How HomeBot Can Help You Grow Your Business and Get More Agent Referrals

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Go check it out right now, visit LOKestudy.com and download your free copy today. Hey, people, what's up, Jeff Zimfer. Welcome back to this episode of mortgage marketing radio. So glad you tuned in. Yes. That's my live virtual studio audience, live virtual studio audience. What am I saying? Anyway, what I want to tell you about, if you haven't heard, yes, I'm talking about it again. That is my brand new book Disruptor Die, How to Survive and Thrive the Digital Real Estate Shift. Listen, just the other day I had a loan officer who came back in order to second round of these books for real estate agents. He started with 20. Those went so well and the feedback was so positive that he came back and ordered 50 books at wholesale. You want to drive conversations with real estate agents. You want to help them navigate the digital shift, help them read what other agents, top performers, coaches from around the country are doing. When it comes to not only real estate, but mortgage, hey, this book is for you. Disruptor die, right? If you haven't got it yet, go check it out for free. Yes, you can get the book for free and just pay for shipping. You can go to getdisruptordie.com. That's where you can buy the book and I'll give it to you for free. You just pay for the shipping. If you are interested in bulk quantity of books at wholesale, these books are available. Should you be interested in giving some to your real estate agents? It's all about conversations. It's all about driving conversations with real estate agents. How are you doing that? Hopefully you're doing it in a unique and different way. That isn't cold calling, which is how is your weekend and you have a deal for me. I'd like to share something of value with you. Do you ever consider, wonder, need help with navigating the digital real estate shift? You've got to give for them to help them do that. You can use this for when you're targeting top producers and you want to send something before you do call, before you're meeting. You're working in in-house lender relationship. You have a relationship at a brokerage. Do you want to help a broker with recruiting and retention? The book can be used in so many different ways. If you order a minimum of 50 copies, I will host a free class for you. There I say a free class. That's right. A free class on the same topic, Disruptor Die, that you could invite your agents to use the books to gift to them and I will host the class over a Zoom or webinar platform, which will walk them through the core concepts of the book about how to survive and thrive the digital real estate shift. You get all the credit for it. You get to build your realtor database, add value, and everybody wins. If you're more interested in that, send me an email, podcast at mortgagemarketingradio.com with the subject line, wholesale books. Podcast at mortgagemarketingradio.com, wholesale books is the subject line. That's that. Let's get into my special guest this week who I'm thrilled and honored to finally be having a conversation with. Let me set it up this way. We recently surpassed 200 episodes, 450,000 downloads of the podcast and I want to just say thank you very much to you, my listeners. I'm grateful for you for continuing to tune in and by the way, if you get a chance, leave a podcast review. I just noticed I haven't had any reviews in the last 30 days and I really need some reviews. But anyway, so here's the thing, right? My point in sharing with you those numbers and stats is I get quite a few LOs who ask me, hey, what's the top thing to move the needle with real estate agents? What digital marketing platform works? What are the top three tools that you're saying top producers use? Those are the kind of questions I get a lot and here's what I do. I ask, I go around the horn and I ask people all around the country, hey, what are the top three tools or platforms you're using to have success with past clients, with realtors, with the digital shift? But more often than not, right? One of the platforms that continually is ranked among the top from these producing loan officers is Homebot. Now, I don't know if you have Homebot, I don't know if you've heard about Homebot, haven't like done anything with it yet, I don't know where you're at. Here's what I do know. I do know that Homebot like any other tool is a tool and when used properly can perform certain tasks for you, such as mining past database refinances, building offence around your past database of clients, helping to protect you from your past database being pillaged from other people, companies trying to get after your client who you just closed and they're now getting the messages from them or whatever, but now it's time to refit. Look at all of our databases are at risk, how strong of offence are you building around them? Is part one of the value Homebot provides? Part two, I'm talking to more and more loan officers who are succeeding in leveraging Homebot to drive conversations with producing agents and you're going to hear some of those ideas on today's podcast episode with my special guests and Homebot has just also just continued to evolve and they've come out with this incredible contextualized video, whether it's one to many or specific video libraries that are milestone based that you want to build out into the Homebot experience. I'm seeing loan officers team up with agents and use Homebot to, here's the thing guys, here's the killer thing right now, what if you could approach your agents and say, hey, you struggling with listings, I know, so is everybody. What if I could show you a way that we could get more listings for you? Would you be interested in a conversation? How many agents are going to say no to that? And then what you can do is have a conversation about how Homebot is able to capture more potential seller leads and convert and nurture those two listings over time. I'm not going to link that into the details now about how you do that. You're going to hear it on the podcast episode, but I'm just thrilled to have two