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You've seen it on LinkedIn and all over the news; the tech takeover is happening. Integrating tech into the strategy of any business sector is essential for growth these days.
You might be wondering how you can integrate tech into your business if you are a real estate investor, and it's a valid question! Luckily we recently acquired a SaaS (Software as a Service) company called FlipperForce (now Upright Tools), which answers that question with its all-in-one platform for rehabbers, flippers, and new construction builders in REI.
In this long overdue episode of Real Estate Investing Unscripted, we sat down with the founder and CEO of Flipperforce, Dave Robertson, along with the head of Customer Success, Haley Lasley. They're talking about how their software can change the game for real estate investors and help them level up and scale their businesses.
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Brendan: Welcome back to another episode of Real Estate Investing Unscripted. I'm your co-host, Brendan Bennett, and with me is your other co-host, David Duggan. David, what's going on
David: Everything is well in my world. Ready for our latest iteration here of Real Estate Investing Unscripted and excited about our guest today. Excited about the topic and Everything, FlipperForce. Haley, Dave, welcome to the show.
Haley: David.
Dave: Hello there. Thanks for having us.
Brendan: To kind of kick us off guys, what I would like to do is to give the listeners a little bit of background into each of your guys' real estate journey or professional journey, before joining FlipperForce. And then we can kind of get into some of the background on who is FlipperForce relative to Fund That Flip and, and kind of explain some of that.
But Dave, if you'll kick us off, give us a, a brief intro and, and let the listeners know who you are.
Dave: All right, sounds good. Well, I'm Dave Robertson. I'm the founder of FlipperForce. I really started in real estate investing back in 2009, so I always had an interest in real estate investing and thought I wanted to do go into home building straight outta college.
So that was back in 2009 and obviously that wasn't a great time to be starting a home building business or going to work for a home builder, so at a college ended up going the commercial construction route. ended up being a commercial construction cost estimator for a local company here in Kansas City.
So spending time, estimating construction costs on new construction projects, commercial renovations, tenant finishes, stuff like that. but ultimately wasn't really doing, what I wanted to. I wanted to work for myself, always had a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit and wanted to work for myself, start my own business, stuff like that.
And so back in 2009, there was a lot of opportunities in the real estate market. There were. Obviously a lot of foreclosures and opportunities to get into real estate investing. Maybe instead of doing the home building route, going the flipping route. So the flipping tv flipping houses, TV shows were pretty popular at the time, flipped this house to fight that, and I thought that could, was an intriguing way to maybe make some extra money on the side while I was working full-time for the commercial construction company.
So, ended up diving into that. Around 2012 bought my first house flip. It was a foreclosure property. ended up doing a lot of the work myself. Kind of got the rehab bug, thought it was an interesting way to make some extra money on the side. While I was doing that, I also started creating some systems and spreadsheets for myself just to help me get organized and stuff like that.
so created a deal analysis spreadsheet just to help me analyze deals. Created an estimating spreadsheet. That was kind of my background. So that was naturally something that I created was a little database of. Cost that I could use to create budgets for my projects, stuff like that. And then eventually I found out something called a macro.
So that's the something you can code into your spreadsheets. And once I found the macro, I kind of went crazy and started really diving into building out my spreadsheets. Spent way too much time bu working on my spreadsheets and not really focusing on real estate. I should have been focusing more on finding deals, but I was too busy tinkering with my spreadsheet.
Eventually decided that other people might wanna buy it because it was pretty elaborate at that point and created a website called house slipping spreadsheet.com and posted it online so other invest investors could buy it. people started buying it and it really kind of took off and eventually I was making more money doing that just kind of as a side hustle than I was as a, commercial estimator full-time.
So, Eventually decided to quit my job back in 2015 and really focused on the spreadsheet business, focus on the part-time house slipping, stuff like that. Right around that same time, a guy named Matt Rodak reached out to me and he was, he thought my spreadsheet was kind of interesting and he thought that I should develop it into a web application.
