Uncovering Hidden Inventory in Real Estate with Amanda Orson, Founder and CEO of Galleon

Nate Smoyer (00:01.617)
Amanda, welcome to the show.

Amanda Orson (00:03.726)
Thank you for having me.

Nate Smoyer (00:05.105)
Okay, so we got on a really fun pre -show tangent about Pennsylvania. You having worked in and done business in Philly, now out a little bit in the rural county areas. But there's some things about Pennsylvania that are very specific. So I'm gonna drop some terms here and see if, give me a thumbs up or thumbs down if you will. Birch beer.

Thumbs up, okay, cool. Scrapple.

Amanda Orson (00:37.622)
No. No. It's pig face. No one wants to eat pig face.

Nate Smoyer (00:38.481)
Thumbs down, what, no? Okay, we'll talk about, we'll work on that later. All right, the last one, the last one's a very regional thing. Tomato pie. Thumbs up, all right. Where have you gotten or had tomato pie?

Amanda Orson (00:52.238)
thumbs up.

Tomato pie cafe, obviously. Lid -its, there's one in, the original one is in Lid -its. Mm -hmm, yeah.

Nate Smoyer (00:57.413)
in Harrisburg. there's one. OK. Is that the original? OK, I'm a Corpolis guy out in Phoenixville. So, well, anyway, before we go too far down rabbit holes here, I've got Amanda Orson. She is founder and CEO of a company called Galleon. Galleon is direct to consumer real estate marketplace. They've got a interesting process list in two minutes.

They launched that back in January, closed the pre -seed round in February, and now building up a marketplace highlighting inventory that's been hiding. Is that a good way to describe that there?

Amanda Orson (01:39.758)
Yeah, absolutely. I think we all kind of know this market exists or all of those unsolicited door knockers, direct mail pieces, flyers, and cold texts from some rando investor would not have a positive return on ad spend. Like they wouldn't do it if it didn't work. So we all know that there is more than just what you see on the MLS available.

Nate Smoyer (02:02.353)
Right. And this now, this used to be, there was kind of, it used to have a little bit more visibility because this was like a make me move. I think that's what Zillow had called it years ago. And I have to tell you this, when I became a real estate agent in 2017, I was, I was very scrappy and trying to find any way to generate leads. And so without telling my wife, I put our household into make me move.

because I figured I could find buyers. And so if someone came and bought my house with a price, well then cool. And if they didn't wanna buy my house for that price, now I knew that they were looking to buy homes. And I did actually get a few leads. I was just not a very great real estate agent for residential buyers. But there's certainly, there's a way to work everything.

Amanda Orson (02:52.078)
fantastic that's a use case I hadn't even considered in all of our customer interviews and storyboarding that had not occurred to me.

Nate Smoyer (02:59.505)
There we go. We got something valuable out of this conversation. To start off though, I actually want to dig into a little bit about your background and history here because you've been a CEO and a founder several times over. You've worked in real estate, you've worked in FinTech, outside of these. What's different about how you're approaching building Galleon versus some of your previous ventures?

Amanda Orson (03:25.134)
Sure. I would say early on, most of my ventures were bootstrapped and they were mostly solo ventures or ventures with myself and a very small team with the exception of one or two partnerships or where I was building something under a larger umbrella organization. So basically instead of going out and obtaining outside capital, the capital was implied and I built something within those organizations, but it was intrapreneurial. The difference is this particular venture,

is actually venture backed. It is the first time that I've ever done anything venture backed on my own. I've worked within one organization that was venture backed before. And it's because I recognize that the size of the problem and the speed with which we will have to tackle it to win this category are necessary. It's necessary to take outside capital to go big fast.

Nate Smoyer (04:14.417)
Hmm. I've not actually had that, that particular answer, you know, of 200, I think I've published episode 207 earlier this week of the show. People talked about the problems and they've talked about the speed, but they've not used that as a reason as to why they've gone the venture route. And so maybe we, we should just, just jump right into the size and the scope of the problem here. We kind of hinted at it, right? There's this,

hidden inventory in the market. I try to follow where inventory is going on a week by week basis to see where the market is. We're still very far below what we've previously deemed as a healthy real estate market. So what is the size of this, the problem here? How much inventory is out there just kind of hiding in plain view?