people, Bernie Graham, the CEO of Homebot, and Austin Lar, who's a successful originator with fairway in Indianapolis. And you're going to hear the stats on his production and how he's averaging Homebot. And Ernie's going to talk about some cool things that invest practices with Homebot, but also some new features that have recently been added that I think are relevant for you to hear. Now, here's what's good. If you don't have Homebot yet, hey, listen, I wanted to do something special. So I asked Homebot, could we do something special if anybody wants to sign up? They said, yes. So if you're going to sign up for Homebot, you can go to Homebot.ai and use the promo code, mortgage radio 200, okay? Mortgage radio 200. What that does is wave the sign up fee. So there's zero sign up fee for you, the podcast listener. If you're using the code mortgage 200 over at Homebot.ai, check it out, give it a run. I know if I was producing today, this would be one of my absolute go to platforms and tools I would be using, and I'd be leveraging it not just for past clients, but to have those conversations with real estate agents, and you're going to hear about how to do that on this episode. So without further ado, let's get into this week's show. Ernie and Austin, welcome to the show. Thanks Jeff. Yeah. Thanks Jeff. Yeah, let's do this. Let's quickly identify who's who. So the listeners know what voice to put with whom Ernie wanted to go first, tell the listeners who you are. What do you do? Thank you everyone. I'm Ernie Graham, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Homebot. Awesome. Austin, how about yourself? Yeah, Austin Lar. I'm the area manager for Fairway Independent Mortgage here in Indiana. Okay. Awesome. Hey, just real quick, Austin, how long have you been in the business? 11 years. 11 years. I'm on this thread that a lot of people are used to me asking, what is your number one source of business and like units volume? So the Austin Lar team last year did 1300 units and about 284 million shout out to my team. They're awesome. And our number one source of business is probably, we're about 75% purchase 25% refires and most of our refires are past clients. Thanks to Homebot. Yeah. Awesome. Fantastic. And how about the purchase side? Is that mostly focused on realtors? You know, it's a lot of builder stuff too. So maybe a little more 50, 50 builder and even our own past clients, referrals. Do a little bit of lead gin ourselves trying to get to that consumer first. Yeah. Awesome. Hey, appreciate you sharing that. That's wonderful context. And yeah, congrats to you and the team. That's a massive year, 1300 units. Okay. So we're here to talk about Homebot, which I love talking about because, you know, there's a lot of loan officers who come to me and ask me, hey, man, what's the best this? What about that? How do you do? You know, what would you recommend? And I have to say that, you know, I have a short list of activities or platforms or tools that, you know, I usually go to or usually recommend. And Homebot is always on that short list. And for those, you know, I can't, if there's somebody listening who's not familiar, this is for you, Ernie, for who's not familiar with what Homebot is or what it does. I don't think there's anybody better to tee that up, Ernie. But how would you kind of break that down for people? Is it, am I, is the spotlight on me from a 60-second pitch right now, Jay? Yeah. That's, that's your chance, man. Short on this is that Homebot's a financial dashboard for homeowners and renters. And so, customers like you, like Austin, give it away for free to all of your past clients, all your prospects, and it is a dashboard that does two things. It tracks home value, it tracks loans, it tracks home equity. And then the other thing that it does is that it gives these personalized insights that it helps your client, your prospects, make great decisions to build wealth, like when to buy, when to sell, when to rent, when to remodel, when to refi. You can imagine that refi module has been exploding here over the last, over the last year. But that's really the net of it. It's an empowerment tool for consumers. And if you're an L.O. and you care, and you think that empowering your clients and prospects is good for business, you should use Homebot. Yeah, I don't have to say like in my own podcast group and in other organizations that I work with, the response rate on the success, the level of engagement to open rate, I mean, the level that Homebot with past clients drives conversations, it's just always just like off the charts, man. I don't know if there's a better platform out there that will drive past client engagement. I haven't seen it. I appreciate that. And it's, it has, it's just been an amazing ride for five years. I credit it to a couple of things. We're maniacal about the North Star being consumer empowerment that we want to create a beautiful user experience that the consumer feels empowered, empowered, empowered. And in a lot of ways, when I, you know, when we think about the business that we're in in terms of helping lenders do better business by empowering their clients, we feel like almost like an arms dealer because the truth is is that when you've got these huge companies out there, you know, the, the quickens and the zillows and the bank rates and these guys that have pretty much unlimited resources to dazzle the consumer, you know, you got it, you can't go to a thermonuclear war as a LO with a slingshot. And so we'd like to think that we're, you know, we're, we're, we're giving the industry something to fight back with in a, you know, in a way that has intrinsic value for the consumer. Yeah. No, no, it's, it's funny. When you, what you say there, it makes me think of how, you know, I'll hear a lot of L.O.'s get aggravated speaking of some of those companies, how, you know, so and so company is like, you know, mining my database or pilfering my debt, you know what I mean? It's like they get these offers of solicitation and then L.O.'s get upset because another company has come in and, you know, captured that business or captured that attention, which, which I think is one