Modern Modular Platform for Real Estate Operations with Andrew Becker, CEO and Co-founder of Billions

Nate Smoyer (00:01.114)
Andrew, welcome to the show.

Andrew Becker (00:03.374)
What's up Nate? Thanks for having me.

Nate Smoyer (00:05.482)
not a whole lot. I'm not going to share my laundry list of to -dos for our interview like I did to you on our pre -show.

Andrew Becker (00:12.238)
Yeah, I've heard it. I don't envy you today. You got a lot going on.

Nate Smoyer (00:17.046)
It's summertime, man, summertime. We gotta have a lot of fun. I mean, you gotta get a lot done and it is what it is. We're excited to have you on the show here. I know you're also a podcast host, so now you get to be on the other side of recording. So hopefully this is as fun for you being on that side as it is when you're the interviewer. For everyone listening here, exciting guest to have on the show today, I've got Andrew Becker, CEO and co -founder of a company called

Andrew Becker (00:32.494)
Yeah?

Nate Smoyer (00:46.778)
Billions is a highly customizable real estate operations platform. They're designed specifically for high volume, high transactions teams, and they give owners and team leaders the ability to automatically collect and track the data that really matters the most in their agent business. And we're going to break down what that means, what that looks like. I'll just first start off with this. I know you run a podcast. Let's get a...

Let's tell people what that podcast is, where do they find that? And then we're going to jump into talk about billions.

Andrew Becker (01:18.318)
Yeah, that's awesome. so the podcast is called team lead talks, real estate related. Obviously, I meet with, we're actually international. We, we broke into Canada, with a few, a few guests to go. So international podcast hosts, on my resume, but, I meet with team leaders across the country and Canada and North America and just hear their story, how they got started trials, tribulations, you know, how they built incredible teams. We have people with.

Smaller teams, we have people with hundreds of people on their team doing seven, eight, 900 deals a year. But you can find us all over social media at the Team League Talks podcast. We're on YouTube and Instagram, TikTok, you name it.

Nate Smoyer (02:02.81)
And I'll before we go any further, cause now, now you opened up the gates. Maybe I opened it up. This is something I want. I want every founder to listen to and hear. I am fully convinced that if I were to go start another business in another age, in another industry, the very first thing I would do is set up a podcast. And it has for me zero to do with how many people would listen to it or how much business it would drive. If I could do 20 or 30.

episodes, that's 20 or 30 conversations I would target with my ideal customer, hearing their stories, their pains, their wins. And it becomes content. Sure. If they share the, the, the episodes and the content, it validates me in that industry and that vein. But you're also just directly learning from your customers and taking lessons from that. And we hear it all the time. You should talk to your customers. You should really be involved and connect with them.

And I hear that you're doing it just by you telling me about this. And there's so many benefits that come out of that. So for every founder listening, if you ever wanted to start a podcast, you think you'd benefit from that, hit me up. I'd be happy to help because I think this is far too valuable of an activity, at least in even the early stages to learn from your customers. It's important to do. And, Andrew, do you agree with that? Push back on any of that.

Andrew Becker (03:21.646)
Yeah.

Andrew Becker (03:25.55)
Yeah, I'll expand on that a little bit. I agree with everything you just said. Also, I just like meeting people and talking to people and, you know, hearing their stories. It just kind of, I'm passionate about doing that. and I wouldn't have any other really, avenue to do that with if I didn't start the podcast. It's a little nerve wracking at first, but you kind of get the hang of it. And then I always feel like, like you said, regardless of how many people watch it or listen to it, if

the people who do listen and watch it can pick up on just one thing that changes their life, changes their business, or helps them move the needle to the right in their real estate operation, then we're doing our job. But I feel like, especially in today's world where people are struggling with growing because of low inventory levels and high interest rates right now, lead gen is all the talk, AI, that kind of thing.

Nate Smoyer (04:04.602)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (04:19.854)
So we just talk about this stuff and people kind of resonate with it now. And if we can help one person or a thousand people, that's great.

Nate Smoyer (04:28.346)
Yeah. Now, of course I know you can talk to real estate agents and team leaders from multiple angles, but largely because you were one yourself. And before we get into billions of we're going to obviously I'm going to dive into your background a little bit. Having been in the business for some time in the DC Metro area, maybe you can share a little bit about what your track as a, an agent and team leader has been like and how that led to starting your own company called Billions.

Andrew Becker (04:58.254)
Yeah, so brief background history. I started, well, I'll go back a little bit further and graduated college in 2009, went into the Air Force as a civilian. I worked in the nuclear enterprise. So nuclear missiles, all that good stuff was actually, yeah, yeah, you know, you know how it works. You're in middle America. You've probably seen some of the launch sites, but

Nate Smoyer (05:17.37)
obvious, yeah.