So he kind of planted the mind virus in my head that. I should try to take it to the next level and take it from being just a spreadsheet to a web app. I ended up sitting on that idea for a couple years cuz I was enjoying just. Selling spreadsheets online. It was pretty easy business. but eventually decided that I did want to take it to the next LE level and build it out as a web application.
And so that's when around 2018 hired a dev shop to help me start building out what is today our FlipperForce web, web platform for real estate investors. So eventually launched, got it launched in January, 2020, and then Matt Rodak reached out again in 2021 and said he thought we could do some interesting things together.
And so in 2022 we were officially acquired by Fund That Flip. So now we're all one big happy family.
Brendan: Very cool. Thank you Dave Hailey tell the listeners a little bit about yourself.
Haley: A little bit different of a journey here. Uh, definitely don't do any coding and not a ton of real estate spreadsheets on my end. Until recently. majority of my career has been in guest services. I was director of guest services for a good while. in 2021, I had a one and a half year old and was commuting about 30, 45 minutes a day.
And I thought, this is not working out for our lives. So I started like, Researching online different remote jobs. In that same year, we actually had purchased our second home. We had moved, we had done some renovations, like we had gutted the kitchen. We had fixed up the home cuz we wanted to invest in it before we, we moved in.
And so when I ran across Fund That Flip, I was like, ah, this is interesting. You know, we just did some of this. This sounds exciting now we didn't rent it or flip it by any means, but sounded really interesting to be a part of. So, Kind of landed into this job with learning and development with flip fund, that flip.
And then like I said, background was way more guest services director focused, had spent some time in training and development. But when FlipperForce was acquired, a position for head of Success and support came along, which is. Right up my alley of working with customers, making sure they're satisfied making sure that they have the support they need to continue their journey and the platform.
And so it just worked out naturally that I got to step on with the FlipperForce team. And so now Dave can't get rid of me. So we're together forever. Right.
David: Love it.
Dave: That's right.
David: Well so a lot to dig into on, on both of these fronts, Dave. Boy, where to start with you? First houseflippingspreadsheet.com. That's gotta be like the most Google friendly name I've ever heard. Even more Google friendly than Fund That Flip. So respect there, but, your background is as a real estate investor, right?
So like, it sounds like that was kind of the spark to all of this was you, you basically created this tool just to help your own investing career that it actually. Help you scale up your real estate investing at the time, or, or you mentioned you were kind of more focused solely on, on the spreadsheet at that point.
Like what did it do to your real estate investing career as you started to morph this spreadsheet that turned into a business and where did that take you?
Dave: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the, big problems with my real estate journey was the distraction of building systems and building spreadsheets instead of maybe focusing my time on. The important things like finding deals, making offers on property. So I think that's one of the, the challenges that you can get into is if you, you don't really wanna be spending so much time on your business systems that you're, distracted from what's important, which is closing on deals and making money.
And so, you know, the spreadsheet itself was a tool that I built just to help me get organized really. I don't know that I ever had a dream of necessarily doing 50 houses a year. It was more like, How can I scale up this part-time side hustle from being one to two houses, part-time a year, two, five to 10 houses, so that way I can get out of the rat race and focus on that and my spreadsheet business.
But then again, like I completely stumbled into this, the spreadsheet business, I completely stumbled into the software business wasn't ever something that I was planning on creating a business out of. It just kind of happened out of building my own systems and stuff like that. So,
Brendan: I think one thing I want to dig into a little bit is, so we'll talk a lot about FlipperForce throughout the course of our conversation today, but just on, on a macro level, right? The need to create process, the the need to. You know, leverage different automation or software, whatever it is to, to run and operate your business.
I, I'll ask maybe a very general question, but why should people care about that? Right. So if I'm someone that's operating a real estate business, and, Haley and, and Dave, I think it'd be interesting to talk about someone who's like really experienced and someone who's not Flipper. Force aside, just general software and automation, like what are the benefits?
What brings someone to use a tool similar to FlipperForce?
Dave: I think that it all depends on the experience level, where you're at in your real estate journey. So I think there's very different needs for somebody that. Is just getting started. They might only need a deal analysis tool to help them analyze their deals, just to make sure that they don't overpay for a property.
