Artificially Intelligent with Sam Maule and Maia Bittner

Real Estate Evolution Through Technology with Visionary Amanda Orson

• Sam Maule, Maia Bittner, Rachel Morrissey

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Prepare to step into the future of real estate with Amanda Orson, the visionary behind Galleon, as we discuss the seismic shifts taking place in property transactions. Through a lively chat with your hosts, Maia Bittner and Sam Maule , we'll uncover how Galleon is charting a course for a world where traditional agents are no longer the gatekeepers of our dream homes. From the legacy of Zillow's Make Me Move to the thrilling possibilities of a market driven by technology, we promise an insider's look into an industry on the brink of transformation.

As we sail through the realms of iBuying, consolidation of industry giants, and the infusion of crypto into the home-buying process, you'll be at the helm with us, navigating through the intricacies of modern real estate. Amanda opens the treasure chest of her insights, revealing the challenges and potential of underwriting loans for the crypto-rich, and sparking curiosity about how blockchain technology could revolutionize ownership verification. Join us for a voyage that not only explores the current landscape but also sets the compass for future innovation in the world of real estate and personal wealth.

Hosts: Sam Maule & Maia Bittner


Sam Maule:

This is Ascential Audio.

Maia Bittner:

Hey guys, welcome back. Welcome back to Artificially Intelligent brought to you by Money 2020. I am one of your hosts, Maia Bittner.

Sam Maule:

Hey, and I'm Sam Maule, the other co-host. Good to see you, maya, it looks beautiful. God, it looks beautiful.

Maia Bittner:

Beautiful spring day here in rural Washington state.

Sam Maule:

How'd you like the eclipse?

Maia Bittner:

Well, yesterday was cloudy.

Sam Maule:

Well, in Florida it was awesome and the eclipse event for us was fantastic because it was basically my wife, chase, after my kids going don't look at the sun, don't look at the sun.

Maia Bittner:

It was cool. I'm so jealous. I'm already looking at now. You know plans to go to Spain or Japan in 2030. I'm jealous that I missed it.

Sam Maule:

Yeah, well, the next one in the US, I believe, is in 2044.

Maia Bittner:

And none of us are going to make it that long.

Sam Maule:

I am going to make it that long. I'm good. I am going to make it that long. I'm going to freeze myself, I'm going to do cryogenics or something so I can be around, because Florida is going to get the whole blackout and I'm very excited about that.

Maia Bittner:

Oh well, commit yourself now. I mean, they say that people live longer if they have something to live for.

Sam Maule:

Well, I'd like to hope it's more than that, but you know goals, goals, maya that. But you know goals, goals, maya, goals. Um, speaking of goals, one of my goals is to found my own company and my. I don't know if that's a goal I'm ever going to get. I'm going to be honest. However, I've got a ridiculous number of friends who have achieved that goal, and one of them is Amanda Orson. That was an incredible segue, everybody, and I want credit for that. I want, like a Weebly award or whatever you get for segues. I thought it was fantastic. Amanda, how are you doing?

Amanda Orson:

I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me here.

Sam Maule:

It's great to see you again and to talk to you again and for our listeners, I want to dive literally right into this because I find this topic fascinating. Can you tell us the name of the company you founded and what you're focused on? Can you tell us the name of the company you?

Amanda Orson:

founded and what you're focused on. So we recently founded Galleon. Galleon is an unlisted real estate marketplace. We are focused on off-market listings for the moment, but the key actually is just to accrue a bunch of disaggregated inventory that we all kind of know exists so that we can capture the attention of people before they sign on the dotted line with a real estate agent. We're developing in background something akin to a turbo tax for real estate, basically a way for you to perform an agentless transaction turbo tax for real estate.

Sam Maule:

That's a actual line I think most people can get. I I joke around with maya constantly about this, but, um, I love history, it's a hobby. I can't help myself. So, maya, I googled when did the multiple listing service come from? How far back does it date? You want to take a guess, amanda? You're not allowed to answer this, maya. What do you think?

Maia Bittner:

okay, I want to guess. I want to guess either 1800s or like 1986. I'm feeling the number eight.

Sam Maule:

Damn it. Whatever education you got is incredible. Yeah, Late 1800s is what they say Real estate brokers. This is actually from the National Association of Realtors. It said in the late 1800s, real estate brokers regularly gathered at the office of their local association to share information about properties they were trying to sell and agree to compensate other brokers who helped sell those properties. Thus the MLS was born. I cannot believe you got that right.

Maia Bittner:

It's kind of a cabal right. I mean, it even sounds like it from your description.