Andrew Becker (05:25.454)
I was there for seven and a half years actually working at the Pentagon. And, in 2013, I decided I wanted to kind of be an entrepreneur and start my own company and business. So landed on real estate. That was kind of when like the, the HDTV shows were coming out, like love it or listed, you know, house hunters, that kind of thing. So, long story short, I started a team at Keller Williams in Arlington, Virginia, 2013.

I did my Air Force role and built the team for two years. So I was kind of doing two jobs at once, but in 2015, we kind of took off pretty, pretty fast in terms of like volume and transactions. And in 2015, I left the Air Force and decided to tackle real estate full time. In 2018, and we had a true team model where myself and my business partner,

Dan McDonald, who we're best friends in middle school. So we've known each other for 25, 30 years, but we started with like, let's figure out the real estate industry and how this works. But ultimately we wanted to leverage building a team, right? And buying back some of the time that we could. So we hired ISAs or inside sales agents, better known as appointment centers, and then agents on the ground.

In 2018, we moved to Sotheby's International Realty from KW and we've been there ever since. So I actually just got my six year anniversary at Sotheby's graphic, their marketing team gave us, but very high volume, high transaction team. We do a mix though. We're kind of like a hybrid. We do a mix of both retail, so helping buyers and sellers, but we also do investing, wholesaling, flips, that kind of thing too. Yeah.

Nate Smoyer (07:03.514)
Congrats.

Nate Smoyer (07:19.578)
wow. Very cool. We were actually KW agents at the same time. So how about that? Small world, very familiar with the team model as I was on the Ben Kenney team up in Bellingham. yes. Yeah. Well, if you're KW agent, you probably are at some point. All right. So let, let, let, let's, let's keep it moving here. So I'm going to ask a question. It's going to seem like a dumb question and it's really broad reaching, but I think.

Andrew Becker (07:24.206)
Okay. Yeah, nice. Yeah.

Andrew Becker (07:30.126)
Yeah, I'm familiar with him. Yeah, cool. Yeah.

Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. You should.

Nate Smoyer (07:48.794)
I think you're the person to answer this. How much room for innovation is there actually left for real estate teams?

Andrew Becker (07:57.198)
I think there's a lot. I mean, the use of technology that we built for our own team, which subsequently became what's known as Billions that teams across the country are using, kind of validated that for me personally, especially with AI. I know that's like a, we could have an entire session just on AI, but all this new stuff is coming out and you kind of have to keep up or you're going to get left behind.

Nate Smoyer (08:19.738)
totally.

Andrew Becker (08:24.75)
So I think, I know that's like a broad answer, but I think AI is such a broad topic and tech is such a broad topic that there's no like finite answer for that, I think, but it's like, take it to where you want to take it. If you have the wherewithal, if you have the capital and the mindset to it, sky's the limit with kind of what you can have technology do, and especially in that team model.

Nate Smoyer (08:50.81)
Yeah. And I think maybe we'll get into that a little bit here. So, you know, billions being a product that's really focused in on teams and we're kind of talking about teams a lot. Why focus on teams? Why not? Why not the number of individual agents or go big and sell to the brokerages? Why maybe break down the opportunity here because especially if you're not in the day to day working with the agents or brokerages, some, some people may not be really fully familiar with

Andrew Becker (09:08.782)
Yeah, that's a great question.

Nate Smoyer (09:19.578)
kind of how this all shakes out and breaks down and like why a team has some unique advantages. And of course, there's probably some disadvantages in comparison to be a solo agent or being as a brokerage.

Andrew Becker (09:31.95)
This is a great question. So the easy answer is I was on a team. I was the COO of that team for the better part of a decade. And I built it for our own selfish reasons, right? And we did it really well. And that was our, if we're going to commercialize this and give this to industry professionals, it just made sense because that's who we first and foremost built it for, our own team. And then we said, Hey, other teams out there, do you want to try this out?

Nate Smoyer (09:50.522)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (09:59.758)
they've been on ever since for the last two, three years, as we've been kind of building and adding teams and users here. But that's, we didn't want to chase the shiny object and go after brokerages, agents. We said, what do we do really well? And we said, well, who is this for? And it was four teams. It's an account. And I know we'll get a little bit more into it, but at a very high level, it's an accountability metric machine on steroids with

Nate Smoyer (10:18.426)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (10:28.27)
all these different components from like what a team would need to operate on a day -to -day basis. So Omnichannel communication, e -signature, transaction, listing management, commission management, you name it. From the time someone says like, hey, I'm interested, all the way through closed or dead and whatever, it tracks everything for you automatically from the way we have our system architected. So it just works really, really well for teams. We had touched on this a little bit.

in the pre -episode meeting, but it can also work for a solo agent with the ambitions of building out a team. Because then you... So getting into a little bit of the architect and how Billions works, it's modular features. And what I mean by that is we have all these different features that one could use, but if you do not need it, you simply don't enable it. So it's there in the background, but you're not turning it on.