Whereas somebody who's an established real estate investor that's doing full-time real estate investing, or they've got a full scale business where they've got other team members, they'll have very different needs from somebody that's just getting started.
Haley: you're gonna find softwares that have educational resources attached to them as well. And so I think if you are on the beginner level, Great. Like FlipperForce, other softwares, we have resources available to help with the getting started. because one, one thing I do know, whether it's real estate investing or whether you're in operations for a company, systems and processes make us more efficient across the board.
And so the reason that you would wanna establish a system in a process for yourself as an individual or a team is because you want to create. Efficiencies to move faster and move smarter, right? So whether you're starting out as one, can you find a system that can help teach you and resource you in a way to create that system?
Or what, maybe you have five people and you guys are so disorganized that like one system is going to lock you guys into a place where. Everything is located, your documents are here, your receipts are located, and that just lifts off a burden of now having like five or six different applications that you're having to run your business off of. And again, systems create efficiency and speed.
David: one of the common things that Brendan and I run into most often when we are hosting this podcast is with those that are experienced real estate investors, they always talk about creating those systems and processes so that they can work on the business instead of in the business. Now, I think one of the ironies of this conversation is, Dave, it while you were creating.
These systems and processes for FlipperForce that actually pulled you outta your real estate business. Luckily it turned out well for you. Right. And, and all, all as well that ends well. But I think you've created something for real estate investors that now Haley is working on and optimizing that allows them to, to Exactly.
It's, it's kind of a one-stop shop thing where they can now step out of the day-to-day grind of working in their business and it automates a lot of those things so they can focus on other things that they need to optimize.
Haley: And I think, I think another thing I would add to that as well is, so if you're an individual, you can, you can hop into a system in a software and kind of like navigate your own way. It's not important to teacher or educate others on how to do that. when it comes to a team, there's the ability to use us as a resource or use a software.
employee as a resource to kind of put those processes in place. A lot of softwares will offer like adoption services or client services. It's your ability to scale and get your team up to speed. So I think that's another big benefit as well is like, I mean, we all know working in the company that we do there, there are times when we have to adopt a system and sometimes, like it takes time.
It doesn't happen overnight. And so the ability to have someone also there to help educate and get people on the right track is, is a major benefit.
Brendan: Yeah, I'd, I'd say that's huge. So just from, from personal experience, the, the couple different softwares that I've leveraged for, whether it's rentals or accounting softwares, there's always this initial, resistance because you're like, okay, I have my spreadsheet, Dave. That's what you founded your initial business on, right?
So I'm like, I have my spreadsheet that I can do my profor on. I have my spreadsheet that I can do my accounting on. And I don't wanna learn this new system, right? There's just like, I don't wanna jump in the pool. And then once you start to dip your tone a little bit, you're like, oh, this isn't actually that bad.
And like all the additional benefits that you're being sold on or, or talked to starts to become real. And you're like, oh, wow, I just saved an hour doing this. Or Hey, I can do the same thing every time. It, it's, it's rinse and repeat. I see it being pretty natural in a lot of the, the software space in general, like flip or force and beyond, where.
There's that initial resistance, and then once you jump in and get to kind of test it out for yourself, it works. How do you guys see that play out in, in your business and FlipperForce? Right? I'm sure you talk to a lot of investors, agents, wholesalers, whoever might be, that are like, Hey, I'm good right now.
I got, I got this, I got the spreadsheet, I got my project manager does it all. So I just look at my phone and I'm all set. So like, what, what does that conversation usually look like and how, how do we add value for people like that?
Dave: Yeah. I mean, I think. A lot of investors are using spreadsheets to manage their business, just kind of like what you said. And they're, they're used to running their analysis in a spreadsheet. They're used to tracking all their expenses in a spreadsheet. the big problem comes with if they've got multiple projects going on all at the same time, now all of a sudden they've got.
Multiple spreadsheets where they've got different information in different places. There's, there's really no source of truth on anything. All their templates might be different. so I think establishing just kind of overall standard business operating system where people can go into, they've got a standardized process on how they analyze all their deals.
