The Zillow for Off-Market Real Estate Deals? How Investors Can Find Properties Faster

Andrew Miklos (00:00)

So then you’ll message that seller and maybe a day or two later you’ll get a link to a Google Drive of photos, but you don’t remember what post that came from because you saw multiple posts. That post is now probably buried in your feed somewhere. so then you have to ask the wholesaler again for the information about the property. So then they’ll

Finally, maybe message you the asking price, the ARV, all the details. So the gathering and finding and hunting of information is a challenge. and that’s what Go Deal Pro solves is you can post on our website like you could post on the MLS, your property photos, your pricing, your ARV. you can even attach documents to it.

Scott Bursey (02:11)

Welcome back to the *Real Estate Pros* podcast powered by Investor Fuel. I’m your host, Scott Bursey. Glad you’re with us. And today we’re delighted to be joined by Andrew Miklos of Go Deal Pro, who has made a significant impact in the Proptech industry. In this episode, listeners, you can expect to learn how to replicate that success and scale your own operations. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Andrew Miklos (02:35)

Hey, thanks so much for having me.

Scott Bursey (02:36)

It’s awesome having you here and to help our listeners get up to speed. Please give us the ninety second highlight reel, if you will, of how your career ignited and where you’re pouring your fuel now.

Andrew Miklos (02:46)

Yeah, so I started in real estate about twenty years ago. mainly in the proptech startup space. we built a for sale by owner company called My Secret Agent. that was in 2009, right after the housing market crash in 2007, 2008. We noticed a lot of people were going the for sale by owner route. And that was because they were just trying to save on commissions and, trying to get out of being underwater. So

We quickly learned that the for sale by owner space was not really serving the users very well. so we came up with an idea for a startup called Savvy Lane, which was more of an a la carte real estate option. So instead of just paying a agent a flat fee, or commission, or a fixed commission, I should say, you’re able to pick and choose the services you want from getting your house ready, like photography or cleaning, to when it was posted to the MLS and how.

And if you needed offer reviews or things like that. So people just paid as they went rather than just a giant lump sum at the end. So that one was a fun startup to be in, fast paced. we had a lot of investor interest, raised like four million dollars to date. but COVID killed it, unfortunately. And so we after like in 2022, after we shut the company down and sold off some of the pieces.

we started a traditional real estate company called Acre Real Estate here in the Pacific Northwest. And we brought on a few agents and then I started kind of dabbling in the off-market world and was looking for deals to flip and wholesale and looking for platforms and apps to try to share those deals on, and found that it was a very fragmented space with deals living all over the place and finding the right contact information.

person to close on the deal was difficult. so we over the last year we spent the time building an app called Go Deal Pro.

Scott Bursey (04:33)

That is awesome. Appreciate you walking us through that. And regarding your strengths, what is the one thing that keeps your machine running smoother than the competition?

Andrew Miklos (04:44)

Well, our strength is what I learned from being in the proptech venture capital space was lean and mean is sometimes very important. being able to make your own decisions and move quickly and iterate and pivot without having to run your ideas past a board or investors. so with Go Deal Pro, we’re in a position where it’s me and one other co-founder.

we know the industry really well. Like I said, I’ve been in it for 20 years. I’m focused on technology and improving, users experiences and out of that came Go Deal Pro. And we’re not, in with venture capitalists where they need to see a profit immediately. It’s more of a passion project and being able to help build this app with wholesalers.

on our side has been very beneficial. So they tell us their pain points, we’re able to respond to them in ways that a lot of companies can’t. And we can build something overnight and especially with AI and all the technology we have at our fingertips, we can iterate very quickly.

Scott Bursey (05:45)

Andrew, as the market shifts, how do you maintain your edge?

Andrew Miklos (06:36)

So right now, yeah, we have seen a slowdown in the market a little bit. the beginning of this year, things were flying off the shelf, multiple offers, bidding wars. we did see a little bit of a slowdown. I want to say in the last couple of months. interest rates did go up above seven percent. so but on the other side of that, we have seen more buyers coming out of the, closets or wherever. because

before a lot of people just didn’t want to get into a bidding war and they knew that, all this house is listed at, five hundred thousand and it’s gonna go to six hundred thousand and there’s gonna be five other offers on it and I have to waive inspection and there’s just a lot of hesitation and sometimes people will only walk to house for twenty minutes and then they immediately had to place an offer on it. So, what I see now is and actually in our traditional real estate brokerage, we see more

buyers coming out and wanting to look at homes and spend the time to look at five or ten homes and then decide which one they want to place an offer on. So I think it’s helped to have in inventory increase a little bit. and that’s just on the traditional real estate side. with off-market deals, those things seem to still be flying off the shelf. And we’re seeing that with Go Deal Pro. So something will be listed and if it’s hot, it’s under contract within a couple of days.