Nate Smoyer (11:07.898)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (11:27.31)
direct mail. If you don't want to send direct mail today, you don't have to and we can hide it. But if you want it in six months, we literally just turn it on and it just works from day one in less than 24 hours. This is an example. But a solo agent could get a streamlined version. And then if they are ambitious and they have goals and dreams of creating a team, it can grow and scale with them. And this is true for smaller to mid -sized teams as well who want to grow without having to change

Nate Smoyer (11:39.258)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (11:56.75)
platforms, right? So that's one of the things that I went through. We were on, I won't name drop any, but we were on probably eight different platforms. As we grew, we would outgrow that platform and then to have it do what we needed it to do would either mean moving platforms or a Zapier connection and then like another tool and another tool. And our last prototype version was a well -known CRM with Zapier and eight different tools.

And it was a nightmare to maintain, costly to pay for. And when something broke, it was, it was super stressful. So it was like, you know what? These tools are great for what we needed at a certain point, but when we outgrew it and, and didn't want to throw away our tech and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours of actually building it out, we said, how can we do this ourselves? And that's what Billions turned out to be.

Nate Smoyer (12:56.794)
This is a trend, I think, not just within the residential space. This is kind of happening in all different verticals of real estate where you have the incumbent way of doing things and companies have built up big presence and they're very good at doing one through four type activities. And there's still some things that were left offline. And then we saw this surge of money come into PropTech and it's really continued.

Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (13:24.206)
Right.

Nate Smoyer (13:25.146)
And so what we saw was a rise of the point solution, point solutions, getting a lot of attention, really better solving, you know, contextual problems. And then you, you naturally see then the larger companies or the incumbents are like, Hey, we're not going to try and rebuild that. Why don't you, why don't we just acquire this? We're going to consolidate the challenge still for those incumbent companies is they still are maybe on older architecture or they have maybe some outdated.

frameworks of like how they solve problems. And it opens opportunity for something like that's modular to come in with all this thought about at the start, the ability to build this out at the start and have that all encompassing tool set versus point solution to point solution. And quite frankly, the Zapier connection is, you know, using Zapier can be magical of like how it gets tools to talk together. But you talked about the maintenance in the upkeep invariably Zapier will break and it's not a problem of Zapier. It's just

That's just what happens. Like stuff changes inadvertently and connections break. And if you have eight tools to connect with Zapier, that could easily be, you know, eight tools connecting with Zapier could easily be like 30 different zaps happening.

Andrew Becker (14:31.47)
Yo.

Andrew Becker (14:39.63)
Well, not to mention that, but they charge, there's different buckets of how many zaps, right? You're doing. And if you do, yeah, if you do very, very high volume, like a lot of the teams, like we have a team in Tennessee, they do close to a thousand deals a year. They set hundreds of appointments. That would be very costly tool, right? Not to mention the maintenance part that we kind of just touched on, but you're getting into like that enterprise level plan with Zapier that could be

Nate Smoyer (14:45.546)
yeah, yeah, and you have to pay for that.

Andrew Becker (15:09.646)
hundreds or thousands depending on the volume there. So we remove that. Obviously, one thing I'll mention is we're built on the backend of Salesforce. So the most powerful CRM, you know, $250 billion company headquartered in San Francisco, tons and tons of amazing resources, and it's very open. That's another thing that kind of sets billions apart. And what I ran into quite frankly on other platforms,

Nate Smoyer (15:25.434)
Yep. Yep.

Andrew Becker (15:39.502)
I would have the ability to do a Zapier connection and then deal with what we kind of just talked about. But with billions on Salesforce, you can obviously do a Zapier if you choose to. We don't recommend it. That's kind of like a last ditch, you know, most economical option, but you can just build it right in and you create a web hook through our open API and then it's just there and you're not having to deal with that Zapier connection, right?

It's an investment upfront if it's something super customizable that a customer wants to do, but it allows you and affords you to customize it to your wildest dreams. And that's one of the limitations of all the other platforms we're on is you can't do that. One other example, I'll just tell you real quick. We have a very large brokerage team in Tennessee. They have a recruiting effort going on and they were, they're almost like recruiting just as much as they were marketing and selling real estate sales.

Nate Smoyer (16:30.234)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (16:35.598)
And they were paying a fortune for their recruiting software, right? And they said, Hey, can we just move this into billions? And we built a backend app inside of billions. So now they don't even have to leave with its own page layouts, its own stages, its own contact cards. So the idea behind billions is you're not tab hopping or software hopping. We're saying inside of the platform, there's a lot of like Harvard Yale studies out there, like Google.

Nate Smoyer (16:58.554)
Yep.

Andrew Becker (17:03.918)
you know, mind flow, flow state of mind, and you'll be shocked by how much time is wasted literally going from one tab to another, or, you know, one screen to another. It's terrible. And it takes you about 30 minutes to get back into a flow state of mind when you do hop back and forth. So as much as we can, we like to refer to billions as like the source record or the source of truth. So anything happening with your leads all the way through whatever, you know, how

Nate Smoyer (17:12.954)
Adorable.