They've got templates for how they can estimate their renovation costs. They've got templates for their schedules. They've got their. Typical materials that they're installing in all of their properties, and they've got that in a database that they can reuse over and over again. It's just a matter of all of the, having all that stuff in one place, creating those standards just adds up.
Your time savings over and over again as you start to combine those together. So that is one of the big pain points is people are using their spreadsheets. And if you're like me, I mean, I, I spent a whole lot of time building a spreadsheet and I think a lot of investors get caught up in their, their love for their spreadsheets when, when they should be focusing on.
Letting somebody else maybe build their business systems. And then, focusing on the actual business at hand, which is getting deals and making money in actual real estate deals. So,
David: Yeah, I would say that most real estate investors, at least those that we work with, are not they don't come from a very technical background. Their skillset is more evolved around exactly what you said, right? Like, they know the real estate in their markets, they know certain neighborhoods. They know price points.
They know when to find a good deal and how to find a good deal, and You know, you're spending all your time elsewhere. That's, it's not a really good plan. did you start with any sort of technical background or was that just kind of an acquired skill for you as you started to morph this thing into what it is today?
Dave: No, I, I'm, I'm a non-tech founder, so I have no technical background or anything like that. So my background is really in construction. I got a construction management degree, and spent seven years as a professional in the construction industry. So really, you know, Diving into this whole tech world was certainly uncomfortable for me.
And that was one of the, big scary things about taking this whole, you know, spreadsheet business, which was really just me selling spreadsheets online and morphing it into an actual software company was pretty intimidating. but I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of carryover between, you know, maybe tech and construction.
There's a lot of, planning that goes into it. Planning and design. So a lot of that is related to construction. You gotta do all your planning upfront and then you're building out a, an actual execution plan from that, that higher level there. So I think a lot of the stuff that I learned from maybe project management or construction management from, from the construction side translates a little bit too, managing an engineering team and stuff like that.
Haley: I can't speak for Dave, but anytime I run across a coding issue that I think, like I guessed the correct thing, I might look at us. Look, look at us, go. It's amazing because I, I don't have a technical background either, so that has been a learning curve of like, oh, okay, there's coding involved in this. And it's not, it's not just the click of a button.
You can't just say, oh, let's turn this on. And now it exists. There's some actual weeks of work that go into engineering and coding to make a feature become
David: Well, and, and one of the reasons, you know, the, the driver of that question for me is, Brendan talked about it earlier, right? There's a lot of people that have an aversion to software, right? Software can be scary. It's technical. I don't have a technical background. I'm a real estate person. I'm a construction person, right?
A lot of our people come from the trades, so they hear software, they're like, Hmm. No, I like back of the napkin. Right, but Hailey, there was an adoption period for you, right? Like you didn't come in knowing this software back in front. You had to learn it so that you can help guide people through it.
Haley: For sure there. And I would say there's an adoption period with any software. If you're using a spreadsheet, there's an adoption period with, oh, did Google Sheets release a new feature that now it changed the interface? Well, that's a learning moment. Or same thing if you have to say you're a Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel, they come out with a new program and you have your, you and your entire team has to update.
You know what? There's a little bit of a learning curve. So I think, yes, I did have a learning curve with it. It. Came a lot faster than I thought. I think more of the learning curve that I was speaking on, on the technical side is now when we're going to launch features or we have an improvement or an update, learning the behind the scenes has been more of a learning curve.
But the front facing software has actually been, you know what, like. Once you get in there, Dave, Dave has some tutorials. I don't know if y'all seen that library, but he's, he's got some tutorials for everybody. So once you get in there, it's, it's like, okay, if you spend a couple days in this, you start working on, I, the thing that I did is I added my own home address and I just started playing around and like watching the numbers calculate, but seeing the reports that generated adding random expenses that weren't actually expenses.
And then before you know it, it's like, okay, get in the hang of this. This is working so.
Brendan: We've had, the, ForCasa CEO on the podcast, we've had the Furnished Finder CEO on the podcast. We've had our own CEO Matt Rodak on the podcast.