Amanda Orson (05:05.582)
I think it depends on where in the spectrum you think of the seller, right? So if you're thinking of the inventory that's currently available on the MLS, I would say that is an extraordinarily motivated seller. You are only there probably because of an event. You are selling your home because you've had a new baby, because you have an estate sale, you're moving, because you have a new job, you're getting married. There is an event that is driving why you are selling your home. And...

Nate Smoyer (05:32.817)
Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (05:33.358)
It makes sense because the MLS listing process is so high friction and it's so much commitment. You don't do it passively. You only do it when you are an extraordinarily active seller. So we seeing the paucity of inventory back in like August of last year, I think it was like 690 ,000. We wanted to understand what's the universe of people who like me are targeted for one of the homes that we're currently renting out.

What's the universe of people that would sell for the right price, but have no reason to sell. There's no extenuating circumstance or event driving that sale. And what we did was we took under a quantitative survey and then followed up with a lot of qualitative customer interviews. And our initial hypothesis was that...

Nate Smoyer (06:03.857)
Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (06:20.177)
Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (06:22.862)
If even one in 200 homeowners was a persuadable seller, which was just our definition of somebody that has a price in mind that would sell for that price, but just doesn't have a compelling event driven reason to do so, it would double the MLS inventory that we currently see, because it was around 700 ,000. There's somewhere between 141 and 150 million units in the United States defined by single family homes and condominiums. It's a bit of a war of research, but.

Nate Smoyer (06:46.609)
Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (06:49.038)
One in 200 people would double the available MLS inventory. And what we found throughout our quantitative survey nationwide of homeowners and our qualitative research of follow -ups with some of those homeowners and additional people that we knew through one or two degrees of separation is that number is a lot closer to one in 10.

Nate Smoyer (07:07.985)
That's a lot that would add a lot to the availability of homes for sale on the market. So is it just because no one has asked them, hey, would you sell for this price or are they too shy to list or like, why do people stay hidden? Why wouldn't they just put it, like why not just put your house on market, you know, Facebook marketplace and say, we'll take, you know, X price and then go from there.

Amanda Orson (07:20.75)
Yeah.

Amanda Orson (07:32.718)
I think that a lot of people don't see that as an opportunity, one, but two, because I think that the way that we are ingrained to think about buying and selling homes is via a real estate agent on the MLS. There is no other way to do so. And if you want to be syndicated via the normal...

real estate aggregators right now, you are doing it via the MLS. Like you pointed out Make Me Move, for example, which is a feature that Zillow deprecated in, I think, 2018. Shortly around the timeframe that they joined the National Association of Realtors. And one of the stipulations in the National Association of Realtor rules is that you must prioritize MLS listings. So all of the other listings that you see are below one degree of friction.

Nate Smoyer (08:14.737)
the reasoning.

Amanda Orson (08:17.358)
That's actually the crux of the lawsuit on Rex v. Zillow that Rex unfortunately lost on appeal, I think, back in the fall. But Rex was a low -cost brokerage headquartered out of, I believe, California with a very smart entrepreneur, Jack Ryan, which sounds like a superhero. I think it is a superhero. But Jack Ryan is an incredibly smart guy. I highly -

Nate Smoyer (08:25.137)
Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (08:37.329)
If it's not, someone's going to write the story of the superhero real estate investor named Jack Ryan. Yeah.

Amanda Orson (08:42.286)
They should. They should. He built Rex and it was basically a low cost brokerage that was trying to create liquidity for real estate, trying to find a way to like make this process faster, lower friction and a lot cheaper for individual home buyers and sellers. And he used Zillow to syndicate some of those listings. And then once they moved everything that was not on the MLS behind one degree of friction, it torpedoed his business. It absolutely tanked it despite all of the venture capital that had gone into it. And I think that a lot of people that are currently listing their house like by owner, which is the

other alternative now that make me move is gone don't recognize that you don't see that listed unless you individually check a box and the opportunities for you to list by owner anywhere on the internet right now are more or less limited to Facebook marketplace Craigslist you know it's it's not where you're going it's interruption marketing you're not probably going to Facebook marketplace to buy a house you're probably going to Facebook marketplace to you know

buy, I mean, I live on a farm, so probably buy a piece of farm equipment if you're me. But in general, you're gonna go buy a dresser or something like that. You're not going to buy a house there.

