Can Blimp Homes help you and your clients centralize the real estate process? CEO Matt Shaw explains

Hi everybody. And welcome to brokerage insider the podcast where we interview the leaders in real estate and technology. I'm your host, Eric Stegemann and I'm the CEO of Travis. We're one of the largest independent property technology companies in real estate and provider accustom, brokerage technology to medium and large brokerages in the United States, Canada. And now even around the world. In addition, I'm the managing partner, Travis capital, a private equity fund focused on the property technology. On today's episode, we have Matt Shaw, the mats, the CEO of a property technology company called blimp homes. Blimp is a mobile only real estate tech company that helps agents connect their clients and other parties in the transaction. So, Matt, thanks for joining us today. Thanks very much. Great. Well, I'm excited to dig in and learn a little bit more about your company to be honest you know, until we, we chatted here about you coming on the show, I hadn't heard of you guys before, so I'm really interested in learning more about what you guys do. I did get a chance to play with your app. And so for all those folks listening, you know, feel free to jump into the app store either Google or Apple app stores. You're on both and you can go download the blimp homes app and play with it. But first let's talk a little bit about your history and how you got into real estate, because that's something I'm always very interested in. Now, when I, when I took a quick peak, it looks like you come from a history in the banking world, the the FinTech world. And then recently you kind of got into the blockchain world. So what, what caused you to have a jump into. Yes. Thanks very much. Well, my background, as you, as you rightly say, is a bit varied. And I, I started my career in investment banking. I was the best bank for over 20 years, but I was always very much involved on I would say the cutting edge side, you know, the innovation side. So I was very deeply involved for instance, in building the capital markets in the central and Eastern Europe. And that led me to, to, to, to down various avenues eventually into investing in real estate personally. Really that was probably my first foray into the real estate space. I mean, I guess growing up in London you know, everybody is slightly obsessed with property and you know, certainly, you know, my, my experience was trying to get on the property ladder at a young age. Going through a bit of a boom and bust and then, and then eventually sort of investing in other properties abroad you know, partly because of my banking background, I traveled around quite a bit. So I've lived in several countries and ended up, you know, buying properties and obviously UK, but also France, Cyprus, Switzerland, Canada, and, and also the U S and I think. My experience in the U S was one of the reasons where she really piqued my interest to, to get into this. Well, you know, obviously if you've, if you've done that level of investing in ownership of properties, I can see where, where you'd be interested. But do you, do you or anybody around you have any formal brokerage side of the business? Cause it, the reason I asked the question is that I, a lot of times, you know, people that start in this world, you usually have come from, they were an agent before a broker before a family member was an agent or a broker for before accepting. But from what you just said, it didn't sound like that was the case. So you were an investor and, and owned property and then decided to jump in and help solve a problem. Is that what I'm understanding? Yeah. So that's my personal experience, but of course other people in the team have got deep experience in this space. One of our co-founders Ben Clark was I think a member of the founding team very early on at Zillow, for instance, and has a long experience in the real estate data space. And some of our advisors have had the illustrious careers in real estate as well, but you're right. My main experience really is I suppose, really an interest in systems and, and problem solving. And then also as a consumer. And I think, you know, my, again, my experience in the U S was quite quite significant from, from, you know, its impact on me. I mean, I think that every country. Has its own quirks. I mean, the UK, for instance, you're buying a home in, in, in, in England is quite strange in some ways quite quirky. And you know, every country has its own nuances. And I think that what really got me interested in, in real estate on the technical tech technology side was was when I started buying a couple of homes in India. Gotcha. Well, you know, let's jump in and talk a little bit about blimp then. And how and what the problem is that you're solving, because it does seem to solve somewhat of a, of an issue in the industry, from what I saw. So tell us a little bit about blimp. Tell us about maybe how you got started on the specifics of solving the problem and w where you saw the problem and then a, about the company. Yeah. So so as I say, I initially bought a property in the U S and I was really surprised about the, you know, how much friction there is in buying real estate in the U S I guess my, my key takeaway was you know, being saved by an amazing realtor, you know, so a realtor really quarterback, quarterback the whole transaction. At the time I really was, you know, finding my feet and, you know, I, I, this is probably many people who have a similar experience, you know, you really rely on a great realtor, but I also noticed that some of the communication channels. Well you know, very legacy and you know, old fashioned. So I had an amazing realtor who went above and beyond, you know, any sort of call of duty to the point where I left him some keys and he coordinated, you know, some repairs and, you know, things which, you know, we