Sam Maule:

A cabal, Amanda? Is it a cabal Be honest?

Amanda Orson:

So I think that the way we have transacted real estate is unique because it's one of the few, it is the only example I can think of there being one pretty uniform way in which a major, in which anything equitable, actually is transacted. Like, if you decide that today you want to go sell your car, you can take it to a dealership, you can list it on Craigslist, you can list it on Facebook Marketplace, you can private sell it, you can sell it to Carvana. But really, if you want to transact real estate, I think prior to the iBuyer open door marketplace, it was pretty much only through a real estate agent and the MLS. That was it. So I don't know that it's a cabal. I do think that it has been centrally gatekept for a very long time.

Sam Maule:

Well, I like that concept of centrally gatekept the gatekeepers behind it. It has gotten interesting and I think Maya and I we've talked about this on a different podcast. We talked about the real estate space with the introduction of Zillow and Redfin and Take your Pick right To where we're all. When you can't sleep at night, you basically go on Zillow and look at homes you can't afford and dream a little bit, but that just feels like it did give something of a drop kick from a technology standpoint into this market from a technology standpoint into this market.

Amanda Orson:

I think Zillow, trulia, both of those were really important early aggregators back in the early 2000s by basically aggregating a bunch of stuff that had been disaggregated against the MLSs A lot of. Actually, it's important to note there's not one. I think that's a popular misconception. There are 600 something MLSs in the United States and there had previously been 800. So since this is a fintech podcast, I can actually talk about this.

Amanda Orson:

Most people wouldn't get the analogy but it's actually very close to community banking. You know how there used to be a lot of local community banks, right Like 5,000 FDIC insured community banks or something around the country and they're consolidating and sort of coming in. The MLSs have experienced something similar and I think that it will continue to sort of have this consolidation in the near future and I think for the first time, dependent upon how this newest antitrust DOJ inspection thing goes that's happening at the moment, if the NAR doesn't continue to sort of be that central gatekeeper to the MLS systems, I think that you might see that for the first time a national database aggregator on the outside.

Sam Maule:

Yeah, I actually learned that researching for the show. I didn't know that either, but I mean there's. The largest MLS in the US is the California Regional Multiple Listing Service and it has over 110,000 real estate professionals on it. I didn't realize it was broken down that way. I also didn't realize there are MLSs in other countries, which shows you my ignorance.

Amanda Orson:

Yeah, there are MLSs in other countries, but I believe that the United States has more MLSs than all of the other countries combined, and I think by a multiple.

Maia Bittner:

So, Sam, I don't think you know this I actually once worked for a startup it was called National BLS and it was called BLS because they called themselves the Buyer Listing Service, and it's kind of getting at a piece of what Amanda is building. And so they really focused on the home buyer. They said the desire to buy a home was a lot stronger than the desire to sell a home, which I think is what Amanda's saying, Like she's saying, hey, there's a lot of people that would sell their home, but it's too much of a pain in the ass and so we have to make that process easier to get more listings. And what the buyer listing service did is it let you advertise yourself as a buyer. You could say, hey, I'm looking for a house with three to four bedrooms, at least two bathrooms, in one of these neighborhoods, and then you could sort of market your qualifications, which is mostly around financing, right. So you could say, like I'm pre-approved for up to $750,000, or I have a down payment of this amount saved up, I have this credit score, things like that.

Maia Bittner:

And so from the seller's perspective, they could just go on a website and sort of peruse the buyers and say I want to offer my house to this person. I don't want to offer my house to a buyer who's going to like maybe back out or not be able to get a loan. I want to make this as easy as possible, and it appealed to sellers who also they might want, you know, they want their home to go to a young family, or there's an emotional component to selling your house too that they were able to get at. So that's I kind of have. It's funny to hear Amanda talk about her startup, because I have some experience that echoes some pieces of that from, oh like circa 2007.

Sam Maule:

And what happened? Gotta ask.

Maia Bittner:

Well, 2007 was not a great time for real estate-based startups.

Sam Maule:

first of all, Every listener just went. That was the dumbest question I think I've ever heard in my life.

Maia Bittner:

So not a great time for real estate, frankly, not a great time for startups in general. You know it was a bad time for the economy in the United States worldwide financial crisis. Startups fared better than a lot of industries, but weren't immune. So National BLS is no longer, I think. The CEO and founder went on to start a pretty big co-working space in San Francisco, though, so he's doing OK. I was their social media intern, which I don't even think is a job anymore.

Sam Maule:

So, Amanda, when did you get this idea? Was it during COVID or does it predate COVID?