None of those guys have technical backgrounds, right? They, they've been in and around tech. They're all real estate professionals, right? Or they grew up around, They had an event that that triggered them to have this idea and roll into to business. So Dave Roberts, I wanna shift that question to you a little bit.
not that one way or is better than the other, right? Because I'm sure there, there are plenty of founders out there that are extremely successful, that come from a tech background who may not be industry experts at the time of founding. But what kind of perspective do you think that gives you, coming from that construction management background, literally finding the need in your, in your day-to-day and then creating it, how does that compare to maybe somebody who comes from a more traditionally tech background trying to do the same thing?
Dave: Yeah, I mean I think I've used my background in real estate or construction to my benefits. So it's really just kind of having an intuition or know-how of what basic stuff a real estate investor needs to analyze, deals or manage their projects, track everything in their business. And so I think coming from that background, I think it gives us an advantage cuz you know, we're real estate investors that are building a real estate investing software.
If we were. Tech people that was trying to build a real estate investing software, I just don't know if they would get, understand all the nuances that go into a real estate investing business. So I do think it's definitely an advantage to have people that are industry leaders or know what their industry's about before they dive into tech as opposed to the other way around.
Brendan: For sure. I I heard a saying recently that was like, you can ask people how to provide value to them or you can just figure it out. And I think if you have. That context that you have, Dave and, and Haley, that you're learning on the job as well for, for the software. You guys can figure out what they want, anticipate the need before they put it in through a support portal, right?
So we're, we're already halfway there. We still need the clients to help shape what it ends up being, just like in any software. But yeah, Dave, I think that background really helps us get, you know, 50% of the way down the, down the field.
Dave: Yep. And I think, you know, I have a whole bunch of ideas on how we can improve the platform and new tools and features and stuff like that, but we certainly ask our user base and try to get their feedback as well. So we've, we've developed a pretty elaborate idea portal actually, just so we can gather our users.
Uh, feedback and they can upvote on our feature ideas. They can submit their own ideas, stuff like that. And so we're really trying to build a collaborative product with our user base. making sure that we're actually building the tools and features that they want. And so we can have all the ideas that we want and I can have all the crazy ideas that I wanna want build, but ultimately we are building this product for our customer base and we gotta listen to them and listen to their feedback on what they want us to build for 'em.
David: Can you. Touch on some of that. as far as like what some of those different features look like. What are you hearing from your user base and, you know, how are you looking to, to keep them satisfied as users of FlipperForce? with some of those features and optimizations?
Dave: Yeah, I mean, if we go back to like our ideas portal, so we just, we've just launched some new features like our. Material catalog, and we also just launched a new comps tool where people can research comps in their market. Those were ideas that. pretty much originated from our ideas portal. I mean, obviously a comps tool is just something that maybe everybody wants in the market, but people submitted that idea to our ideas portal.
They started up voting it, and then it gradually came to the top and it has been one of our most requested features. And so they indicated to us that they want us to build a comps tool within our platform. And so we went out and built it and tried to gather as much feedback as possible from our users on how we should build it.
But we've just recently launched that. So that's kind of the, the lifecycle that we use to launch new, new products or new tools and features is really trying to listen to them. we've got our own ideas, but listening to them on what they think is the best and then. Delivering on that. And then I would say once we deliver it, that's really where Haley comes in and makes sure that the users are adopting it and gathering their feedback and stuff like that.
Haley: Yeah, I would say I like to have touchpoints with our users for sure, especially after something launches. So there, there are some power users that, when I say power users, they're users who are using. A system very regularly who are in it quite a bit, that we'll touch base with. anytime we've been doing these new feature launches, we're also sending out communication just to explain exactly what the tool is and we equip with some resources on how to use the tool.
And inside of that like the tool that Dave just mentioned is our comps tool. So that one is still what we call open beta. So open beta is when the tool is still technically being worked on by our engineering team, but we're putting it out there because we want feedback in order to sharpen it and improve it to be the best that it can be before we say that, hey, this tool is launched and good to go.
And so over the next few weeks, I'm gonna have very specific touchpoints with our users to make sure that. One, we're gathering the feedback and the data around how the tool is working for them. and then be able to equip Dave and team with some of that feedback. I think that's, that's a great example of how we're using it at the moment.