shouldn't really ask a realtor to do, but but equally he communicated with me. Many different channels. So he would send me a bunch of links, which I would look at. And then I would then try to remember which of those links I liked. So I ended up clicking twice and then making handwritten notes. We would speak by phone. He would send me texts and so forth. So it was, it was quite a disparate communication channel. And I think that I, I sort of realized that maybe there is a, a way where the consumer could be guided through a transaction in a more logical fashion where they can understand, you know, all of the tasks in front of you, all the core services, which you need to engage and above all, perhaps finding all these core services in one place. I think there's some reasons why. Some of the legacy systems have a lot of friction for consumers is because, you know, you have different channels, you know, different core services competing for consumer attention, essentially. And so in some ways, you know, the consumer is getting dragged from one, you, you know you know, sales funnel to another in, you know, which doesn't enhance the consumer experience. So I think. What really struck me from my experience and what the problem, one of the key problems we're trying to solve is really helping the guide the consumer. It's truly the prime prime buying process in a way, which is, you know, logical. There are no surprises. So again, I'm a, I'm a, you know, a Brit living in Canada and I bought a home in, in the U S and I'll be really honest. I didn't actually know what title insurance was at that point. So that was, I sort of surprised at the end, but again, it was all smoothly navigated thanks to my thanks to my age. But I think the idea really is that the consumers can navigate this process in a more seamless way. It feels like one end to end transaction, not a series of, you know, sort of disparate transactions. You know, I need my mortgage now. I need my insurance. Now they might talk to the insurance and so forth. So it seems like a seamless end to end transaction. And equally for the, for the professionals, you have the consumer in one place where they're basically saying, well, I understand that this is at this point in the process, I really realize I do need to put in place insurance. So I do need to find an insurance solution as an example, so that you know, in this example, the, the consumer is a willing participant in, in actively seeking those services. So I think it really, the idea really is to solve those. Those friction points for the consumer, but equally solve some problems for the professionals in terms of how do you reach those reach those consumers. And then I think also overlaid onto this. There is an incentive and reward system to incentivize both professionals and Well, I think we'll get to that part and talking about the crypto side which is certainly an interesting part of what you're doing. And just a little bit, I have a number of questions for you about that, that portion of it. But I want to step back for a second because, you know, you said something kind of interesting. And, and if for frequent listeners of the show you'll know that we, we had a series of shows that we did about international real estate and how different it was to the United States and even in Canada As somebody who's not from the United States and is used to how things are done in other countries. What do you think are the biggest differences that are there between, you know, maybe purchasing a home in the United States versus in London? I know you mentioned the title insurance thing. Certainly we can start there, but, but what else have you seen? That's different. That's probably, yeah. You put your finger probably on one of the biggest differences, you know, in England, for instance, This is probably an example of, I think in the U S does it much better, but in, in, in England, you know, if you, if you find a house you'd like to buy and you, you basically reached an agreement with the seller. And by the way, the, in, in, typically in England, the, an agent only represents the seller. It's actually quite unusual to have an agent representing a buyer that's normally just sort of you know, pop styles or something like this, or people who are extremely busy hire an agent to help them find a home. So typically you just have an agent representing one side of the transaction, and let's just say you found a home, which you arranged to buy. And let's for the sake of argument, say it's a million pound home in London. Quite a small house, to be honest in London these days. And all parties are agreed. You then go through a process where the, the lawyers check back through the, the land registry to make sure they're in those sorts of strange aspects which could impact the title. And since a lot of these houses have very, very old, you know, I remember I bought a house in England, I think was built in 1850 or, and it had a previous condition on the land that you weren't allowed to graze sheep on the land as an example. So it goes really, really way, way back some of these items and, and other strange things about how, you know, you can't use the house for certain activities and things like this. But the key thing that takes typically takes about three weeks for the lawyer to check all these old covenants and rights of way to make sure that no one can walk across your land and things like this. And during that three week period somebody else could come along and just outbid you. So the there's a word in England in a new school cause something which just means that, you know, somebody just comes along in that three week closing period that says, well, 1.1 million and you've lost the you've lost the house. And in a, in a weak market buyers do the, do the opposite. You know, they, they, they, they reduce that bit at the last minute and, you know, quite often the person has no alternative, but