, the agent has really beat up terribly with that. What are you doing to break through that noise of everyone else in the market fighting for their attention, but at the same time, like not doing exactly what everyone else in the market is doing?

Vijay Gopalswamy (25:57.887)
We are not doing cold emailing, cold calling. I'll tell you that. And as lastly you mentioned, I hate being spammed, but I welcome a good marketing message or a good sales message that can help my business. So to differentiate that is the key. And what we focus on is don't spam them, but if there is interest, definitely give them value in respect of their time. Don't write a four paragraph email.

Nate Smoyer (26:01.646)
Hehehehe

Vijay Gopalswamy (26:26.495)
write a four bullet point email and say, this is what we are doing. If you're interested, call me. If you show interest, take it to the next level. So just be mindful and respectful of their time and their attention span. That's one. And number two, we just, I don't know if you know, we got selected for the Reach program for this year. We are one of the eight companies. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much. And we are one of the eight companies got selected out of probably hundreds of companies.

Nate Smoyer (26:31.15)
Mmm.

Nate Smoyer (26:45.23)
I did see that. Congratulations, by the way.

Vijay Gopalswamy (26:54.143)
So one of the things we are going through that is it's reaching the right audience to the right channels, right? So we are tasking our marketing team to look for people who show interest first. Don't spam them, show them the information, but look for information where there's interest. So those are a couple of things we do differently, slightly differently. And I think any modern company should do that, I think, because like, no, we have so much media, so much thing grabbing our time, and we ought to be mindful of that.

Nate Smoyer (27:21.294)
Mm -hmm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (27:23.519)
But also, if we don't give the right message, we are also doing a disservice to the agents and say, hey, this could be useful, take a look. And if you take a look, if there's more interest, we can follow up.

Nate Smoyer (27:33.422)
Yeah, yeah, that's good stuff.

Vijay Gopalswamy (27:34.943)
And also we take it, we make it very easy to get in, get out, come here, try for a couple of weeks. If you don't like it, go away, go find something else, be happy, right? It's not to bother them, but just to kind of make it a very respectable mutual relationship.

Vijay Gopalswamy (27:57.823)
Does that answer your question, Nick?

Nate Smoyer (27:59.182)
Yeah, that's solid. I appreciate that. Thanks for going into those details. And yeah, you know, I should have brought it up to the top of the show here, but, you know, congrats on, being selected as, you know, one of eight in the 2024 reach class. I mean, I think that's, you know, and looking at the list, there's quite a lot, and I think there's a very focused, cohort on the residential real estate transaction. I think in the past classes I've seen, there's kind of ancillary and collect, you know,

connected in this any other, but this is a very focused cohort. It's a good one to be a part of. VJ, we're gonna shift to the bottom of the show to the segment I like to call For the Future. For the Future is a segment where I get to ask each guest who comes on a show to give their best predictions based on the following four questions. Are you ready to play?

Vijay Gopalswamy (28:47.359)
Mm -hmm. Yes, let's do it.

Nate Smoyer (28:49.71)
Alright, number one, what does Traxy look like one year from now?

Vijay Gopalswamy (28:55.647)
One year from now, we want to be in probably like a, in probably at 10 MLS associations. And we want to have two or three big franchisee contracts where we can reach probably around 25 ,000 agents. That's our target, right?

Nate Smoyer (29:14.222)
Phenomenal. All right, number two, where are interest rates gonna go? I'm just kidding. I'm not gonna ask you an interest rates question. Let me ask you this, because I think this was a topic for some time now and I'm curious your perspective. Are teams still the feature for residential real estate agents or will low cost tech services enable more agents to strike out on their own?

Vijay Gopalswamy (29:23.071)
Yeah.

Vijay Gopalswamy (29:44.447)
I think it's going to be a mix because I think there's definitely value proposition for a single agent or maybe an assistant. That person's identity, that brand, that neighborhood, that area, the servant, the zip code, the servant, there's definitely a value for that method. And then the teams are more, if you want to scale, if you want to be a little bit more bigger, right? It's more like this is a 1099 self -employed contractor business. So there's only so much you can do.