I think investors and flippers see more long term because they’re like, hey, right now if I’m gonna flip a property, it’s gonna not gonna sell over the winter. I’m gonna have to take my time and probably list it in the spring, right? So yeah, that off-market space, and I’m newly in it, seems to be going pretty quickly as long as the properties are priced right for what the rehab costs are and things like that.

Scott Bursey (08:09)

Thank you for highlighting that, Andrew. And when it comes to weaknesses or internal bottlenecks, what is the biggest friction point you’ve identified in your current workflow?

Andrew Miklos (08:19)

so for our current workflow, the bottlenecks we see are just getting users to adapt to a new platform or tool. so a lot of our wholesalers, they’re some are small mom-and-pop operations, which we’re kind of what we’re more interested in right now because we’re a newer platform and the people that do five, ten deals a year aren’t gonna pay the high prices that some of our competitors want them to pay.

but the larger operations, we’ve realized that they’re more of a company with employees and they have their systems and tools in place. so getting to getting them to adapt the new tools kind of difficult sometimes. it’s like I already have my stack in place and then like I already have these tools and I’m not gonna learn to use a new tool or pay for another one. but that’s why we made Go Deal Pro mainly free for our users to test out and list a deal and post a deal and search.

Just so that, okay, I don’t I can see the value in this before I decide I want to start paying for it.

Scott Bursey (09:13)

And fascinated to learn looking at the landscape right now, what is the greatest opportunity that you see for Go Deal Pro?

Andrew Miklos (09:21)

an opportunity to be a site like Zillow and not have so much noise out there. So for our investors, and this is how it that picture the landscape looks for them when they’re looking to purchase an off-market deal, is they’ll typically go to Facebook because a lot of deals are posted there because it’s a free space to post a deal on. they’ll see, an ARV, city state, after repair value. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that term.

but a city, state, and zip, and then you have to contact the seller for more information. So then you’ll message that seller and maybe a day or two later you’ll get a link to a Google Drive of photos, but you don’t remember what post that came from because you saw multiple posts. That post is now probably buried in your feed somewhere. so then you have to ask the wholesaler again for the information about the property. So then they’ll

Finally, maybe message you the asking price, the ARV, all the details. So the gathering and finding and hunting of information is a challenge. and that’s what Go Deal Pro solves is you can post on our website like you could post on the MLS, your property photos, your pricing, your ARV. you can even attach documents to it. now a investor can look at it and

Everything’s in one place, the photos, it all lives on one platform and they can search it just like Zillow. So, enter a zip code, enter a city, enter a state, whatever they want. they can create a Buy Box. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that term, but it’s like save searches, right? So I want, King County in Seattle, Washington, anything under a million dollars with a minimum profit of X, and then those will get emailed or texted to you as soon as they’re posted to our app.

Scott Bursey (11:37)

And for those of our listeners that are thinking, hey, this is truly fascinating, what would you like them to know first about Go Deal Pro?

Andrew Miklos (11:45)

first is it it’ll do better with you. the more buyers we have on there, the more deals we’ll have on there. The more deals we’ll have on there, the more buyers we’ll have on there. So it’s a flywheel effect. and if people, take advantage of the tool and that’s where like it some of our competitors charge too much and there’s not a lot of deals living on there, and that’s why there’s more deals on Facebook.

But yeah, mean if you start to take advantage of our tool, it kinda it benefits everybody and it could benefit the wholesaler, or seller as well, because instead of just showing it to a small group of investors that they’re comfortable working with, now they’ve opened up their horizons to everybody. and we do have like some systems in place to help create trust. So we have badges that we can assign our users. So based on if we’ve verified contact information or they are.

or if we know that they’ve transacted deals before, they’ll get certain badges like verified or trusted badges. And then that’ll show the seller that he can he should trust or work with this buyer over some of the other ones that maybe aren’t verified on our platform. so yeah, again, it just takes people to come and start using it and realizing it’s a pretty efficient tool. And we’ve onboarded some wholesalers who’ve been really impressed with the results.

And yeah, they, post a deal and within a couple of days have I think one guy within twenty four hours had five offers and ten messages, which we can track so our s our sellers can see all the analytics on the deals that they post as well.

Scott Bursey (13:13)

That is truly remarkable. And it strikes me that in this industry there are always threats lurking in the background. What are you most concerned about when you look at the macro environment?

Andrew Miklos (13:25)

yeah, I mean with AI nowadays anyone can build an app. so the threat is real of someone else coming along and building something like this. I think the what separates me and my co-founder is that we’ve been in real estate for twenty years and we really understand how the life cycle of a transaction works and all the parts that are involved. and we see that these wholesalers are

Some of them are new and learning how to do this process. So if we can help them out with that, because of our industry knowledge, I think that’s very beneficial. But yeah, the threat is, someone else coming along and building something similar and with AI nowadays anyone can do it. but it just depends on, what your knowledge of the industry is and if that actually if your tool is actually better than what someone else built.