to accept that low bid. So I think, you know, the title side is handled quite differently. You clear all the title You know, deficiency, deficiencies and do all the analysis during the closing process, but you haven't actually bought the home. So of course that's very, very different from the U S and I have to say, I think the U S is a much more satisfactory system, you know? So, you know obviously when, when somebody goes under contract here, you know, that does seem to be better. I I'm very glad in the United States and Canada, for that matter, we don't have dumping. And that's going to be a, maybe a new, a new word in my vernacular here of making sure you don't. Because dumped. But that, you know, that is a PR that does seem like a problem where you have almost no security in, in the deal. Because I know, you know, when, when I've purchased homes for example, I purchased a home last year and two weeks later I purchased it right at the beginning of the pandemic on purpose because I recognize the data that showed the real estate was going. Rebound very quickly. And I got a crazy deal and I definitely would've gotten gazumped because somebody else would have definitely come along. Had it been a different rule and seeing that the property was for sale made a higher bid because of the seller, you know, wanting to sell quickly worried about the pandemic. So definitely seems like a better model there also, you know, that what you said about buyer's agent. It's still shocking to me. I have a friend in Georgia, not the state, the country and he is has been actively going around to different countries, trying to essentially push the concept of the value of a buyer's agent in representing the buyer and making sure that they had, you know, somebody fighting for their behalf on their behalf. And it seems like that's not the way it is on a lot of places. So. You know, let's, let's you know, talk a little bit about the the, the, the app and what we're doing here, because in playing with it, it seems like the idea, the main idea is, is we're connecting up a number of, of Hardy stakeholders in the system. Right? So being the idea is I can go in. As an agent set up a transaction and then invite multiple people in. So, you know, it kind of begs the question of You know, is it, is the idea that there's this one place for all of communication, because I think today a lot of this is just done over text messages. You know, the agent goes in there, I messages app on their phone and texts the lender and said, Hey, what's the status? And then they click and text the, the buyer or the seller and just kind of give them an update on what's going on. So is the idea here to have more of a centralized location for that? Or, or what's the long-term goal? Maybe, maybe you've got something that you're working on. That's adding on to that that will provide more functional. Yeah, I think I mean, I think the idea of communicating through text, it, it, it definitely works to a certain, certain, a certain point, but here's an example. My daughters were looking for a house to rent actually in, in California you know, a year or two ago. And they were sharing, you know, properties with us, you know, do we think this is a good run or not? And they were, they were obviously sharing it with the other, the other. Students who are looking to live in the same house. So, you know, there's multiple people on this and literally people were saying, sending texts around, you know you know, and people are, people are pulling in listings from, you know, different, different you know, Zillow listings and so forth. And then people would say, well, What did you think of the one which I marked with an exclamation point or what do you think about the one I put a heart next to? So once you get into sort of multiple parties looking to look at properties and share their share their thoughts on the property, it actually gets complicated quite, quite quickly. And email doesn't solve it very well either. As I say, you know, if you get a series of links you know, somehow the human brain. Well, maybe it's just my brain, but if somebody sends me 10 links and open them all, and it's four houses, I'd quite like to see for some reason, I'm I sort of have to go back and remember which, which, what, which those were. So I think one of the, one of the. Key advantages of our, of our app is that people, even before they select a realtor, for instance, to help them, consumers could just simply share listings and exchange views. You can pull in listings from different sources and basically just chat about them. So it's a little bit, you know, a little bit like slack for real estate, if you like. And I think this is, this is, you know, a superior experience to. So texting, and then, then they can then invite the consumer can invite you know, the various professionals. They need to help them probably very likely guided by, you know, their realtor. So for instance, you know, they can then bring in you know, somebody on the mortgage side, somebody on the insurance insurance side and so forth, and then they can have, you know, multiple chance of course. Some of the communication is, is just in private chats. You know, what, what is discussed between the mortgage broker and the consumer would not be for instance, necessarily shown to the realtor. Although some, sometimes that's a very, very key sort of you know, communication channel with those three parties very often they're very cool to it, but there's some information which shouldn't be shared. So for instance, uploading documents or just sharing, sharing, more confidential things So it really puts the power back in the hands of the consumer in terms of they understand the transaction. They can look at lots of different puppet properties, share properties, discuss them. I mean, a very typical flow would be. You know, they would, they would have shared, you know, three or four properties among