Nate Smoyer (09:51.953)
without getting into the details. Facebook Marketplace is convinced of a handful of things about me. I'm looking to buy a motorcycle, Western art, and random outbuildings. Those are the listings that I get under the for you listings within a 500 mile radius. And of course, they all want to take me to Nebraska or to pretty almost central Wyoming. Unfortunately, I can't get to most of those. So, okay, now you have worked...

Amanda Orson (10:01.71)
Hahaha!

Nate Smoyer (10:21.457)
What I find interesting specifically about your experience though is because you're not just like saying like, Hey, we should just go like find ways to like get these people to sell. And then we'd have more listings. Like you've actually done this. Like you've had to, as an investor, find properties that would sell and to make those, those properties work and improve them. Like, can you talk a little about like, what are the ways in which you get to these people to say, Hey, there's an option here.

It doesn't have to be MLS. It doesn't have to be on retail. And this can work for everyone.

Amanda Orson (10:55.374)
Sure, I'll give you a very personal experience. My partner and I flipped homes in Philadelphia in what I would call a marginal. I think generous characterization would be to say that they were marginal neighborhoods at the time. If you're in Philadelphia or from Philadelphia, you would now know the neighborhoods of like Fishtown and anything north of Northern Liberty is to be very good. At the time, they were just okay. And we had no business flipping these homes. But we were basically doing guts stud renovations. We have all the blood, sweat and tears to go along with it.

And the first time we sold one, it was like a punch in the gut because I did not anticipate how expensive sale, like the sale of the property, the listing fee would be. It was almost 9%, which wiped out our profit, like completely wiped out all of the time and all of the money we had sunk into one of these Philadelphia real homes. And I...

Nate Smoyer (11:38.417)
yeah.

Nate Smoyer (11:49.233)
How long did you think it took you to do that flip?

Amanda Orson (11:53.39)
We were brand new, so that first one, probably six months.

Nate Smoyer (11:57.145)
So six month education to find out there was no margin left at the end of the day. That's brutal.

Amanda Orson (12:01.454)
No margin, right? And we literally like got two studs, everything in the kitchen, the bathroom, there was only one bathroom. You name it, we did it, hanging drywall, putting in doors, things that I have no business doing. But we learned through the University of YouTube. And yeah, we had it completely wiped out. It was a very, it was like a shocking experience. So when we went to...

Basically, I exited a company that I didn't expect to exit. We had recently purchased a home in Connecticut. And when I purchased that home, that is one of the 21 states in the United States where you must have a real estate attorney at closing. Not all states require this, but Connecticut is one. So I knew the attorney who had been on the other side of the table when we purchased that home.

Nate Smoyer (12:40.081)
Amanda Orson (12:47.182)
And I had this crazy idea when we knew that we couldn't, we didn't have a reason to move in Connecticut when we sold that company, but we didn't have a compelling reason to stay. And I knew at the time, because remote work was not a thing that it is now, it'd be very difficult to build another company where we were in Bucollic, Gilmore Girls, Northwestern Connecticut. So I had to move somewhere. I didn't know where that where it was going to be. And on a lark, I put my own personal home up on Make Me Move in 2015 on a Thursday. And that...

Nate Smoyer (12:59.921)
Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (13:17.326)
Thursday, Friday, I got a whole bunch of inquiries. I did what I now have words for being KYC. I know your customer or look these people up to make sure they were real people. And then I had two blocks of open houses Saturday, Sunday. I had multiple full price offers and one was full price all cash. So on Monday, I went.

Nate Smoyer (13:27.665)
Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (13:36.878)
back down to the town square, which is a thing in Buchholic, Northwestern, Gilmore Girls, Connecticut. And I had talked to the attorney that had been on the other side of the table and I'm like, hey, David, can you write me a contract for this? And he's like, sure, no problem. And I'm like, okay, how much would it be? He's like $750. And just like that, for $750, I sold my home in 30 days. Like it closed in 30 days. And it was such...

light bulb moment for me because it stood in such sharp contrast with my experience of having invested all this time and sweat and and money into the Philadelphia home that cost me 3 % and wiped out my profits here I mean I probably saved I don't recall exactly what the house sale price was at that point but probably on the order of $20 ,000 if the standard commission rate was 6 % something like that it was just a no -brainer.

and I thought, why would I ever not do this in the future?