David: The other thing I'm curious about, you are a national company, right? So you're, you're working with people all over the us Are you noticing different trends coming from different markets in the us?
So for instance, like Southeast, very new, build heavy. Are you seeing different requests out of them versus out of the Midwest where maybe it's more rental based? Uh, like what do you see in there?
Haley: I would say, not at the moment, but you're giving me great ideas of some reports to run. Uh, I, I would say right now we're having users from all over. Uh, we have a couple users who are even out of the states, which our platform is not built for outside of the United States, but we do have people who are adopting it and using it in Australia.
And Dave, where was that user from recently that we noticed was just like, how did they even locate us?
Dave: it might have been Italy
Haley: Yeah, it was, I mean, it was kind of like outta left . So I, I really do feel like we're, we're getting a wide range of users at the time. It really hasn't slowed with our traction with trials and customers coming on board.
So I think people still have projects going on regardless of what the market is looking like.
Brendan: That's actually where I wanna take the conversation for a second is the, the who behind FlipperForce of like, who are your target customers or clients, which I think is somewhat a loaded question because, well, I'll let you guys get into it, but I think there's a lot of softwares that have a, have a specific niche, and even if it's in real estate by itself, there's, there's also a very specific demo within real estate.
So who are and who are not your type of customers.
Dave: Yeah, I would say, you know, our typical customer is a house flipper that's doing three to five houses up to, you know, a fully scaled business that might be doing 20 to 50 houses a year. So I would say like that's our bread and butter customer, and those are our ideal customers that are active investors that are actively renovating properties or even building new construction.
Projects. you know, we also do have newbie investors that maybe haven't got their first deal under contract, but maybe they're using our our deal analysis tools just to evaluate their very first deals so that way they can make their very first offer and get their first property under contract. But I would say overall the platform is built for real estate investors that are actively investing, actively renovating house slips or doing bur stuff like that, in their local market.
Brendan: What about in the non-traditional sense? Do you guys see like wholesalers, real estate agents passive investors who maybe just want to get a, get a beat on the market or throw together a scope of work if they're lending out private money locally and see if someone knows, you know, what the cost should be?
Do you guys see those kind of clientele come through?
Dave: we do have wholesalers that are using our analysis tools. to analyze deals. We also have an investment packet, ref report that really takes all of the analysis information that the wholesaler's putting together, puts it in a nice, in investor packet that summarizes the scope of works, summarizes the financial analysis, the profitability of the deal, and they can use that to market the deal to their, their house slip buyers.
Buyers. and then I think Haley has been onboarding quite a few real estate agent brokerage, so I dunno if you wanna talk
Haley: Yeah, we, we have a, we have a few at the moment who are, I mean, they're taking our system and. Working it to fit what fits for their company at this, this time. So I have one user that, well, it's a team of users, but they have, are utilizing the system. It's a team of real estate agents that analyze the deals.
They find great deals in the area, they submit it over. They use our platform to submit it over to their head honcho. well, that, that's what we'll call 'em. They submit it over to their head honcho, who either says like, Yay, Renee on the project. And then from there, once it is moving forward, it transitions to their project management team who they have a project manager who kind of runs all the ins and outs of the project, and then they have an operations person who is running the accounting, the expense tracking, kind of overseeing and making sure that all of these projects are coming to completion as they should.
they're not the only ones. We have a couple other in the pipeline who are. Are kind of similar of taking our platform for, what a single user might use it for are finding ways to make it work for them. But the reporting pieces have been huge for some of our teams and business accounts
in that.
David: Do you guys have a, forecast or maybe, you know, some kind of pie in the sky idea about where this platform goes in three years or five years and kind of what it looks like at that point? Who your client base is, that sort of thing.