themselves. For instance, you know, if there's more than one party buying, then they bring a realtor into the, into the mix and say, look, these are the homes. This is the type of home I've been looking at. And and you know, probably these days let's say, and every time we looked at it, it's already gone, but this could you now help us. And then, and then the realtor would then say, well, here's 10 others, which we think you should take a look at. And then you start this you know, rich communication, which is, you know, very, very good for all parties. And I think on the task side, there's a task management side. Again, you know, I was the stupid Bret from Canada who didn't really understand, fully understand the process in the U S but if I'd had that tool, which basically said that at these stages, in the transaction, you're going to need these professionals to support you that have been very, very helpful. And you know, would, it would have led to less surprises on my side. So I think it's, it's really, it's very much trying to work with, with the industry, working with professionals sending that a good agent is really going to quarterback these transactions. You know, they can really guide you in terms of you know, the whole flow and the whole process in terms of our longer term ambition. So I think, you know, the. The incentive and reward roadside is a, it's a very big part of what we're trying to do, but I think we have lots of other ideas about how we come. Create some very interesting tools to help agents do their jobs better. You know, we have a very strong data science team. We have access to very rich data. Some of it potentially is unique data. And some data we'd like to use incentives to, to acquire. But again, the mantra really is how can we, how can we use data to create a better consumer experience and help professionals do their job better? I guess that's what. So let's talk about data for just a second. Cause it's, it really seems like that's where your, your value where you're trying to drive corporate value in the system. So is, is the idea that you're collecting this data and knowing about the person or selling a home and to be able to sell that data to, for example, a moving company or to insurance companies or something like that? Or is it something that I'm not sure. Yeah, I would say it's a little bit different from that. I think that the model is not really strictly speaking, selling, selling that information to yeah, like a moving company and so forth. But I think the idea is that, well, first of all, w w we're getting, we've acquired, you know, extensive data sets, you know, we'll you know, from on, on, on homes and demographics and so forth to create a richer experience we will also acquire in certain regions we're testing search side so that we can also match up live MLS listings with with other sort of public records and demographic data. But I think the other idea is that we can then. Have a relationship with a consumer where we learn more about their, their needs, which can drive some analytics around propensity to sell and, and so forth. Which again is, is I think going to be very interesting for, for realtors. But I think, you know, we're never going to sort of sell that data per se. It's more really giving consumers choices around, you know, the, the, the vendors they would like to use. So, you know, for instance You know, on the, on the, on the mortgage side, it would be giving them a selection of mortgage brokers for them to, to, to choose. And really, so it's about empowering the consumer to, to bring in the vendors who can most meet their needs. But you know, we're not going to sort of sell the data. Per se, you know, to, I don't know, for instance, suddenly some as an example, the, some correlation between new car ownership and buying homes. So we're not going to sell this data to, you know car manufacturers or salespeople to, to, to sort of reach the consumer. The data would only ever be used to enrich the experience for the consumer and help them make better. So in that way, it seems like it's kind of like a credit karma almost if you're familiar with them where they're not necessarily selling off your data, but they're exposing offers to you based upon your data that they have. Is that, is that kind of accurate or am I understanding it? I think I think maybe we're going in that direction. I mean, maybe in the end there could be a sort of a marketplace for, for mortgages or a marketplace for insurance products. It's not really in the first iteration, perhaps, perhaps that's a a direction we might go in, but it's not, it's not. Immediately on our product horizon right now, but I think yes, giving them choices they will understand that they'll need a mortgage professional to help them or an insurance professionals to help them. And it will give them a selection of those, those, those people to reach out to. And again, I think back to this idea of you know, having a consumer. Who is, is, you know, positively willing to be engaged. This is also going to probably reduce the CAC for professionals and also, you know, just have a better communication with that. We're about to consumer because the consumer is basically saying, I realize now where I'm in this process, I realized I do need that. Insurance cause, well, without insurance, I'm not going to get my mortgage. And so this is the right moment to really seek quotes for insurance and reach out to different, different insurance professionals. So how, how do I best do that? And really where we're at all, which is going to try and help them to make that the best. Yeah. And just for the listeners that haven't heard that term, cause I'm always big on trying to make sure that the brokers and staff, people and agents listening know when Matt said CAC, there that's a CAC cost of acquisition, cost of the acquisition of the customer. So essentially, you know, that it would be cheaper than