Nate Smoyer (30:10.638)
Mm -hmm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (30:13.375)
And there's not everybody is good in everything. Some people are super organized, some people are good salesy, some people are super strategy people. So because of the fact there's a 1099 type of situation, I think there's definitely a need for a team concept where there's a focus areas in each one. So I don't think it's one or the other. I think it's going to be a blend mix depending on situations. But I don't know, I can't see a world where it's only big companies, franchises doing teams.

Nate Smoyer (30:35.342)
Yeah.

Vijay Gopalswamy (30:42.303)
I think the genesis of this business is still an agent who is a local expert who is connected to a family, connected to an investor, connected to a neighbor.

Nate Smoyer (30:53.422)
Yeah. Number three here on For the Future, what's one industry trend you think will continue, but you wish would go away?

Vijay Gopalswamy (31:03.135)
Sorry, say that again. One industry trend.

Nate Smoyer (31:05.87)
Yeah, what's one industry trend you think will continue, but you wish would go away?

Vijay Gopalswamy (31:11.711)
I think it's the good agents and the other agents. There are a lot of, I think at least the numbers claim there's a lot of agents who don't even do a lot of business and they are there for numbers and they may do one or two deals a year. Nothing wrong with it. But now the industry is so focused, you're challenged to provide value and you have to pretty much get every listing, every buyer.

discussed beforehand and you're selling your services pretty much every single day. And I think there comes to a point in the industry we have to elevate the expertise of the agents. I think the people who are the agents who were, hey, I did a couple of deals in my family and that's about it, are still going to be there. I think there's a lot of them, but that will need to be more professionalized, organized. And that's what we are trying to help through Traxie. Anybody signing up to Traxie?

Nate Smoyer (31:51.054)
Mm -hmm.

Vijay Gopalswamy (32:08.767)
There's templates, there's things to do. Like you said, when you got your listing, you probably didn't know what's going to happen next, right? You probably tracked 10 things, but there's maybe 35 things, right? So those are all the things we, from my 15 years of experience, we are putting in templates and we're upskilling the agents from day one. And that's kind of where the industry will go, I think. But it's going to take some time. But like I said, the hobby agents and the professional agents, I think the gap is a little bit too much.

Nate Smoyer (32:15.374)
I have no clue. Yeah.

Vijay Gopalswamy (32:38.015)
I wish that good strength.

Nate Smoyer (32:40.526)
Okay, last one here. What's one thing you believe will dramatically change or fade away in real estate as a result of tech advances?

Vijay Gopalswamy (32:50.495)
Tech advances the quality and level of service. I think it's been dependent on the personal agent, but I think the tech and other things that are coming and helping the agents, I think the level of service is going to go up. And I think the buyers and sellers are going to see that pretty quickly.

Nate Smoyer (33:08.494)
Awesome. VJ, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you for coming on the show. Glad we were able to make this happen. and enjoyed learning a little bit more about the transaction tracking and management process. Sounds like, you guys have really thought through a lot of the details and this is a very detail oriented problem to solve for before we close out for those who want to get in touch with you and for those that want to learn more about track C, where do they go and how do they do that?

Vijay Gopalswamy (33:35.103)
The first step is Traxy .com, T -R -A -C -K -X -I .com. It's a marketing website, but it has pretty much everything anybody needs to know. It has reviews, it has testimonials, it has our news coverages, and it has all our product information. We also have a demo button, so just click on it, do a demo. Or if you want to set up a time, you can do that as well. You can also sign up and try our product. But if not, if you want to get a hold of me, I'm on LinkedIn.

just to search for V -I -J -A -Y and my last name G -O -P -A -L -S -W -A -Y. Or you can search VJ Traxie and I'm in LinkedIn. And feel free to connect with me, ping me. I would love to talk to different people, get different inputs, have different conversations.

Nate Smoyer (34:21.87)
Yeah. And of course all of those details will be found on the tech nest website. Go to tech nest .io. You can find VJ's contact info as well as a link to Traxy. Don't forget while you're on the website, join the newsletter. We send out some art marketing articles as well as all of our featured episodes on a weekly basis, as well as the blueprint discount that you can get to attend blueprint. VJ great having you here. Can't wait to see what you guys do. Congrats on making.

the class of 2024 for the REACH program. Until next time, we'll see you later.

Vijay Gopalswamy (34:56.479)
Thank you, Nate. Thank you for everything. And thank you for Tech Nest and everything. So good luck. We'll be in touch.

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