Scott Bursey (14:11)

Is there a way to protect your business from that external force?

Andrew Miklos (14:14)

Yeah, I mean in our industry there’s things called moats, right? And so yeah, you can build several moats. some of them’s just data, some of them’s just users, some of them are ideas. but none of it’s really safe. Sometimes even just being first to market is a moat, right? but yeah, you really just kind of have to focus on, hey, what can we provide that other people can’t? And, again, part of it is being a lean, mean

startup that’s bootstrapped and we don’t have to, we can listen to our users and not have to listen to our board about producing, scaling to certain markets at a certain speed or producing X amount of profits. So

Scott Bursey (14:51)

Andrew, love your take on, strategy wise. How do you align your long term vision with the day to day tactical execution?

Andrew Miklos (14:59)

that’s a tough question. yeah, so right now when we got into the off-market space, I was, focused on wholesaling and flipping. realized if I wanted to build a successful app that I had to focus all my time on that. And so we I stepped back from doing wholesaling, doing flipping, doing investing, and put the last year or so into this app entirely. I do run a traditional real estate brokerage that pays the bills so that keeps the lights on.

But all my other time was spent with the app. And I do have a family. I do have two kids that are now teenagers in high school. So they can drive themselves around, which makes it a little gives me a little more free time, especially over the last year. But yeah, we just you just kind of need to put your head down sometimes and put your passion into something and you can’t run with too many ideas at once or else you’ll spread yourself too thin. and I think that’s just something useful for people to think about is like

there are a lot of things within real estate that you can do, but again, even with that, you can spread yourself too thin if you’re trying to do too much at once. So and I did that for a period and kind of learned the hard way is we started a traditional real estate brokerage. I wanted to get in flipping, so got my general contractor’s license, we started working just kind of doing too much. And then I came up with the aha moment of Go Deal Pro and was like, what, this is what I think is actually gonna help people.

and I this is what I need to put my time into.

Scott Bursey (16:18)

Digging a bit deeper, what does your professional network look like right now?

Andrew Miklos (16:22)

yeah, I mean it’s pretty widespread. I mean, I know a ton of traditional residential real estate agents, commercial brokers, from my time in the proptech space, a ton of angel investors, venture capitalists, private equity companies, strategic investors, and all of it does come together for you your users specifically. I mean, building a network of people that help.

facilitate your transactions, like title and escrow companies, things like that. lenders, hard money or whatnot. yeah, I mean just making sure you build a solid network of people that you can trust and perform and will answer the phone or a text when you call them promptly is important. So

Scott Bursey (17:03)

Very well said. It’s clear your network is a major asset to your growth. And Andrew, if you were starting over from scratch with only your knowledge and no capital, what is the exact move that you would make in the next thirty days to get back to where you are currently?

Andrew Miklos (17:18)

Ooh, loaded question.

Do I would say pick a lane and stick to it and do what you know well. don’t get too distracted or discouraged from people telling you, that’s been done, or that’s gonna be really hard. You shouldn’t do it. just pick something you’re passionate about because that will get you through the day more than trying to just make it rich or get rich.

and if you’re like passionate about it, it’ll show through the work that you put in.

Scott Bursey (17:43)

Our listeners are gonna get so much value from that piece of advice there. And really, Andrew, you have given us a lot of really good advice here today. Is there any additional words, a golden nugget or two that you could leave with our listeners?

Andrew Miklos (17:57)

yeah, trust your gut. no like if you’ve invested your time into studying and researching and you have an idea or an investment or a plan that you want to go with, don’t let people talk you out of it. It’s really important to focus on your passion and your goals and what what’s gonna make you successful.

Scott Bursey (18:18)

Gold. Pure gold right there, Andrew. And for those of our listeners that want to keep this conversation moving, stay in your lane or collaborate with you on future deals, what is the best way for them to plug into your pipeline and reach you directly?

Andrew Miklos (18:30)

yeah, I’m a pretty open book. so yeah, I mean if they wanna just send me email or a text message, my phone numbers I’ve been in real estate for a long time, my phone number’s everywhere and easy to find. but yeah, they can reach me through GoDealPro.com or they can reach me through Acre Real Estate. either way is fine.

Scott Bursey (18:48)

Andrew, thank you so much for joining us today on the *Real Estate Pros* podcast.

Andrew Miklos (18:52)

I appreciate you having us. Thanks, Scott.

Scott Bursey (18:54)

And to our listeners, we appreciate you. If you receive value from today’s episode, please subscribe. We’ll be filling your tanks with a lineup of elite guests, just like Andrew, who are accelerating and setting the pace for the rest of the industry. Until next time, keep your standards high and your vision clear. We’ll see you in the next episode, everyone.