maybe going to Zillow to get a new lead or, or that an insurance company would be, it would be cheaper than buying a new lead. So Matt, that kind of begs the next question, of course, which is right now, if I play with the app, it kind of seems like when the transaction ends, then the usefulness of the app ends the journey of the customer ends. So two, two questions. Your number one is. You know, it doesn't seem like that's the case of what you're saying in an ongoing manner. So, you know, am I, am I understanding it correctly that your goal is to stay useful to the consumer and for over time. And then the second question. In a world where apple has started making their apps all offload, if you don't use them frequently which it seems like this app is very possible for that after you would close, it might be 90 days or more before you touch it again. In which case the apple would offload it. How do you get a consumer to make sure they're engaged with the app and therefore keeping it on their home screen. And of course, getting the push notifications, which, you know, most people know are pretty darn fast. Yeah, no great questions. Really? I think you're, you're, you're absolutely right. We do want to keep that consumer engagement beyond the transaction and that's really, again, so help you know, professionals in particular agents, you know do their job better with ready to. Create engagement so that the Asian can keep in front of their customer. I believe some of the statistics around customer retention are really quite low. The ones I've seen, you know, in the sort of 20 to 25% range. So, you know, if, if, if agents can retain their customers better, you know, this is a tremendous source of future business. So I think one of the ways we'd like to do that is to encourage homeowners to continue to give us useful data. And again, this, this, this probably is going to bleed into this question around the, in the, you know, the the incentives But we'd also through, you know, analytics. We'd like to, you know, keep keeping engaged with the consumer where we say, you know, a similar home to yours just sold, you know two blocks away, you know, for, you know, a hundred thousand dollars more than you pay for it. And we will give that we will push that information to the agent who had closed that transaction and say, Would you like to use this as an opportunity to reach back out to, to your client now? I'm sure they're not. Okay. Click yes. Every, every two weeks, but it certainly, it's going to be a way they can keep, you know, perhaps every two or three months, they can basically say that was a great purchase, you know, just so you know, a house nearby, very similar sold for a hundred thousand dollars more. And it's just really a way of just keeping the engagement. And then the other thing is that if, if consumers. Give us interesting information about the life cycle, you know, and about what they're doing to the home. You know, whether they're putting in a new roofs and so forth. I think this is also very interesting information, which our data scientists are going to build models around propensity to sell again, to feed this back to agents, to help them keep engagement with. So it, I mean, I know you said that you acquired, but as a data junkie and I oftentimes say that Travis at its core is a data company. And in fact, one of the things that is, is pretty crazy is when I look through our archives we have data on 92% of every real estate transaction that's happened going back seven plus years in that data set. And so. You know, when it comes to that, it seems like your data is reliant from at least from a front facing, from an outsider perspective is relying on you getting data into the system. And then seeing what happens on an ongoing basis, but it sounded like you acquired a data set that you're gonna use to augment that data. Is that right? Yeah, w we're certainly, we're starting off with a large data set, which is probably similar. So, you know, the data sense that you, that you may have acquired for instance. And then we want to augment that with, you know unique data, which is going to be derived through our our reward system and the analytics we're going to do around the homes, which we will close through the transaction throughout, through our platform. Gotcha. Well, and that kind of begs the next question too, which is you know, let's because we're as we're kind of running out of time and I thought we were going to get to this a little sooner, but I'm glad about the conversation that we've had so far which is from at least from your website. It seems like blockchain and the offering of a token is, is kind of. You know, something that that's important to what you're doing and important to your, your compensation to the agent slash consumer. And you're connected up with the home network foundation token. And so they. Folks listening understand is the idea here is that you would earn tokens based upon what you do in the system. So would you say that as it sits currently that the crypto portion of it is you're trying to make that a main driver of getting people to use the app or no, I think first of all, the token isn't live yet. So, so nothing has happened with the token, but it will happen fairly soon. And the, and the initial. Sort of allocation of tokens will be directly to real estate professionals. So the first idea is to try to get as much of the, of the network, which is going to share and, you know the, the value of the network to get as much of this network in the hands of the professionals. So it really comes back to this core idea of who contributes to the transaction. And and so who should we be? Derive most of the benefits. So our thesis, and I think, you know if, if you, if you read the white paper, which has been generated by the the home network foundation the core thesis is that the contributors to the network should, should reap the benefits and