Amanda Orson:

No, actually this idea was from July, the 9th of last year, but it goes back a lot farther than that Do you? Have a specific date. Absolutely. What happened on that day? Yeah, tell us. I know I'm dying.

Sam Maule:

What happened on July 9th?

Amanda Orson:

I was having coffee on a Sunday morning and, to take it one step further, as a point of introduction to the crowd, I used to be the country manager for the United States for a company called Curve, which is a fintech based out of the UK. That's how I know Sam. So we had enjoyed a very nice rosy, frothy valuation during 2021 during the bull market, and we're not going to continue to enjoy that, like a lot of other startups, and we ended up laying off a bunch of the US staff, which, it happens. It's a startup where the expansion market it was the right decision for the business and I stepped down as CEO. So we actually went through a very how do I say? Methodical iteration of four to six ideas, three of which we went deeply down to figure out what we might do together in the future, and this was an idea that I actually came up with in a vacuum over coffee on a Sunday morning.

Amanda Orson:

The actual genesis of the idea is that long before this, back in 2015, I'd used a feature that I figured out pretty quickly was defunct on Zillow, called Make Me Move, when we had sold a previous company and I didn't need to move, but I wanted to just kind of feel the market out. What I was receiving at the time was a whole bunch of inquiries to a property that I owned in Lancaster, pennsylvania Not the only one, but that one happened to get a lot of them and I was like you know what I'm sick and tired of these stupid mailers. I'm sick and tired of getting these cold texts. Let me just put this up. And when I found out that that feature had been deprecated, it started sort of an inquiry and I fell down deeply down the rabbit hole into why that had actually been deprecated.

Amanda Orson:

And what I figured out pretty quickly is that the take rate for that particular product was very low, in part because it was in competition with all of its normal MLS aggregation listings, but also it ended up just being sort of a lead gen for real estate agents, which was a poor user experience. So I was like, well, what if we extracted that and made that the first sort of genesis for a company built around that concept? So the idea for Galleon basically we went through a very thorough customer research iterative cycle, the same way that we had done to invalidate a whole bunch of other B2B fintech mostly ideas that we had gone through the prior four to six weeks or whatever it was, and when we actually dug into this one, we kept finding signal and I was like, ok, this is definitely what we need to be working on.

Sam Maule:

Maya, you got excited when she talked about that feature. It wasn't one I was aware of, so you were familiar with that.

Maia Bittner:

So yeah, that's. I mean I know Zillow's Make Me Move. It sounds really similar and so I'm so glad you brought it up and that you had dug into it. And I do think you know, I think often people can take a lazy approach and say like, oh, zillow tried this, or like some big incumbent tried it and they deprecated it. There must not be any there there.

Maia Bittner:

But I think when you are as big of a company as Zillow is, things don't get the. They don't get the attention that they deserve and maybe not the framing and positioning that a product needs to be successful. I'm thinking I mean I'm thinking about all the different angles of this Like there's no fees on Galleon for the right. So yeah, I mean Amanda's nodding now. So no fees is huge and I think that, um, you can afford a bigger house if the seller's not paying that 6% commission, potentially right, you can afford a more expensive house because the real estate agents aren't taking a cut of it and that's going to be really compelling to a lot of people. I don't think that Zillow was ever really able to market their make my move feature in that same way.

Amanda Orson:

No, actually, if you read early interviews from its founder CEO, rich Martin I believe I have that name right. If I don't, please forgive me, but if you read the early interviews, a lot of the genesis for what Zillow began as came from his experience at Expedia. And the first nugget of it was well, what if we went sort of direct, and wouldn't that be a better way to transact real estate? And what he learned pretty quickly is that real estate is much more nuanced and the middlemen, as it were, weren't actually somebody that you could cut out or should cut out because it's such a complicated transaction. So they fell very quickly into how do I say it? You know, water seeks the path of least resistance. Businesses seek the path of the easiest large money, and the easiest large money is selling ads to real estate agents. So in, I think, the last year there's like 1.5 million realtors. According to the NAR statistics there's 106,000 brokerages. That's a very healthy TAM to sell leads and advertising into. And I think that they recognize that pretty early on. So it doesn't surprise me that Make Me Move never really had an opportunity to be a fully fleshed out like in a big corporation. I can't imagine. I've never worked in one quite of the size that Zillow is, but I've worked in one that's four or 500 people Really hard. It's really hard for little features to sort of get their time in the sun and to get some prioritization.