Nate Smoyer (17:26.522)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (17:32.974)
however far they make it, you can stay inside of billions. You don't have to leave to call them, to text them, to email them, to send them direct mail, to e -signature them. So it just makes it that much easier and stable. And then another kind of fun fact here is our customers on average can get rid of three to five third -party solution softwares on day one. And there's an instant return on investment because we do have so many

Nate Smoyer (17:42.618)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (18:02.062)
free native features like document storage, data and analytics. If you're using a third party connector through Zapier, you can get rid of it. It comes with 135 KPI reports, everything you need to run your business for free and it works from day one. You don't have to manually update any report ever. So it just tells you all this stuff proactively, which is super helpful.

Nate Smoyer (18:24.922)
Let me ask you this, I mean, because you talked about this being like an accountability platform and steroids and, you know, the idea that this is collecting the, you know, as you guys put it, automatically collect and track the data that matters.

When we think about that, what does the industry often get wrong when it comes to tracking and collecting data to better power the operations and efficiency of a real estate team?

Andrew Becker (18:53.102)
Well, number one, I think just at a very high level, you're running a business, right? And how do Fortune 500 companies run their businesses? They make decisions based off of data. And you would be surprised. I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of agents and teams. And I'm like, where did your last 10 deals come from? And they don't even know that our system. That's like a basic, you know, data point that we get, but our system will tell you.

how many interested leads you need to close a deal, how many listing agreements you have to give out to close a deal, down to like the, hey, I need to be able to project and to plan around everything we have going on. And that's how you really transform your business. In the past, like I fell victim to it as well. I had a coach and he would come once every six months in person. He'd be like, hey, Andrew, I'm coming up.

All day, I want to know every lead you got by lead source, how many appointments by lead source, how many transactions, how much money, how much does it would stress me out. And I had like a, an Excel spreadsheet that my executive assistant offshore was filling out. And I'm like, I have no clue if this is even accurate or not. And it like, it just, the month leading up to that was like hell for me to be perfectly honest. Now, because of the way we collect data so easily and seamlessly.

Nate Smoyer (20:02.01)
Hehehehe

Nate Smoyer (20:13.69)
Yeah.

Andrew Becker (20:18.254)
And I'll explain that in a second. You are getting every data point, unless you want something super specific, Nate, like how many pies I passed out that led to a deal from a high level, like this is what a business owner would need to know. We give you all of that, but now you're manipulating the data to show what you need to see versus trying to find it, hoping it's accurate, and then trying to graphically represent it somehow. So I'll give you an example.

Nate Smoyer (20:33.754)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (20:48.11)
If you ask me, you know, how many appointments did you set last quarter? I would know from using the system. I'll go to the, the manager dashboard and there's a little, you know, goal setting set this quarter type of thing. And then you're like, well, actually show me by month. I literally go to that report that I know where it lives and I click edit and I say, don't show me by quarter, show me my month. And then you're like, show me by lead source and by month and by the appointment center, click, click, click.

here's what you need, Nate. And you have that information. You're making business decisions on that in less than 30 seconds versus like, honestly, it would take me two, three weeks to gather my data. And I was like texting my team members or looking in emails and seeing how many appointments came from where. And it was like, it was a disaster. So that's kind of like one of the benefits here. And the way we do this in case anyone is wondering, or in case you're wondering, is we have a linear workflow.

Nate Smoyer (21:36.794)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (21:46.222)
of how to progress a lead from the time they come in through closed through a series of web forms. And there's one way to progress a lead in one way only. I made it super simple. So a new lead comes in, you set an appointment, you click on a button called the appointment form. You sign a listing, you click on a button called the listing sign form. As a series of fields that you fill out, some are required, some are mandatory. You can customize that as well. You click save. And then in real time, all your numbers churn.

So they know Andrew, the appointment center just closed a deal that was a Google PPC lead that Nate, the agent signed and it brought in $30 ,000 gross. Here's all the costs of goods sold in the company netted $22 ,500. And that is how you, it's very repeatable, predictable. So it's very easy to adapt and to train on. So when you have an agent saying, Hey, what do I do after the appointment? You can do it on your desktop or your phone.

Say, hey, Nate, when you go on an appointment, the company needs to know what happened on that appointment, right? So when you're in your phone, when you're in your car, get out your phone, go to the lead and click on the post appointment form, fill it out and click save. And then the entire team is instantly notified of Nate went on this $2 million listing and signed it. And you know, the marketing team is involved in that email. It's called a summary email.

They'll say, Hey, new listing signed 123 Main Street, 2 million bucks. We're doing, we're throwing the whole marketing playbook at this listing. So in real time, the team on the backend support staff is now getting ready, you know, social media, scheduling photos, cleaning without Nate having to drive to the office, debrief them on what happened. And that's what you do on repeat over and over again. So there's five forms, depending on where you are, you fill it out, you move on with your life and then.