of the great things about homebought is we have to do that. I mean, nobody said just because you close that loan that, you know, it's over and they're never going to shop you ever again. Okay. You know, so the question is, well, how are you keeping that relationship sticky and, and, and tied to you? And I think that's where homebought comes in. It came on. It came on. I mean, and that's the thing now too, is that everybody's got CRM. You've got these big guys every minute of every day. I mean, we're all consumers, right? Yeah. Everyone we look at our phone, we're getting targeted for something. Right. So there's no reason to expect that our clients aren't being targeted as well. Yeah. So Austin, tell me a little bit then, how do you get your clients once you've closed a transaction with them? How do you introduce and segway them over to homebought? Yeah. That's a great question. So, you know, and it's not just our past clients, by the way, that we're putting in here. Literally, anybody, I was at my local, local watering hole, you know, yesterday and someone's like, you know, I think about selling my house. Hey, give me your email. Give me your, give me your phone number and I'm going to send you this report, right? And, and so it's definitely not just our past buyers, but we are putting all our past buyers in after closing. We actually introduce homebought at time of CD. So when you're calling the buyer and going over that CD and that final number, you're calling it a gift. We're going to be providing value to you. We're going to be sending you our report every month. This report is going to, is going to track the equity in your house. It's going to tell you what the value is. It's going to tell you what your current mortgage balance is that you can go in an update. And it's going to take that number and show you what you can do with that equity. There's anything we can ever do for you down the road. Please call us back. You're going to be getting that every 30 days. Hmm. I love that the way you introduce that. So you're putting leads in there as well? We do put leads in there from time to time that are, that are, that are, that can even be buyer section, right? Mostly it's the home buyer. It's the home owner section, but we do put some buyers in there from time to time as well. What I really, really like to do is I also like to put our readers in there. And so, so for those people that don't know, like homebought, you can actually have a co-branded version of homebought. It's extremely inexpensive. And, and so you can have access to your, to your realtor's database. And when I say that, you're not being, you're not, you're not taking it over. You actually don't get to see their info if that's an issue for your realtor. However, you are seeing that one of that realtor's leads came and wanted a, a CMA or, or wanted to go search houses or whatever. And so you're, it's just a trigger for you to reach back out to that realtor. But anyway, I put in all my realtor's because I want them to get their own report and I want them to be curious about what this is that we're doing and how can they be a part of it. Now, I'm glad you, you brought that up because I had intended on going there as well. In addition to, I want to cover some of the new features that you guys have recently rolled out like the video and things like that. But let's hang out here for a while because it is an area that I have found L.O.'s struggle with in various levels in, in getting agents on board and getting agents to upload their database, whatever. So I'd love to hear Austin how you introduce it to realtor's data agents. You know, we've all, we're all in presentations, we're all in coffee, lunches, whatever. Just ask for their address. Hey, do you want to see this thing that we're doing for our buyers? You know, you're going to really like it. It's not that, it's not the average what your home value is. It's actually going through and figuring out what the balance is on the mortgage and taking the equity and showing them how they can reify, how they can rent, what they can do to turn that equity into investment, all of those things, right? And so you're just getting the address right there. I'm signing them up from my phone as we're sitting there. And then it's great because I'm the tracking tools. I can see how many times I open it. I can see when they look at it again, right? And some forget about that lunch and three months down the road, then they start opening it again. They're like, oh, I forgot about Austin and what he said, right? And it's a reason to reach back out to him. Hey, I saw that, I saw that you're loving home by, is this something you want to sign up for and put your 600 pass clients in there, too? Jeff, it's a super slick move because I call it the mansplain move, you skip the mansplaining. The realtors got a very limited attention span to begin with. And it's one of those things was like, hey, I got something that'll keep you from getting zillowed. What's your address? And let them see it for themselves, let them teach themselves. I love what you're doing to Austin where because he gets click stream, he's actually now able to see how obsessed that realtor gets with this tool that he just gave you. Yeah, so just to clarify, in case anybody doesn't know, you can see the activity that people are engaging with on that financial digest, right? The clicks, the views and all that kind of stuff. And all the different things you have that are action oriented, right? The calls to action. You're getting all those analytics, right? Yeah, sorry, yeah, you were absolutely. You know, in fact, one thing I do talk to my loan officers about too is making sure that they're working, quote, unquote, that activity feed. So every day you can go in and look, now you're going to get alerts through emails as well. But we opened up our activity feed once a day. We looked to see who's the most active. What's great is you can put notes in homebots so you know, you know, when you did reach out to somebody, when you didn't reach out to somebody. And we just have someone kind of dial in, just check it in on you. How you been? You