Nate Smoyer (14:37.17)
Wow, that's a pretty illustrative story here of like demonstrating just like how expensive it, and I do think it often gets missed of like how expensive it really can be. For the marketplace itself that you guys are creating here, I wanna get into a little bit about building that. So it's one thing to know customers exist, it's one thing to know like, hey, there are some motivating factors that could get people to see like, hey, listing your home is a good idea. All right, so the conventional wisdom here is,

go get supply when building a marketplace and the demand is already there. I'm curious your approach on getting traction here of like how you're working both sides. Cause obviously if people are willing to sell, you want to get transactions done. You don't want to just accumulate these pocket listings, if you will. But at the same time, you have to have that supply to then give something to pay attention to from the demand side. So be curious to get your take on like how you're approaching building this marketplace.

of homes that would be for sale at the right price.

Amanda Orson (15:39.534)
So I'll give you some really inside baseball that your audience will probably appreciate because everybody is in PropTech or in real estate broadly. Our initial hypothesis was not that we needed to have a marketplace. Our initial hypothesis was that you did not fundamentally need another human being besides a real estate attorney to walk you through the process of buying or selling a home. We built the marketplace because we understood that trying to solve at the point of highest friction implicitly means that you need to solve for the seller.

under the old commission rules. Sitzer changed that. And then the post -Sitzer settlement of March 15th has changed our own thinking of what we're doing. So we had always envisioned not to be a marketplace per se, but use the marketplace as a customer acquisition tool to basically produce a piece of software that I'm referring to internally as our TurboTax for real estate. TurboTax is a good analogy because it is highly personalized. It...

Nate Smoyer (16:25.361)
Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (16:34.225)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (16:36.974)
requires, you know, it walks you through methodically what is a very complicated transaction. It has a lot of state and local regulations implied. And I'm like, there should be an analogy for that in real estate. And there simply hasn't been. Now, I don't think that's for everybody. I certainly don't think that's for first time home buyers. But for people that have bought and sold a couple of homes, yeah, it's probably going to be sufficient for purpose. So we have always been in gen - er, trying to -

figure out what the TurboTax for real estate is, and that's what we're actually building in background. The marketplace was simply our conduit to go and find capable and willing sellers who are experienced and own the home already, right? So we know that they're already experienced to basically funnel early users into this tool. The tool is not yet available. We're going to ship it probably in August. What's changed is,

Nate Smoyer (17:18.193)
Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (17:27.31)
Now, because of the Sitzer rules, or I should say the settlement post -Sitzer, we know that the biggest need is probably going to be on the buy side, not the seller side. So we're actually pushing this product into single player mode where previously it had been sort of a dual pained, this is the sell side, sell side takes an action.

buy side sees something. Now we're trying to figure out how do we build the software so that it can stand in for people that want to buy but do not want to be on the hook for a 3 % commission. Because they're about to be on the hook for a 3 % commission come mid -August unless the seller offers a concession, which I think will happen sometimes, but definitely not all of the time. And that 3%, as far as I've heard from every mortgage loan officer I've talked to, is not going to be rolled into the loan. So right now, our working theory is,

Nate Smoyer (18:06.481)
Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (18:15.022)
a down payment is actually 23 % plus your fees. It's not 20 % anymore. A lot of people don't recognize that yet. So that's the future we're building to. Back to the marketplace.

with that initial hypothesis in mind that the inventory is actually much larger. And there are a ton of people that would list if they had an opportunity to. We're like, that's kind of our long game. Let's go out and actually shine a light on this, what I would call passive inventory of persuadable sellers who think that they would sell for this number. And honestly, we figured out pretty early on in our qualitative research that the premium that they were assigning in some markets was.

Nate Smoyer (18:34.897)
Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (18:54.254)
call it 50 ,000 to $100 ,000. It's like five to 10 % over ask or something like that, which ends up in some of these markets working out to what the average home sale actually closes at because they come in over ask. So it's not as premium as they think it is. And we know that there is a lot of inventory in, for example, underutilized Airbnb's who those investors may just be covering the PNI, but it's certainly not creating a lot of margin for them on the other side. Do they need to sell it? No.

Nate Smoyer (19:08.305)
Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (19:24.014)
But would they sell it? Yes, that's sort of the marketplace that we're engendering.