Amanda Orson:

It makes a lot of sense to me that it was deprecated, but the timing of it was really interesting. They deprecated it in 2018, I believe, right around the time they were launching their iBuy arrival, that open door iBuy arrival, that Open Door iBuy arrival, which I think they also have shuttered. I know they also have shuttered. They're now actually partnered with Open Door. When that happened, they also, I believe around the same timeframe, joined the NAR.

Amanda Orson:

And when they joined the NAR, they moved all of their other listings, that's, all the pre-listings, the foreclosures, all that stuff all behind one degree of friction, which is the crux of what happened to Rex, which was a low-cost brokerage in California who had a CEO named Jack Ryan, who's been very outspoken In fact, he just had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Sunday about the National Association of Realtors and sort of this consolidation, this centralization, holding back homeowners from being able to transact or to transact more freely, basically. But it did absolutely take out Rex, and it was the crux of a lawsuit, rex v Zillow, that they actually lost on, I believe. Appeal back in September, october.

Maia Bittner:

Well, it does beg the question. So tell us about your business model. Is it going to be harder than Zillow's? And I'm also curious if you are making an enemy out of all of these agents and if they're going to be fighting against you at every corner and as your company grows.

Amanda Orson:

So I want to be very clear, and I've said this multiple times on social I don't think there is a future where there are not real estate agents. I think that they are absolutely necessary, particularly in the case of people that have out of location moves, people who have a special circumstance. Everyone will have to have, I think, a reason like a thing that they're marketing to be good at in the future, but I just don't think that it's the only way and that's the key. I think that for people that are experienced homebuyers and sellers meaning people that have bought a couple of homes, they're in the military, like Sam, for example you PCS a couple of times, you've figured this out, like you pretty much know what you're doing that's the kind of consumer that doesn't necessarily need to engage a real estate professional to and certainly not at the post-tax cost of you know, 3%, right Depending on the site.

Maia Bittner:

Well, and this is following a ton of other industries have made this transition right. Travel agents is a classic one. You used to have to book all travel with travel agents. Now it's like, look, if you know what you want cheaper, better, faster, to go direct buy your flights from the airline or Google Flights. But travel agents still exist in kind of a more high-end premium way. You pay more, but if you have special concerns and they bring like an extra touch and extra customization to that service, I love that you flagged that Zillow was founded by Rich Barton.

Sam Maule:

You did get that right. I was doing some Googling and some proofing on that while at Microsoft when it came up with this idea. So, one man, you learn something new every day. So back to your point, maya, about travel industry being disrupted. And the other thing that made me smile, amanda, is when you're talking about a feature being shut down. Prior to Move, I was at Google. Everybody you want to talk about shutting some things down. There is no one better in this world than Google at killing a product, and it's a great place to go and get ideas for products. By the way, I should say Just saying everybody, if you're looking for an idea, go out and look at some of these things that were shut down and try to figure out why.

Maia Bittner:

Well, amanda, I want to ask. I mean, you're talking about the company and it really sounds like a lot of the same philosophies I hear with crypto. Right, it's disintermediating things, it's helping connect people more directly, it's more efficient because middlemen aren't taking a cut. I'm curious if you have any plans to incorporate crypto into Galleon, or are you still undecided? I'd love to learn more about that.

Amanda Orson:

So I philosophically like one, for, to begin with, I actually own a bunch of crypto. I'm an early adopter and I firmly believe in decentralization as a concept, but as it applies to Galleon in the immediate term, what I would say is that we know, just like in crypto, that centralization is not the future of anything, of anything, of any industry, of any policy. It's not going to come back to centralization of doing things, a central way of transacting, literally with the same method since 1913, and the same, I believe, commission rate since 1940. Now that's about to change in July, which we've not talked about, but all of that stuff would be recognizable. The way that we transact real estate right now would be absolutely recognizable to my great grandparents, which I can't say for securities, I can't say for cars, I can't say for anything, but it is the same way that we've been doing transactions for real estate for almost 100 years, more than 100 years. So, with respect to crypto in the future, I am very keenly interested in any mortgage lending partners that have other ways of underwriting, and there are very few of them. I will say that actually happened to me as a human being buying this farm that I'm sitting at right now, back in 2021 or 2022.

Amanda Orson:

Getting underwriting done for a person that has a significant chunk of their personal net worth in crypto is not possible, and that's something that will be solved for in the future.