Nate Smoyer (23:37.402)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (23:39.758)
All this awesome automation happens on the back.

Nate Smoyer (23:43.418)
Yeah. And I, you know, I, I think for some who have taken the time to break down all the individual tasks it takes, to complete a transaction. And I know you obviously know this in detail, but it's a long list. It's, it reminds me of the, the, I think it's one of those like engineering type exercises of you ask someone create a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, right? And then you say like, okay, what I need you to do is write down every step in order to do that.

And I don't know if I actually went through this in school or like someone told me about it, but when I start thinking about it, it hurts. It's very painful for me to think about because if you actually break every single movement down, the list of tasks is tremendous. And teams, you know, sometimes the efficiency comes here because the breakdown of tasks and projects enables people who are not the agent to complete.

work so that the agent can do the most important work, which is work with the client, communications with the client, you know, being out in the field where they can be versus being stuck doing busy work and updating things and, you know, the minutia of like scheduling the sign person or, you know, stuff like that. So this is what can really drive some of those efficiencies and, you know, helping agents move forward. I like to think, kind of

Andrew Becker (24:44.974)
Yes.

Andrew Becker (25:00.622)
Yeah

Nate Smoyer (25:12.826)
kind of talk through that a little bit more though, because we're at this really interesting moment in the industry. There's been commission compression. There's a little bit of turmoil, if you will, around buyer agent commission, what's gonna happen. And then of course, we have a significant lack of inventory available on the market. Sellers are not exactly rushing to sell and

what a lot of people don't realize is that a majority of sellers are also buyers. So it doesn't just hurt one direction. It hurts two directions. So for agents who are thinking about how they're going to get through this, this time, maybe you can help drive home and underscore this is, you know, if like, how does tech help agents get through this with removing a lot of that busy work because. His business becomes more scarce. Do you have to be able to complete and move faster and compete at a

Andrew Becker (26:06.03)
Yeah.

Nate Smoyer (26:11.61)
at an edge that others around you are not.

Andrew Becker (26:15.47)
Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head right there. It's kind of like the theory of doing more with less, right? And the idea behind billions is you can do a lot more with less people, tools, tech, et cetera, costs in order to increase that profit margin. So if you didn't change anything else about your platform or your business, I should say, this platform will help increase your profit margin. And you make more money.

to then be able to put more money back into your business. But the really big kicker, I'll give you like a few real world examples here is, and this is for solo agents, this is for teams, but the administrative burden on planning, even like, we'll stick with like a listing, right? There's all these dates and deadlines and all this stuff that needs to happen. You in billions, when you sign a listing, you click on the listing sign form and you fill in those dates.

Instead of, for one small example here, I sign a listing and there's 15 different dates we need to track. And then me or someone on the team has to go to the calendar or put it on a whiteboard in billions how it works down to the individual date. It'll automatically put those on your calendar and by individual date. Like if there's a EMD due date and me and Nate.

want that on our calendar, we can do that. But if I'm the only one that needs the projected on market date, it can only go on my calendar. And then it will remind you day of three days before, seven days before, hey, this due date is coming due. And then if that date changes, it'll automatically remove it from your calendar and put it for whatever the new date is. So you don't think that's a lot, but if you're doing 30, 40, 50, hundreds of deals, that is...

minutes every single time, but that is hours and weeks over the course of the year that you are saving time. So that's one very small example. And then we do a lot of internal communication, but you also do external communication with attorneys and title companies and, and the buyer or the seller. We also have the ability to send and receive emails directly from Billion. So we have

Nate Smoyer (28:11.642)
totally.

Andrew Becker (28:32.558)
all these awesome templates. I'll give you one example, like the EMD due date. You submit a listing and it knows the EMD is due on July 10th, right? And you say, hey, Billions, tell me on July 10th to reach out to the title company and say, Virginia is a title company state. So it might be an attorney wherever else you are, but remind me to reach out to title company ABC and say, hey, did Nate give you his EMD? Do you have it? Can you confirm it? And it will remind you of that and say, by the way, use EMD.

you know, title company confirmation email. It'll pull in all the merge fields, give you that 95 % done email. You, you know, you quality check it, you remove what doesn't make sense for that particular deal, click send. They'll tell you if the title company opened it, if they reply, it'll come in and that's just done right in there. So you're not going to your email and then doing it. We, we bidirectional sync with Gmail and Outlook, or sorry, Gmail and yeah, Microsoft Outlook for free.

for email and calendar. So everything is syncing and everything is just working. So you can use the templates we give you, make your own, but that's one very small example how instead of spending half an hour adding dates to calendars and, you know, amending them and taking you more time. Now you're going out, hosting an event or meeting a new buyer. You're just doing it from your car. And the way this works Nate is, I use this analogy. When I was 18, my dad gave me a book called the automatic millionaire.