Nate Smoyer (19:30.417)
I generally identify as team never sell. But I'm team never sell and like, I never want to appear as a motivated seller. I always wanna be like, yeah, sure, send me a contract. I'll take a look at it. And if it's, I'll sell anything. Almost anything is for sale. It's just, I don't wanna be the one who's like, I'm trying to sell this thing. I wanna wait for someone to, I wanna wait for that opportunity. Like, I would like to buy what you have. Cool, it's for sale.

so this kind of speaks to me. I'm like, I kind of like this idea. I got a storage facility. If anyone's listening that I'm looking to offload the next year and a half or so, I don't really want to do the refile on that. but.

Amanda Orson (20:02.574)
I think that you're...

Amanda Orson (20:15.182)
you are way more common than you think is what I would say. So people that have bought, I'm not calling this for first time home buyers are not our market. People that have lived in the same home for 25 years are not our market. Our market are people for whom they have already done this transaction one or more times, probably two or more times. And for them, the dislocation between the cost and the value,

Nate Smoyer (20:34.257)
Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (20:41.71)
of selling through the traditional model is very obvious because in some cases they're going to have more experience buying and selling real estate than the realtor that they might hire. That's who we're building for.

Nate Smoyer (20:53.585)
Yeah, I mean, even I would say the last few transactions, for me, it's been like on the phone with an agent and it's always been remote. So like our house here, like we bought it while living downtown Chicago. We bought in South Dakota and I found a lender first. I said, who do you know that works at Aries? I got this guy. I've worked with him on a few transactions. Great. Put me in touch with him. And I get on the phone with him and said, okay, here's the offer. Like I didn't...

Amanda Orson (21:19.982)
Yeah.

Nate Smoyer (21:20.849)
Like there was no like, hey, how does this work? I was like, give them five day inspection contingency. We'll leverage the additional five days that you get that's built into the MLS contract. You know, we did 5 ,000 over asking or no, we did, we did like a 20 ,000 over asking up to 5 ,000 over appraisal. So if appraisal was at asking, then we could only pay 5 ,000 over asking, not the 20 ,000 on our offer. So that we like capped out how much we were willing to.

be competitive, you know, kind of thing. So like, yeah, and so like things like that. My agent didn't propose to me. He also didn't try and stop me from buying a house in a neighborhood where homes are literally falling into a mine that's collapsed underneath underground, which that's a whole other story. I'll send you that one. We can, we can relate that back to our love for Centralia, Pennsylvania. So then, okay, but there's still a lot of uncertainty here around the commission's shakeout, what it might mean for brokerages.

Amanda Orson (21:51.278)
Super smart.

Amanda Orson (22:08.59)
Yes, I was just going to say.

Nate Smoyer (22:19.729)
what it might mean for banks. So then do you, one of the theories and I'm thinking, I know they answer this, but one of the theories is that this is actually gonna, it's gonna shy agents away from wanting to work the buy side because of the pay structure being a little bit unpredictable or now they have to put this in writing upfront, hey, you owe this out of pocket. You have to sign a buyer's agency agreement. Do you have any take specifically on how that's gonna shape?

relationships, brokerages, and the opportunities this opens for tech.

Amanda Orson (22:51.95)
I think that it's already happening. There is a very large, and I'm sure it's not just this one brokerage, but there is a very large brokerage that I've seen the way that their listing agreements change year over year from 2023 to 2024. In 2023, the commission was in writing 6%. There were no blanks. I know this has always been technically negotiable, but...

Yes, negotiable with air quotes, but it was in writing 6%. That changed January 1st of 2024, and it now is three blanks. And this is a negotiation that's happening in every kitchen in the United States that this brokerage is representing that listing.

Nate Smoyer (23:21.233)
Yes.

Amanda Orson (23:33.742)
And the three blanks are, here's what the selling agent gets, here's what the buying agent gets, and here's what happens if there's dual agency. And what I can tell you from seeing some of those brokers' reports on their listings in markets is that around 10 to 15 % are implying right now, no buyer's agent.

Nate Smoyer (23:47.697)
Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (23:55.374)
none, like zero dollar commissions, and they're not on small homes. They're on like multi -million dollar homes. So if 10 to 15 percent are already trending in that direction, and we're already pre the settlement agreement, anticipating a downturn, I think Morgan, I don't want to misquote which bank, but one of them said roughly a third downturn in the buy side, year over year, it's already happening. Like that ship has sailed and it is not coming back.