know, Austin, I were talking about it. It looks like you could actually save a bunch on a re-fi. Hey, you can, it looks like maybe your search and houses can we help with a new pre-approved whatever it is. So, so I'm telling my loan officers, don't wait for the people to reach out to you, which you get alerted, right, that they reached out to you. But we'll be working that activity feed. Yeah, let's go back to the realtor side of things, because I know people would love to dig deeper on this. So I think conceptually we get the, you know, the call to the agent. I love the whole, you know, don't get zillog thing, keep it simple and sweet. They get it. They're on the digest a couple weeks, whatever. Help us make the transition from that to actually having agents upload their database. Like how does that thing happen in the real world? I'd be for you, Austin. And I'm sorry, a researcher that you actually froze briefly on me. I apologize. Did I keep putting that trick on people I freeze midway? I am, I am so sorry, yep. No, no, no, no, okay. So take me from a, you've got an agent who's got the, the, the home bot digest for their own property. Yep. Now, how do we move them from that to great, let's upload your 500 pass clients? Yeah. So again, we're looking at the activity feed. We're seeing that that person's opened it. We're seeing they're opening it every single time. So it's just a phone call, hey, you know, did you, you put me more thought into, uh, into what we talked about at home bot? Remember, it's very inexpensive. It is very, very inexpensive, uh, and then you do the math for them. Uh, hey, if you close, if you get one listing out of this, if you close one more deal, you paid for it for like eight or nine years, right? Right. That's how inexpensive it is to co-brand with that realtor. And so they're more than happy to go upload their 500 pass clients, their hundred pass clients, whatever it is. So you haven't, you know, listen, anybody who doesn't know, I'm the chief truth teller, guys. You haven't run into any friction with, with getting agents to actually execute, execute on that. Hey, you know, listen, it's not for everybody. There's probably five or six agents out there floating around that I've had the conversation with that maybe have something through their current, uh, company, right? Um, so it's not a hundred percent, but I would say the majority of people that I put in end up signing up for it, especially when you tell them the price. I know. Have you, have you played with the freemium model yet with agents at a little bit? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, great point, Ernie. So the freemium model works as you can. That's what I've seen people do is the agents either use it for their own property or they'll go up, they have up to what? How many 25? Yep. Yeah. So so agents can for free upload 25 of their past contacts, I believe, right? That's correct. Yeah. So that gets them started. No, and I got guys just so you know why I'm hanging out here is because, you know, I'm just what I try and do is, is solve problems for people that I'm hearing and look, I know this varies like mileage will vary based on loan officer. You don't have to tell me, I'm sure I don't have to tell you, I'll do respect to those listening. Some people get stuff done, some people don't. Some people come up with reasons why it won't work or excuses because there are plenty of loan officers who have succeeded in getting agents to upload their database. And then frankly, there are some who haven't. And I think what I've seen for those who haven't succeeded in getting agents to actually upload their database, I've seen the biggest mistake is the approach from the get go. They're very hands off, they're very lazy, fair, they're very like, Hey, I sent you that thing, right? Go ahead. You should upload your past database. And of course, they don't, right? Because they don't understand the context of why. So I don't know, Ernie, if you're hearing this, you want to unpack anything else here? Best practices, that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's some. That I, I, I don't see enough LOs right now taking advantage of. Okay. Here's the angle. The angle is you walk into a room or a virtual room of agents and use freemium to carpet bomb the room, right? You know, you could spend all your time trying to find the five people in the room who are actually going to be motivated to upload stuff. But carpet bomb the room, you give out home bot to 20 or 30 or 50 agents. And then home bot tells you which ones actually loaded one or two clients. So it doesn't cost them anything. So in a lot of ways, the freemium can act as sort of a signal detector. So it actually, the people that you see adding one or two or three or five, those are the ones that you absolutely focus on because they already have that predispositions. They say, Hey, I want to use the tool versus, you know, spend a lot of time on agents that you're just never going to get to load clients. So that's part, that's part A. Part B is 10 clients, like package it down. Instead of your whole database, you can just get them to load 10 past clients. And I'm telling you that that is a magic number. And here's why it's magic. It's magic because with home bot 50% engagement rate, you know, five of those 10 are going to be engaging every month or in their home bot. And one of those 10 is actually going to reach out and say something or ask something of that agent. So I'd say parsing it down to the achievable. So once you get signal with somebody, then say, Look, I'm not asking you to put 500 in. I'm not even asking you to put 25 in just put 10 as what'll happen is it's, you know, an agent you put 10 in and they start to see success, that's the, that's the biggest motivator for them to keep, keep on, keep on, keep on. Right. Right. So if I'm, if I want to go, you know, I've got 400 agents or whatever in my database, is there marketing materials that I could send out on, on home bot website to, or a link or anything like that where they can, they can sign up for the premium version? Yes. We have an entire package of videos, how to blog