Nate Smoyer (29:33.878)
that's huge, yep.

Nate Smoyer (29:51.45)
Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Becker (30:00.43)
And the idea was when you start working, you take 20 % of your paycheck and you put it in like a Vanguard S &P retirement fund, right? You set it up once and then as your, you know, your paychecks go into your bank account, it just feeds into your retirement account. You never look at it again. That is what Billions is. We have something called Billions Connect. It's the engine on the backend where you set all these rules like me and Nate get the EMD due date on our calendar.

but only Andrew gets the projected on market. Set it up once and then as you're clicking save on these forms, it happens over and over. And then when you get more teammates, you switch teammates, whatever, you amend those, but that's the idea. So instead of having to work in it, you're just clicking on a form, clicking next, and then it does all this great stuff for you.

Nate Smoyer (30:51.832)
super cool. Andrew, if we're gonna jump down to the bottom of the show, a segment I like to call For the Future. For the Future is when I get to ask each guest who comes on the show to give their best predictions based on the following four questions. Are you ready to play? All right, number one, nice and easy. What does billions look like one year from now?

Andrew Becker (31:04.014)
okay. Yeah, let's do it.

Andrew Becker (31:12.142)
I kind of touched on this before a little pre -production, but we not only do retail buyer and seller, but we also have an investor wholesale component too on the backend. And what we are seeing kind of across the country is with the scarcity of inventory and business, teams are now looking to add lines of revenue. And I think like this is what we did, and this is what a lot of our billions users are doing too. They're getting into different niches.

Nate Smoyer (31:31.706)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (31:40.942)
like buy and flip or wholesaling, wholesaling, buy and hold that kind of thing. And Billions is building out that backend. So you don't have to have a separate platform to run and operate your business, right? You can still stay in there. So I think we're going to see different aspects in Billions of what types of transactions you're doing. And then just to kind of catch all, I really think AI is going to help, you know, appointment setting, follow up that kind of thing.

There's something called Einstein AI and we have predictive analytics that we're rolling out too to say, hey, focus on this. This seems to be working. Were you aware of it? So I think it's just going to get even more hands off for the user and just spit out what's working, what's not, who's working, who's not, that kind of thing for our users.

Nate Smoyer (32:19.098)
Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (32:31.322)
Yeah, I actually, I attended, I'm pretty optimistic about the integration of AI into operations platforms and NCRMs. I think that there's, especially when it comes to sales and marketing, both on the post analysis. So you can retro look back at your numbers and see, Hey, what happened? What was, what should I, how should I be looking at this? Most people I think are still not sure how to run a Cape, you know, to put together a pivot table to identify the KPIs.

Andrew Becker (32:51.79)
Yeah.

Nate Smoyer (33:00.826)
of which are the levers and which are the buttons in their business. So I think that there's pretty good potential for that. And certainly high volume teams, I think predictive analytics is good because the agent business is pretty dang difficult to predict the future on that.

Andrew Becker (33:15.894)
Yeah, I agree. I mean, you need every advantage you can have. And I'll again, I'll admit there had been times in the past when I didn't have my data set up properly. And we would do a postcard a month, right? And then my coach would be like, All right, well, he spent 120 hand postcards this year, what worked? And then we like really drilled down and it was like, only postcard A and D worked. These 10 other ones didn't even give us any return on investment in terms of revenue.

So Billion, I was like, shoot, how can I make it so I can see that in real time now? So we track that and we have a way to know if it's postcard A or postcard D coming in. And then there's reports that will tell you that. So every week, every month, every quarter, however you want to look at it. And we look at it bi -weekly, quarterly at the very latest, but we're like, what's working? And the analytics will just spotlight that for you. You put a fence around what is, you get rid of what's not. That's almost more important.

Nate Smoyer (34:02.49)
Yeah.

Andrew Becker (34:13.326)
than knowing what is working, what's not working, because you're wasting that money, right?

Nate Smoyer (34:19.546)
Yeah, it's crazy actually, now that you mentioned postcard, my largest residential listing came from, I sent them a postcard for like our movie night. And I must've sent hundreds, because I was like, I have no money and the team paid for the postcards. I was like, it'd be dumb for me to not send these. So I would sit there late at night sending these postcards just.

hoping somebody would call me. And these people call me, they're like, Hey, we got your postcard. We like the fact that you followed up like, okay, you want to come over today? We need someone to list our house. Sure. Yeah. I still fumbled the bag. So I learned a lot of hard lessons in that one. It was a very eclectic home with a lot of interesting distractions. So it photographed horribly.

Andrew Becker (35:03.79)
Thank you.

Andrew Becker (35:15.63)
Yeah.