Amanda Orson:

I'm aware of one company that is doing it, but I'm certainly interested in talking to other lending partners that are in that category or trying to tackle that problem. I think the most practical application, though, will come down to blockchain. It is not a solved problem yet, and it is not one that Galleon it's not core to our mission to solve, at least not for the time being, but I do think that blockchain technology is a logical place for Tidal to go to, and Tidal is a whole other ball of wax. It's a lot of talk about fragmentation. It's every state's municipality. It's very fragmented. There are still places in the country that have not yet digitalized their title, so it's going to take a long time, but I do think that that's the most obvious place for blockchain to go I might have funny enough through some other work that I'm doing, um, learning about title processing and the money flow that goes behind it.

Sam Maule:

Yeah, if you really want to laugh, the volume of checks and I'm talking checks, checks, physical checks that flow around, that is staggering, absolutely staggering. And, amanda, you're going to get a special prize I don't know what, yet Some kind of sticker I'm going to send you. She just gave us an idea for a great future show about the impact of crypto when it does come to underwriting, when it comes to taxes, when it comes to analyzing personal wealth. It's hilarious. I hadn't thought of that. That's a great future show.

Amanda Orson:

It's a big problem. It's a big problem. I would say it's a particularly big problem because there are lots of people who are walking around like circa 2021 the last time we had an all time high. Lots of you know guys that were, say, under 35, that could buy any home that couldn't actually be underwritten for any home because the vast majority of their net worth was tied up in crypto. So the only way they were going to get in is by liquidating the underlying asset that was providing that net worth, and they weren't going to do that. So it is a real problem and I do think that it's a niche. It's one that I think we're not near maturity yet, but if we have Bitcoin ETFs now, I think that we should be entertaining. How do we more intelligently underwrite, at least for the blue chip crypto in the future?

Sam Maule:

You just hit on the sweet spot of this podcast. That's why I call it artificially intelligent, because it's what is? These things we don't know a lot about, but it can go really deep. You know that are narrow and deep and fascinating. And again dealing with the MLS and what's out there. And on this end it's fascinating what's next for you? I mean, obviously you're growing the company out. You're coming up on what a year now. So what's what's next for the company? Where are you headed?

Amanda Orson:

We're not a year in yet.

Sam Maule:

It feels sometimes like it's been 10 years, but no, we're not even a year in yet. Every starter, yeah, Every founder. How's it been? Oh my God, this decade has been oh wait a minute six months.

Amanda Orson:

The decade, over the last six months. So we're actually we're I would say, a week or two away away from making a significant announcement. I will say next week we're going to ship a site redesign live. So that should be live. And then what's next? From there? We have the team that we're going to have in place for now in place. That's the most exciting thing is that we actually sort of like put the wheels on the car, put the car together and now we're ready to go off to the racetrack. Uh, I would say, watch this space.

Maia Bittner:

I was just. I mean, uh, I think by the time this episode goes live, it sounds like that'll happen, so there'll be a fancy new website for our listeners to go check out.

Sam Maule:

Yeah, perfect timing. So with that, amanda, where's the best place? What's the best place for the listeners to learn? See the new website and dive into a market disruptor. Where should they go?

Amanda Orson:

It's galleonio G-A-L-L-E-O-Nio. I would say that right now, the thing that would be most interesting and is the product we've already shipped is our two minutes to list marketplace. Basically, if you have a house and you have a price in mind and one photograph of it, sign up takes two minutes to list. There's no commitment and, most importantly, there is no days on market. So, since this is a financial audience, days on market is really important. It's a feature and not a bug of the existing MLS. You can think of the existing MLS system as a place for motivated sellers, but anybody who sold a house or two knows that days on market compresses your price. So we are the place for persuadable sellers and motivated buyers who want to find an off-market deal or maybe a property in an area that they're otherwise closed out of because there's not enough inventory. That's why you can take two minutes, list your house and you do not have any obligation to keep it up.

Sam Maule:

You can take it down at any time. All we need is a price, a photo and you're good to go. That's how you sell everybody. Let me just help you out. If you can talk to a concept in under 20 seconds and you just get it, nod your head.

Maia Bittner:

You have a winner.

Sam Maule:

I don't know how many startups I've got to give this speech to. It gets exhausting. Thank God, with Amanda, industry better. We don't have to do that. Folks, that's going to do it for this week's podcast. Please reach out to me if you've got ideas for shows, Amanda. By the way, gold star going to send something your way for the idea on underwriting and crypto and other forms of wealth. Reach out to me on LinkedIn everybody, Great place to do it or on Twitter. How about you, Maya?

Maia Bittner:

Always come hang out with me on Twitter. I'm at Maya B. I would love to hear how much you would sell your house for if you didn't have to go through the rigmarole.

Sam Maule:

Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll see you next week.