articles, even material that you can brand along those lines, 100% just hit your, I cast for success first and they'll, they'll send everything to you. Yeah. It's about a way. We're going to put links in the show notes to the home bot website and I'll put, make sure I put the link to the real estate agent specific page that, that home bot has because I've, I'm on that page right now and there's, I mean, you guys make it so easy for agents and to share this with agents, you've got PowerPoint decks, you've got like, you know, explainer videos, you've got like, overviews and, you know, template scripts of what L.O.s could say or share an email scripts and it's just like, I mean, it's like 80% done for you. I mean, I'm just pointing this out for those who don't know it Austin, but that to me is what I love because a lot of vendors don't like provide that, you know? And there's a power shift going on right now, Jeff, and this is something I'm curious Austin too, if you're starting to see this. The power shift is, L.O.s have always had beautiful databases that's just kind of a compulsory part of being in the business, right? You got to be in your L.O.S. you, you have all those homeowners in there. The shift that's happening right now is of course the inventory crisis. And, and what home bot can do is to find the people ready to sell in your database. And this is something agents actually have historically never been good at is actually having a great database of their past home owners, their past buyers. They don't put the addresses in. They have all of these leads, but they rarely have addresses with us. And where I'm going with this is inventory is the gold now. Listings are gold. It's such a rare supply. So to the extent Austin that you can get listing, you know, signal out of your past client database, now you're dealing with gold, right? You've got something to, to, you know, hand out to your realtor partners. But then downstream of that, again, it goes back to those realtors. You give a, you get a realtor to put 10 in and they get one listing out of that 10, or one listing out of that 20. I mean, the stat is that even if they're paying for home bot, that basically one listing pays for 20 years with a home bot. Yeah, so, so yeah, I mean, I just say that's where we're putting a lot of energy into right now because of course, 65% of all buyers are existing homeowners and lenders sit on that beautiful database of homeowners. So you're really, the power shift has commenced. Amen to that. And if I could add on that, you know, Ernie, I put this class together for a lot of my clients and all those that I coach, speaking of the inventory issue, the class is 10 ways to get more listings in a low inventory market, right? Very timely class. And in home bot is one of the things I feature in there for the reason you just explained. And in particular, I'm looking at the slide right now that I've seen a number of agents use home bot to generate leads, right? They're running a CMA lead, for example, or what's your home worth type of an opt-in thing. And then what's really cool is you guys have this whole process, well, maybe I'll just like, so instant offer. This is what I'm looking at. You familiar with what I'm referring to there? I did. So, so unpack that for how an agent might use that. Well, instant offers are really threatening to the real estate, to the traditional real estate industry. This is the open doors now at Zillow. So this is where these big portals now are buying properties directly from your clients. Right. So yes, you're the agents getting cut out, cut out of listing, which also now listings, of course, lead to the to the buy side too. So very, very threatening. And so the point here that what we've done with home bot is that instead of the agent pretending like it doesn't exist, the agent can now shoot a video, turn a module on inside of home bot. So when they're when their client is interested in eye buying or instant offers, they stay the central point of being the advisory on that because there's a story and there's advice that that really needs to, you know, to be in context with, you know, instant offers. So it keeps the agent there. And the story is pretty simple. If the agent gets that phone call from one of their clients, it's thinking about taking an instant offer. The agent could basically say, oh, yeah, that instant offer, you know, you're getting less money, but you're taking less risk. Let me show you a little bit more risk, a little bit more inconvenience, but a lot more money. So let me just show you those two scenarios so that you can make the most educated decision there. So instead of hiding under rock, it really puts the agent, you know, in a place to to charge that so that they again, the worst thing that can happen is that realtor gets cut out of the conversation. Yes, if they're not even part of the consideration, for sure. And I love the fact that like even with just generating or using a, hey, what's your home worth offer, whether it's on an agent's website, whether it's a Facebook ad or something in your digest, I'm looking at the screenshot of it here, when people are like wanting to get an estimated value of their home, they can tune the value, which is cool, right? Because then they can like say, well, I don't think it's worth that or whatever. And of course, you're going to get the notifications that they're tuning the value, right? That's brilliant. But also there's that button instant offer like of what would my house be worth? Like today, boom, right? Just to create that very cool engagement and to your point is the agent can create a video, whatever. Anyway, roll this back to all the loan officer is, you know, I'm a believer, it sounds like everybody here is way beyond like doing loans and performing on the transaction, which is of course table stakes today. What beyond that am I going to do for my realtor to help them with their business? That's how I'm going to continue to build that relationship, earn referrals, you know, all that kind of stuff. So that's why I think Homebot and I think a lot of people listening have found Homebot to be a great solution for