Nate Smoyer (24:05.521)
Interesting.

Amanda Orson (24:23.79)
So the question is what happens next? We're gonna see margin compression for brokerages. Right now there are 700 ish thousand homes for sale. There are 1 .5 million in real tours and there are 120 ,000 ish brokerage is. Those numbers don't make sense. Like in any other industry outside of real estate, that is an unsustainable number of people that could service relative to the available inventory.

I think that you're going to see contraction. I think you're going to see consolidation. I think consolidation comes first. And I think that a lot of these people who are, let's call them like part -time, part -time area. Yes.

Nate Smoyer (25:05.425)
there's a very large number of part -time and inexperienced in the industry.

Amanda Orson (25:09.678)
I think that long tail is what shrinks first. And it should. Those are the people that are not actually taking this as a profession. For them, it's kind of like a side hustle. And if they can't make it on the buy side, what will end up happening is they will find another gig economy type job that will pay them more for their invested hours of time. That's where I think that this is going to contract first. But the long term, in my opinion, is that for a bespoke service,

you get to command a premium price. And I think that's the niche that real estate agents will hold long -term. They're gonna provide a bespoke service and they're gonna command the premium. But there will be commoditized, technologically advanced ways or technologically centric ways for humans to transact on their own. And that's what we're building toward.

Nate Smoyer (25:39.345)
Hmm.

Nate Smoyer (25:54.457)
Yeah. So, so then on the platform today, right? let's say, and, and I was taking a look, you guys actually have like quite a, you cover quite some ground. I mean, in a whole bunch of States and different cities, I kind of expected like one regional area. but then I saw, I was like, no, we're, we're actually like 20 some States is 30 some States, represented already on the platform. So if I see a property, I want to go buy it. I get, I click the button and says, get connected. What happens? How do I actually.

Amanda Orson (26:16.302)
Yep.

Nate Smoyer (26:23.825)
talk to this hour, how do I transact here?

Amanda Orson (26:26.254)
we do mutual KYC. So that's a big step change versus what the other marketplaces or other portals are doing right now. So we're verifying you and your identity, making sure that your email address conforms like bank level KYC that you would see on any other FinTech application, which is where some of our team's background is really additive.

Nate Smoyer (26:40.785)
Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (26:44.974)
We're making sure that you are a real human, that you're a US resident, that you have the email address associated with your real human identity. On the other side, we've also done that to make sure that the person who is listed is the person on the deed. And then only once we've confirmed mutual KYC, then we introduce you.

Nate Smoyer (27:03.441)
Makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, one of the, you know, I've picked up and learned from some of the other conversations I've had is like, you know, the challenges with the online instant transaction and real estate is, you know, verification of identity, but in verification of money, you know, those, those two very difficult pieces to do in any sort of like instantaneous way when it comes to real estate. There's obviously some other interesting and fun challenges such as like title and insurance and stuff like that, but that's a, that's a whole nother.

rabbit hole for another day. What I want to do here is I want to shift down to the final segment of the show, a segment I like to refer to as for the future. For the future is when I get to ask each guest who comes to the show to give their best predictions based on the following four questions. Amanda, are you ready to play? Okay, here we go. Easy one to start. Number one, what does Galleon look like one year from now?

Amanda Orson (27:50.254)
I'm ready.

Amanda Orson (27:57.934)
think will be the largest single repository of off -market non -MLS inventory in the United States. And I think that will be the largest technical brand to solve what happens if you're not using a real estate agent to transact.

Nate Smoyer (28:10.033)
Damn, that was a good answer. It's like you've written that down somewhere.

Amanda Orson (28:14.158)
No, I was just pontificating. I was totally spontaneous.

Nate Smoyer (28:16.145)
my gosh, that's so good. All right, here's a, here's a, it'll be a fun one. Five years out from now. Who will be the seller? It says, yes, I will sell if I get this price. Describe that seller to me.

Amanda Orson (28:34.382)
I think that our early adopter and our long -term value will always be to people who are real estate investor class, is the way I would describe it. People that have multiple single -family homes, either because they own multiple homes or because they are short or long -term rentals.

Nate Smoyer (28:59.025)
Number three here on For the Future, what's one industry trend you think will continue but you wish would go away?