Nate Smoyer (35:16.826)
and it's crazy to even think back now because it was like a $700 ,000 listing. I think we hit the market at 770 ,000 and I'm like, now that home, if I were to look it up, I'm almost certain would be like 1 .2 to 1 .4 in the exact same market. And this was not that long ago, 2017. So, just wild to think about, you know, a literal like 50 cent postcard was the thing that they called me and said, Hey,

Andrew Becker (35:36.43)
Yeah.

Nate Smoyer (35:46.17)
we just, we're going to give you the listing because you sent the postcard. and I still ask for a full 3 % on my end, you know, and they didn't bat an eye. So it was, it was, it was pretty wild to see that go into action. All right. Number two on for the future. This one's you're going to bring out the crystal ball. How is all this buyer agents commission kerfuffle going to shake out?

Andrew Becker (35:49.518)
That's crazy, man. And I'll give you another.

Andrew Becker (35:58.926)
That's cool.

Andrew Becker (36:12.654)
Man, this is hard because all the, in my opinion, it was like headline grabbing attention, like buyers have to get agents to sign agreements now. I've been doing that since 2013. So it's nothing new to me. And a lot of the teams that I work with have always been doing that. So I feel like it's going to be adapt and learn how to sell your value as a buyer's agent, or not to sound too harsh, like

Nate Smoyer (36:39.034)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (36:42.318)
leave the industry because there's been a lot of buyers in my opinion, like I'm in all these groups and I see people like, my gosh, how am I going to do this? And I'm like, if you, you know, how do you handle your listings? Don't you present a presentation and go through why you want to list with me, just switch and pivot your mindset to the buyer agreement and, and do it that way. So I feel like it's going to level the, you know, clear the herd.

so to speak, but I thought that was funny. That seemed to be like the number one concern for a lot of buyers agents who only work with buyers is, my gosh, what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do? I'm like, I've been doing that for 11 years or 12 years, whatever, however long I've been in the business. So this is what happens. Like you gotta adapt. I mean, tax benefits change all the time. You gotta figure out how to make that work too. This is nothing different. Just go get a coach, go get trained if you can't figure it out.

Nate Smoyer (37:11.77)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (37:27.642)
Totally. Yeah.

Andrew Becker (37:40.878)
There are ways to get by this. It's not a hurdle that shouldn't be too high to overcome.

Nate Smoyer (37:46.746)
Yep. Yeah. Number three here on For the Future, what's one industry trend do you think will continue, but you wish would go away?

Andrew Becker (37:54.606)
Well, I missed the front part of that question. Could you repeat it?

Nate Smoyer (37:57.818)
Yeah, sorry about that.

gonna mark that clip there lost you

Andrew Becker (38:06.286)
Yeah, I lost you. I didn't get any of that question. Could you repeat questions?

Nate Smoyer (38:06.522)
Okay, now you're back. Yep. That's okay. Yep. I got you here. Yep. Okay. Number three on for the future. What's one industry trend do you think will continue, but you wish would go away?

Andrew Becker (38:21.166)
that I wish would go away? that's a tough one.

Nate Smoyer (38:23.13)
Yes.

Andrew Becker (38:28.622)
that I wish would go away.

You know what's kind of annoying? It's industry related, but you have to be in it is fake Facebook group posts to generate leads somehow that kind of that kind of aggregate.

Nate Smoyer (38:43.93)
my gosh.

The anonymous, it's the anonymous member post. I know what you're talking about.

Andrew Becker (38:51.822)
Yeah, but it's like, yeah, yeah. So you have to be in in real estate to really understand what I meant by that. But if if I had to make a list, that's probably be on the top of it, because it's pretty obvious and people are starting to notice that. So that's my answer.

Nate Smoyer (39:08.634)
I'm gonna pull up Facebook right now, because you don't have to put anyone on blast. But honestly, I don't even care. It's real estate mastermind. I'm gonna pick on that group. I don't know who runs it. I don't care who runs it. There's 302 ,000 members in this Facebook group. And actually, I left this group recently because of this exact same reason. It's the people who run this group do these anonymous posts. And they're just like, I mean,

Andrew Becker (39:19.022)
Nate Smoyer (39:38.042)
two by four dumb type posts of like, you know, my buyer says he doesn't want to put down an earnest money deposit, but we're under contract, what should I do? And it's posted as an anonymous, and it just is such an obvious, like this isn't real. You have a managing broker. Actually, all of these questions that get posted in this group should be going to your managing broker. And if you are the managing broker, you need to quit and go join another brokerage because you are not a managing broker.

Andrew Becker (39:40.334)
I'm going to go to bed.

Andrew Becker (40:04.11)
Yeah. Right.

Nate Smoyer (40:06.138)
I mean, I can't, I can't handle it. And I have one more piece I'm gonna speak on this, because I think it needs to get called out, is that all the stuff about the lawsuit on buyer agent commissions always having been negotiable. And I'm gonna just say this bluntly, because I think it needs to be said, but it is what it is. Guys, there's a lot of self -incriminating evidence all in these Facebook groups, where you have used scripts on how you say it's not negotiable, it's always 6%.