those really and who are those, it's really the professionals and the consumers. So really. If the idea is try to share the benefit between those that those groups. So it's not the blimp is trying to, although blimp uses the token or will use the token and will be a big advocate of this, of this token protocol. You know, the idea is not, the blimp will insert itself into this into this process. It's really to share this benefit between the major contributors. But yes, we we're big believers and. In the, in the, in the power of. Cryptocurrency networks. You know, I think that a lot is lost in the, obviously in the jargon, you know, blockchain and crypto is a very high price now. But, and, you know, we all, we all drank the Kool-Aid, you know, we've all been quite deeply involved in these, in these markets for some time. I've got quite a deep background, you know, since well, especially since 2016, 17, I've been very heavily involved in this area. If we sort of simplify it and again, you know, one of the, our core ideas at blimp is really to abstract away the complexity, you know, so there's a very. If you like sort of nerdy insider you know, sort of view of crypto and blockchain. And of course, you know, we, we have people on our team who are very deeply into this and, and engineers and developers who fully understand this, but in terms of the experience for professionals, consumers one of our core goals is to abstract away the complexity. You know, we are all using the Melbourne. Nobody, not many people know much about packet switching princes. And I think the, the, the core element of cryptocurrencies is the ability to distribute value through networks. That's really one of the key breakthroughs which happened with the advent of blockchain technology. And obviously you were initially a Bitcoin, but one of the, one of the core ideas is that you could just repeat value to between unknown actors. So if you like. From an era of the internet of information to the internet of value would be one, one way of putting it. And, you know, in a simple way, what this really means is that the users of a service or they users of of A network, other people who benefit. So it's really pushing the value away from corporate shareholders and into the people who use a system. And I think that first of all, very intellectually interesting, but I also think it's really going to become a very major theme over the coming decades, really that this is going to transform the landscape or business really. And real estate obviously is one area where it could provide a lot of value and drive. Drive appropriate incentives to the people who are contributing. Apologies. That was probably a very long winded polemic, but I mean, so I would suggest that most people on our, on our industry have heard of Bitcoin before, but I think there's a big big belief in, in the real estate brokerage world. Certainly organized real estate brokerage world. It, it doesn't necessarily have a good spot outside of deed recording type, you know, recording title and ownership of, of homes. It seems like it's trying to be used for lots of different things. But, but every single attempt to do that has kind of ha has kind of gone away or they've shifted their focus to something else. You know, One of the, one of the places that I see people shift to, which is offer a coin or offer something of value to encourage usage of the platform that, you know, maybe it doesn't have to store the data on the blockchain. But there's some sort of incentive and that's where they've gone with some of these, these blockchain methods. So it'll be interesting to see how well that works. You know, w when the coin, or when they offer. Is in its infancy stages. I mean, everybody knows Bitcoin was worth, you know, hundreds of pennies 10 years ago. And there's people that became multi multi-millionaires just by holding onto it where now it's, you know, $30,000. And it was high as I think, 58 or $59,000 earlier this year. So you know that there are opportunities there that are there, but it seems like there's a lot of them that kind of just go away after a while and don't have a ton of value. And if you're, if you're if your value is based around that concept of getting a token, you're essentially, you know, would you say that you're kind of playing into gamblers or you would you'd essentially say that this is a bonus feature where it's nice and if it works out and if it's worth money down the road, then fabulous. And if not, okay, well, who cares? You were getting something for free anyways. I think it's. I wouldn't talk about value or what it's going to be worth or anything in those terms at all. It's really more about The utility of the token. So you're right. If people sort of tack a tokenized network or cryptocurrency onto a business and sort of see, see if it works. Yeah, I think there are lots of models, especially in sort of 2017, 18 was tried that, that use case. And unless it's sort of integral and core to a business model is not going to work. So I think that, you know, our thesis is that you know, These decentralized system where all the participants are sharing in the value of a network. So not as a speculation, but just because you are in this network, so we're not encouraging. You know, it's all speculators to come into this, into this token network. It's really all about the product. It's all about the utility of, you know, how can you earn tokens? How can you use these tokens in our system? And you know, as an example, we're not selling tokens for cash or anything like this. It's really all about. How, you know, it it's, I suppose, really, in a sense it's about incentives and rewards and how you can use those rewards in the system to benefit consumers and professionals, that would be the thesis. And our platform is just happens to be one platform where you can use these tokens, but there'll be many others. And in fact, the home