Amanda Orson (29:08.046)
Hmm.

honestly, the internal industry gaslighting, like I don't understand that. But if you're to talk to the average, if you're to just take a sample on Twitter of the average conversation between real estate agents amongst themselves saying that nothing will happen, this commission rate's always gonna stay the same, 3 % is still gonna be assumed by buyer and seller. The amount that the industry,

is sort of self -reinforcing what doesn't make logical sense in a way that I think is detrimental to them because they could be preparing for a future that looks different is an unfortunate trend that I really think, I wish that would go away. I wish that people would at least take a more pragmatic view because it will help them preserve their own business and potentially create an opportunity for a new niche that they can occupy.

Nate Smoyer (29:45.585)
Hmm.

Nate Smoyer (30:05.649)
I think that's such, that's good insight. Are you also in the Facebook groups? my gosh. If you think Twitter is something, the, the, the amount of evidence I have to assume that was used and gathered from Facebook groups, from people admitting to and describing, you know, everything that could be a challenge or issue within the real estate industry, you'll, you'll find in groups. It's,

Amanda Orson (30:10.126)
I am not.

Nate Smoyer (30:35.601)
It's phenomenal. Some of those discussions I'm in on mostly because like I like being a fly on the wall and I don't read like celebrity gossip. I just read like insider real estate gossip, if you will. But, but it, it, you know, it blows my mind that, and it seems like it's, I don't, I don't want to accuse anyone of being an anti -customer, but there's sometimes it's like, Hey, you know, if it's better for the customer to go one way and you're a fiduciary to them, then it would seem like you should be making adjustments, not just claiming.

Here's a script on how I beat that and how we're never gonna change anything. Because that's the more common response I see.

Amanda Orson (31:11.598)
And I understand, like, the alignment of incentives here. The incentive is to maintain everything as it has always been. But if you look at literally any industry, centralization is not the future. It's not. There is not going to be a central way of doing things in the future for any industry. And that level of self -denial, and unfortunately, the level of rhetoric that reinforces the self -denial for less experienced people,

Nate Smoyer (31:23.537)
Mm -hmm.

Amanda Orson (31:37.39)
just short changes them the opportunity to go and be different in a way that will preserve and maybe enhance their business for the future.

Nate Smoyer (31:45.233)
Hmm. All right, last one here on For the Future. What's one thing you believe will dramatically change or fade away as a result of tech advances?

Amanda Orson (31:55.918)
I mean, this is a very biased, self -descriptive answer, but I think that there will be the 3 % buyer's agent is not likely to be the future. I think that there will be a niche for buyer's agency to occupy that commission rate, but that will be a very small, well -defined niche by people that are, for example, out of town, maybe new homeowners, things like that. But I think that for the mass market, 3 % buyer's agent fees are not the future. I will definitely...

From FinTech, what we've learned is that if you want to see the future of FinTech in the United States, look overseas. Because the United States doesn't have one regulatory body. It has a patchwork quilt of regulatory bodies, depending on what your product is across all 50 states, like different levels of federal regulatory bodies, et cetera. But eventually, we come around. And if you look overseas, I think that you will see what the future of real estate agency and brokerages are in the United States. It's just going to take a few years.

Nate Smoyer (32:27.793)
Hmm.

Nate Smoyer (32:43.217)
Mm -hmm.

Nate Smoyer (32:56.561)
I wouldn't doubt it. Amanda, this has been great. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for coming on the show to share about Galleon. The unique opportunity there is with, I keep calling it inventory hiding in plain sight. I don't know, but that's how it sounds to me. But the opportunity here to reach sellers where they're at and possibly bring them deals as well as helping buyers find their next home or forever home. Before we close out, for those who want to get in touch with you or learn more about Galleon, where do they go? How do they do that?

Amanda Orson (33:07.918)
Yeah.

Amanda Orson (33:23.982)
We are at gallion .io, it's G -L -L -E -O -N .io. You can absolutely at me on Twitter, I'm at Amanda Orson, or you can at gallion at gallion, G -A -L -L -E -O -N.

Nate Smoyer (33:35.953)
There it is, of course, I'll have all the links and relevant info on technest .io. You can find the episode and details there. Until then, I will for sure see you on Twitter. Thank you for being a PropTech leader on Twitter. This makes my mission to get more PropTech founders active on Twitter a lot easier since you're already there. But until then, catch you later.

Amanda Orson (33:56.878)
Thank you for having me.

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