You know, don't worry. The buyer's agent pays, you know, the, you know, it's free to work with me, this, that, and the other. I'm like, you guys have been saying this for years. So it's on you. You really, you found something to poke at me to get me all proud up.

Andrew Becker (40:42.446)
Yup. Yup. Honestly man, I Yeah, that was the best answer you've ever received for question number three. Admit it.

You

Nate Smoyer (40:56.25)
This is good. Very few things get me pumped up like this, but that one really does irritate me, because there's a lot of disingenuineness that came out post -settlement, and I've been in these groups for years, and I've been watching the same thing over and over. All right, Andrew, one more here for the future, and then we're gonna wrap it up. What's one thing you believe will dramatically change or fade away in real estate as a result of tech advances?

Andrew Becker (41:01.87)
Press.

Andrew Becker (41:23.886)
One thing that dramatically changed, honestly, appointment setting. There are people doing appointment setting and follow up. I think that is the next wave of automation. There's all these AI and woo sender and all these amazing 24, 7, 365 appointment setting bots out there.

I think that's going to be huge. Unless the FCC, I know that they've cracked down on like how you can use an AI bot, but some of them, I don't know if you've looked into this yet, but like having a conversation like myself having one on my buddies developing one, it was like, I didn't know if it was Nate the person or Nate the robot. It was like amazing. And they are highly trainable. You're

basically replacing a 30 to 60 to $100 ,000 team member, right? With like a thousand dollar a month robot that never takes a day off and can follow up with 5 ,000 people a month. And there's no, you know, there's no ignoring that. So I think that's going to be freaking huge.

Nate Smoyer (42:45.946)
Yeah, I've demoed a handful of AI call center apps and some of them are a little bit clunky and awkward, but I've experienced a handful of pretty good ones. Yeah, and it does come down to how they're built to be trained and so that they can maintain the same conversation. You don't want people pranking it and be like, hey, can you go buy me a refrigerator or something like that? But...

Andrew Becker (42:59.15)
Yeah, there are really good ones out there.

Nate Smoyer (43:14.522)
Yeah, there's certainly a lot there. I think that you're totally right. I mean, even like follow up and confirming appointments, just that very action. And the way some of these apps work, like they confirm the appointment and then it sends a text to Slack and email to the agent or, and this is any industry that's not specific to real estate. And so, you know, any conversation that's ever happened and what the context was, and oftentimes the conversations are recorded just like you would get from a call center.

And so then you know exactly what was said in the transcript. So it is going to be very interesting to see how that gets deployed and its cost to real estate agents and teams. And I'm fascinated to see how that takes shape.

Andrew Becker (43:44.238)
Yeah.

Andrew Becker (43:49.038)
No.

Andrew Becker (43:52.686)
Yeah.

Andrew Becker (44:01.038)
Yeah, well, the cost is going to be one tenth of a person who earns commission as well. Not saying like they're not needed. I think it's going to be, I think it's going to happen eventually, but truth be told, we are, we're most likely partnering with one of the top AI, you know, bot appointment setters inside of Billions. We're doing that with a beta customer, but just like everything else and Billions like that source record, all of the calls are always recorded, text messages, emails. So.

Nate Smoyer (44:19.898)
Mm -hmm.

Andrew Becker (44:31.182)
you can go in and literally see every conversation ever, whether it's from a human like me doing it or from the spot. So you'll always know what happened if it was like two weeks ago or two years ago and say, who's that Nate dude from Google PPC? Let me go listen to the last like four phone calls that we had. And then you have that for your record. But I think that's going to be big. And there are some that are

you know, top tier ones that are fantastic for a fraction of the costs of, you know, people get sick, you have to train them, you have to hold them accountable. So I think that's going to be a big, big shift pretty soon.

Nate Smoyer (45:08.538)
Sure, yeah.

Nate Smoyer (45:14.234)
Andrew, thanks for coming on the show today. This was a lot of fun. Appreciate you breaking down what Billions is building. You know, the need for bringing solutions to teams that are very specific to them and giving them that flexible, the flexible modular type solution capability to be able to track and analyze what they're doing in their business, but also to help make them more efficient. Before we close out, for those who want to get in touch with you and or learn more about Billions, where do they go and how do they do that?

Andrew Becker (45:40.878)
Yeah, you can either shoot me an email at andrew at join billions .com or go to the website join billions .com and check us out, schedule a demo, get a recorded demo, that kind of stuff. And we're also all over social media. I'm DMing all the time with, with people who find us. So you can, any which way you'd like to get in contact with us. That's how you could do it.

Nate Smoyer (46:10.938)
Sweet. Well, appreciate you coming on the show. We'll catch you later.

Andrew Becker (46:14.734)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I had a lot of fun.

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