that. So all right, let's talk about then what's coming new. I watched this video about a week ago or so. There's a lot happening with you guys and video and scaling your expertise through video. I'm looking at this thing called power-ups. I don't even know what that is, but what do you want to tell us about like what you're now you've rolled out or what's coming? So it has been a dream of mine for almost four years now. And so basically Homebot, you know, you guys have seen it. It's beautiful. The consumer loves clicking on. It's a modern experience. But the thing that's always been missing from it for me has been multi-dimensional brand. And here's what I mean by that. The L.O.'s brand is not just their face and some contact information. Your brand is your humanity. Your brand is your is your biometrics the way you look. Do you look trustworthy to me? It's how you explain things. Do you sound trustworthy to me? It's a lot of different stuff that goes into what your brand is and for us to, you know, obviously we're promoting the L.O.'s brand to their own clients for that engagement. But we I've always wanted to take it to the next level, which was to allow the L.O. to record an infinite number of videos. Let's just start with a dozen. And that those videos are carefully placed at all different places across the Homebot experience for their clients. So in that way, you're actually advising 25 hours in a 24-hour day conceivably. Because, you know, that's the power of video. And of course, you know, we, you know, we've been, you know, students of this industry for a while and we say that, hey, look, oh, you know, most of the top producers are using video very aggressively because they get that their brand is not just their the lowest rate or they're the hardest working or you know what I'm saying. Or they have the coolest office or close in six minutes. Yeah. So really what the what the power up is is that every Homebot, every pro user of Homebot can basically drop, you know, all any and all video evergreen custom video that of them right into their Homebot experience that goes out to all of their clients, right place, right time. And here's one little other little trick to it. When they're co-sponsoring realtors, it syndicates down to the realtors Homebot as well. So in other words, that video now gets exposed to the real estate agent's clients, which is great because remember, this is this is a subject matter around finance and you know, financial education and that sort of thing, what better person than your partner to speak to that, you know, in digest. Does that make sense? Yeah. Austin, have you had a chance to use any of the new features yet? Yeah, we did. And in fact, our goal was to kind of put one of video out every other week and especially around refi time. And we'll continue to do that, even though refis are starting to change maybe more into cash out. We'll continue that video barrage on people and the response is amazing. Like Ernie said, if you want to see your face, right, they care about, they care about connecting with Austin. And we actually take it another step further. It's great to blast the videos out to, you know, 4,000 people or whoever's in your in your sphere. But if we see, if we've tried to get a hold of somebody, we can't get a hold of them and they've been looking at that, you know, they've requested a CMA or whatever it is, right, they're super active. We're going to make them a one-on-one video. We use bomb bomb. And it's basically us sharing our screen and just walking them through what that digest actually means. And the response that you get on doing something when you're calling them by their name, and even though they didn't answer their phone or their text, but you not send them a video, it's watched every single time and you can see how far they're watching it, 95 to 100% of the video, that to us has been a huge tool. Yeah, very cool, very cool, very personalized, which is what people are looking for these days. Regarding the videos, Ernie, the power-ups, or whatnot, I'm looking at the different examples of videos here, like homeowner intro, intro to refinancing, trading up to a new home buyer intro pre-qual. These, how do these go out? In what cadence? Does the yellow kind of control how those are rolled out? What happens? There's a couple of different ways that video works with homeowner today. The first way is, as Austin was describing, there's a sort of a blast. You can actually do a video, do a one-to-many, and so the homebody experience gets coupled with whatever your message is, and that can be very effective. The other way is where you have a library of videos, let's say it does the videos, and they are simply embedded into the homebot digest that every one of your clients always look. So it's really a self-serve. Let's say that that was just used REFI. They clicked on the REFI module. They're going through that and looking at the numbers playing with the sliders, and then boom, Austin's video pops up right in the REFI section, where he gets to speak to maybe something that's going on with the REFI market. This is meant to be alive. This isn't meant to be evergreen. Some of this could be evergreen, but this is also meant to be very dynamic. So if all of a sudden rates went up another half point, he might record another video to speak more clearly to what the dynamics of the market right there. So that's more of the self-serve where the consumer is choosing to, you know, based on their engagement with homebot. Well, what I love about that is it's contextual video at the right time. Yeah. So if they're in that REFI module or if they're in that, you know, buying a new home or first time buyer module, and you've got that relevant video based on the context in that moment of what they're, that's super engaging. You know, it's funny, when I talk to a lot of top producers like Austin, you're almost like a victim of your success. When you had a small database, you could always give face time to people, right? When you have a huge database, geez, even if you, you know, the way that you spend your human time, who's going to be ready to receive you right