network foundation announced a cooperation with another platform recently. So for instance you know, there could be, and there are many, many business use cases in the, in the real estate transaction world, which could benefit from using the home token. So, you know, our use cases just happens to be one. You know, the home, the home that would foundation is completely independent from blimp. You know, we're just an application using this hugging protocol. But I think that you, you rightly say there's been some false starts and some use cases of blockchain in real estate, which perhaps are too early, you know, in the sense of, you know, putting Transactions on the blockchain itself is a very, very interesting thesis and it's time will come, but it's really quite early in my, in my personal opinion, that's quite early still, but it's a, it's a completely logical end point, you know, because, you know, it's A decentralized ledger where, you know, you can see the immutable history of of transactions. I think it's a very, very logical way of using blockchain, but that's not our thesis for blimp and it's not what we're trying to do. We're really in the world of distributing incentives and rewards to, to help consumers professionals derive you know, utility from, from, from transit. Gotcha. Well, we're, we're pretty much out of time, but there are two questions that I one to, to to ask you here. And one is you, you mentioned that you were getting into the space of getting data from MLSs. That's always a hot topic particularly for me, but in general, I think for a lot of the listeners of the show, can you talk a little bit about your experience in, in working with MLSs and going to get the data from them and how that's gone? Yeah, again, it's, it's, it's still quite an early, early stage for us and it's something which we're quite frankly, we're testing. Obviously we're not in the business of at all transacting real estate. So, you know you know, if we become a member of I'm a man of an MLS thing, that'd we get a brokerage license in that particular state that would be really to facilitate access to you know, live listings in a, in a compliant way. So. Definitely not no transacting properties or not trying to compete in that sense. But I think, you know, we'll test that in one or two states and then there are other models where we may not do that. So I think, I guess that's the best way I can put it is that, you know, that it is quite complex. And I think the consumer. Alongside, you know, rich data around homes and you know, that some of the experiences that we think we can bring from all sort of data sets, just using individual AI and so forth. I said, I think consumers still expect to see live listings adjacent or in the same space, but when not in the business of obviously competing head to head with any of the any of the major search portals or anything. Do you plan on doing anything as a vendor with the MLS, as opposed to being a broker that that's there so that you can go get data on behalf of a client of yours when one of your brokerage or agent. I think that's, that's something which we might explore. Yeah. So I think we're in the business of really saying what is the simplest way we could acquire data to display a compliantly to, to consumers. And that, that could be definitely one, one route. I mean, we definitely have, we definitely have partnerships with certain brokerages or franchises in different states. So that may be something which we may discuss with them, but we haven't, frankly, speaking, done that. Gotcha. Okay. And then the last question for, for listeners, they all know that the last question I ask everybody is the same question. Cause I always like getting your take on it. And particularly as somebody that's an outsider that doesn't have 20 plus years of experience in this field, like I do, or like many of our guests do. Some, somebody that comes from your world, I can't wait to get the answer to this question. Which is if there was one thing that you could change about the residential real estate industry. What would that one thing be? Hm, that's a very deep question. I would say really that it would be making it easier for consumers to get access to information. I think that would probably be the number one that you've just, you've just touched on how complex it is, you know, for us to display like listings and you know, there are. Why should we have, you know, relationships with existing brokers? Should we become a broker ourselves and so forth? And really all we're trying to do is offer data to consumers to make informed choices, and indeed then use those choices to go and select the professionals, you know, go and choose a fantastic realtor. I would say that yeah, if, if I had one Thought it would be. Could this process be simplified that, you know, we're not trying to transact homes, but is there, is there a, is there a simplified way where we could display data for consumers that perhaps a big one, but that's just as a kind of outsider coming from, you know from another country. So let's look at looking at the U S and things. You know, how could we just make the consumer experience better and how can we connect consumers better with professionals? Sounds good. Well, thanks Matt for joining us again, you've been listening to Matt Shaw, the matzoh CEO of blimp homes, a mobile only real estate technology company. You can check them out in the app store either the Android or the iPhone app store. So go take a peak at it and I'm sure Matt would appreciate your feedback, Matt. Thanks again for joining. Thanks for having me. Great. Thank you. You've been listening to brokerage insider the podcast where we interview the leaders in real estate and technology. Make sure you subscribe using your favorite podcast player to get this episode in every feature episode, automatically downloaded to your device every single Monday. Thanks everybody for listening.