live? This is a great way to basically take your personality and your expertise right time, right place, right message. There you go. So Austin could be many different places at once. Yes, I like it. I like it. So the Austin, the agents that you've got on homebot, would you say that that has either a, have you leveraged, let me say it this way, have you leveraged homebot to get conversations with agents you think you might not otherwise have succeeded having conversations with. Yeah, that's a really good question. I actually tell a funny story when I'm telling people about homebot and my other L.O.S. is I got, you know, you've become really good friends with some of your realtors where it's more even like a friendship than it is, you know, that business relationship. And I had guys that got mad at me that I didn't show them to this sooner, right? Like they're like, dude, what are you doing man? Like we've been in the first, like uploading our first, right? So I actually use that story to kind of tell out to other realtors, like, hey, and they're big hitters in town. So people know who they are. And I asked him if I could use their name and they said, that's fine. And so I actually use that as my intro story to get more realtors that maybe didn't, you know, want to work with us or didn't already work with us to begin with. So you're like, hey, I don't want you to be angry with me later. That's right. That's exactly right. Yep. That's pretty brilliant actually because I was thinking as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking like, how could an L.O. use Homebot to, you know, as we're making calls or whatever, use Homebot to have a conversation with somebody on their hit list, you know, who might be a producer or whatnot could be an approach right there. Right. Make the video too. Make the video for realtors, right? Show them what, how you're, how you're leveraging video and how they can leverage video to their, you know, past clients. So you're saying make a video with maybe doing kind of a screen share of the Homebot Digest, for example. Exactly. We're screen sharing all the time. In fact, just this morning, I sent out to all of my loan officers a screen share of me sharing in Homebot and how I can sort it by equity, right? Because I'm getting everybody's, well, refires are kind of drying up, they're drying up. I was like, guys, that just means we need to turn into cash out, refires in and Homebot allows you to sort by who's got the most equity, right? Yeah. And a thousand other ways to sort, but I just made a screen share video to show the guys, hey, this is what, this is who you need to be contacting, right? Make your goal five of these a day and make a video for each one of them. Hmm. Brilliant idea. Anything we're missing, earning in terms of high points, you know, where, where LOS should be aware of what you could do in Homebot? You know, it's funny. It's like, you kind of cut me off guard there, Jeff, because it's like, I'm like so intensely listening to what Austin's doing. And I'm just going to say it is for us, this is just the, this is the gold for us as a company is to listen to, you know, Austin tell what he just did. It sounds so simple, but hopefully your listeners like really dial into what he just said, like these little things just have so much nuance and they sound so simple that they can be so powerful. So I was just thinking about, well, how can we build something like that easier for him to do to do what he just did? I think that with realtors right now, again, this isn't anything new. With realtors, you know, it's hard to get through attention. There's a million shiny metal objects in their universe of technology. But one thing right now that I would, you know, if I were in L.O. that I would just be banging the drum is, it's a listing machine because realtors are suffering. It is suffering the inventory crisis. And like really positioning this as a, hey, you know, listings is the gold, you want to mine for gold, put your clients in this thing, and that's how. Because one thing I've noticed is that, you know, L.O.s are really, really thoughtful about this story, right, of empowerment and financial literacy and multi-generational wealth and caring about their clients one year, two year, five year, ten year. That doesn't really translate to most realtors. I mean, I don't want to be insulted. I was a realtor. And here's the, it's so transaction oriented. And for so many reasons, you know, they, it's, it's really hard for them to carry those relationships for ten years. What are you going to talk about for ten years? You're not going to buy or sell their home, right? Banana bread recipes. Yeah, they're just not very good subject matter. But when the, when you, so as a lender, when you partner with them, you're now giving them all of this amazing content subject matter to really push that nurture over years and years and years. Here's the problem right now. Agents don't care. Why? They don't have any listings. So I would say right now, the timeliness of this is to narrow that message to, hey, you need listings? I got something to get your listings. And the way you do that is both with the past clients, you know, with the financial digest, but also using home bot as like a top of funnel, lead gen capture slash nurture thing, right? 100%. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. That's, it's like somebody once said, it's like, you know, solve problems, right? Show up in self problems for people. And that's the biggest problem agents have to your point with, but, but now you can actually do, because you know, the classic thing with LOS is like, well, how do I actually do? Oh, oh, help my realtors be successful. How do I actually do that? Well, this is one way you actually can help solve a pain point. And you and I both know that many, I won't use the word most, but many realtors are, are woefully lacking when it comes to appropriately capturing leads, but even bigger than that is like nurturing them, you know, so I think home bot's a great tool for that. Fantastic. All right, Austin, any other nuggets you want to share? You got a brand new L.O. in front of you. They're like, home bot, what do I do? How do I, how do I, anything else you want to tell them? Yeah, listen, we've said it a couple of times, but, but leads are currency, right? And, and when you can get this currency that you can hand back out to realtors, I swear for every deal we hand out, three come back to us, right? If you're a brand new loan officer, get a hundred people in there. You know 100 people and you know 100 people that own houses. This is, this is such a good, and you know, it's running a lot of the new loan offices. They don't want to go after their sphere of influence. They don't want to be pushy. But this is a way to be not be pushy and just slightly remind people what you do every 30 days, right? So we're getting every single person we know and getting them into home bot. And like I said, we have about 4,600 and I wish we would have been doing this forever by 11 years because we'd have way more in there, right? And at some point, we've had to almost turn one of our junior loan officers just to our home bot loan officer to keep up with it all. It's, it's currency guys. It's currency sign up. And I'm not getting paid by the way to say that. So I truly truly believe in it. Well, well, I'm getting paid. And you know, and I think that I think the other consideration here is to know that it's not good enough to just say buyers. They're either homeowners or renters and two thirds of them are homeowners. So I think that's really important to understand, you know, that those homeowners sit in that database and they're ready. And so if you're purchase focused, your purchase leads are sitting in your database because those folks are going to those folks are going to convert over. So with that contact, and I don't know if I'm going to get in trouble saying this because I can't remember our product team rules out so many new features. But I am going to share something right now that I am beyond excited about maybe us that you can tell me or Jeff, if this has been announced yet by us, but you're quietly rolling out home bot for insurance agents. I think I heard of that. Yep. And and it's it's so powerful because everything that we've just talked about with real estate agents where they don't keep good databases is hard to get them below their data and everything. You don't have that problem with insurance agents. They got a whole other set of problems of retention right now that their their industry is getting disrupted, especially that and you know, obviously the independent insurance agent. But everything we just talked about as it relates to how do you get access to another to a bigger sphere or increase your sphere. I think those insurance agents are just right. They sell homeowners insurance. All of those homeowners in their database, they use home bot they're exposed to your brand. So you're saying a new niche of referral partner for LL? Yes, 100%. I know a lot of folks have already doing it, but it's been kind of soft. Yeah. We've been at the last eight months kind of drilling in deep with a bunch of insurance agents and piloting and you know, seeing where this thing works or doesn't work and where it breaks. And I think we've found a really sweet spot. And by the way, the insurance agent cannot get home bot today without the LL. So it's really the same story. Everything that we just talked about whether it's freemium or even co-sponsorship, same price, same everything. But for insurance agents, and Austin, I would just say that you should be carpet bomb in the insurance agent. Well, it's funny you said that because we had several of our LLs start that maybe about 90 days ago. And that's a whole different conversation because there's five, you know, insurance agents that come into your office a day, right? I mean, so that's a completely different conversation. They have just as many people in their in their database than a realtor does maybe a way, way, I mean, again, the insurance agents homeowners are written on napkins and five old iPhones playing in the basement. And their databases are all over the place. The the insurance agent is one click from every single client. Well, because they recognize the value of their database for sure for residuals and all that. 100%. Yeah, that's cool. That's that's another great niche. All right, we'll look for more good stuff to come on that insurance niche. So you heard to hear folks folks, perhaps an exclusive on a mortgage market radio. All right, listen, I know you guys are busy. You've shared a lot. I am incredibly grateful for it. All right, guys, so listen, we've got a partnership going with home bot mortgage marketing radio. And if you're interested in taking the next step with home bot, if you don't have it yet, you want to check it out, we're going to put links to all this in the show notes, but you want to go to homebot.ai, homebot.ai. That's their website. And if you're going to get started, use the code mortgage radio 200. That'll save you 200 bucks off off the sign up fee. So there is no sign up before you whatsoever. As a podcast listener, it's mortgage radio 200. You go to homebot.ai. You know, check the show notes for those links. If you need them, but other than that, hope you've heard enough here today to be convinced if you're not using home bot yet to get on it because of the impact it can have. And if you are using it, then take some of the ideas you've heard from Austin and Ernie today and apply them in your business. Gentlemen, I can't take you enough for being here. Appreciate the time. Thank you for having me. Great stuff. Thank you, Joe. You bet. And listeners, you know what to do if you enjoyed this episode. Hey, go to homebot.ai, mortgage radio 200s of code. And leave us a review if you are so inclined. We appreciate you tuning in. We'll see you on the next one. Bye for now. Hey, guys, what's up real quick? You've heard about the mortgage marketing pro membership before. And I just want to quickly remind you if that you're in a place in your business where you simply need more purchased loans. You need to fill your pipeline with purchase business. 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