Dave: when FlipperForce was initially built, it was really built as a house slipping tool. So it's basically taken everything that we built in a house slipping spreadsheet, just building it as a web app. And so it was built to be a very niche product. Specifically for house slippers that are doing renovations or home builders that are doing new construction, because we've got a lot of project management functionality and stuff like that for them to manage or deal.
as we continue to build out the platform, we'd like to continue to expand on our product offering so that way if somebody isn't just. Doing a construction project or doing a renovation and then flipping it and selling it, maybe they're gonna hold onto it long term as a rental property. Really improving some of our rental tracking and operations tracking for people that are holding properties long term will be a big initiative for us.
so I think really expanding the offering to more than just kind of what we have today, which is, Has been more tailored for house slippers, but expanding it to, to more niches out there and stuff like that. also say we're also built as an all in one platform, and some investors don't want all of it.
So like maybe we can create. Smaller modules that are easier for people to sign up to. Like if somebody just wanted deal analysis, that deal analysis plan might be ideal for a wholesaler, cuz a wholesaler technically probably doesn't need construction management tools. They just need a deal analysis suite that they can use to analyze deals.
And so just making our our platform a little bit more flexible. Uh, breaking it down into maybe smaller chunks just from a subscription basis, but also expanding upon all of the different real estate niches that are out there. And so that way we can provide a solution for the end-to-end solution for real estate investors.
David: About the Italian and Australian crowd that wants to use you, are they gonna be able to use you in three to five years?
Haley: Well, they're using us now.
Dave: I would, I would think so. Yeah.
Haley: Yeah.
Brendan: David Haley, I'm, I'm curious, so we, we've thrown around a couple different, Features that FlipperForce offers. If you guys can give the listeners the top three features that you guys see as being most used, and most people come to the website for these three things, what would those be?
Haley: are we gonna match? Like, do we have the
Dave: let's say it, let's say her answers right
Haley: Yeah. 3, 2, 1. No. Um. I mean, definitely analysis. Analysis is huge. Dave, anything you would add to Ana? Because we have the flip analyzer, we have the bur analyzer, so those are definitely utilized. I would say the reporting piece in that as well, because everything you put inside of the analysis tool then is auto imported into an investment report. And so I think that functionality in itself is most used.
Dave: I would say the, the estimator tool is probably my favorite tool, and I, I'd like to think our, our customers really like the estimating tool. Since that's my background. I mean, I, I think ours is one of the most detailed estimators out there. So if you're, you're really wanting to dive into the details of how to create a detailed estimate, pick out your materials, create a detailed budget.
I think ours is the best on the market. and then, you know, scheduling and project management. I think one of the u unique things about FlipperForce is it really is an all in one solution. There's not many real estate investing softwares out there that are trying to package everything. You'll, you'll get a lot of like tools that are just doing deal analysis, but they don't have the project management accounting.
You'll get. A lot of leads or deal finder tools, but they don't have any analysis or project management stuff. And so it seems like there's a lot of like specialized tools out there where we're one of the, the only ones that's really connecting it from end to end and creating an all-in-one business solution.
And so that's one of our big, another big pushes that we're doing right now is to improve our functionality for teams. I don't know of very many real estate. Investing softwares out there that really support a collaborative experience where teams can go into their platform and communicate and collaborate and see what everybody else is doing.
There's a lot of like general project management platforms out there that might be collaborative, but there's not really a real estate investing operating system that that does that. So I think that's another differentiator, hopefully as we continue to build that out. So,
Brendan: Hell yeah. Follow up question to that. What is maybe something that's most requested or Dave most you're most excited about? So what's on the roadmap? You're like, I cannot wait until this thing drops.
Dave: Hmm. I don't know if I can tell you this. There's some stuff that I can talk about and there's stuff that I, I cannot talk about.
Brendan: Okay.
Dave: So I mean, we are launching some commenting and communication stuff, so that'll be a nice feature for our teams plans where people will be able to comment and communicate within the application.
We also might do a heavier integration with Fund That Flip. So at some point people might be able to get loans or something
within the platform, but that would be pretty cool, wouldn't
Brendan: that would be something. .
Haley: Yeah. Can we talk about the QuickBooks integration?
Dave: Yeah, the other big feature that's been requested a lot is the QuickBooks integration. So I think a lot of real estate investors do their accounting in QuickBooks, and so just creating a way for us to connect to QuickBooks so that way when they add an expense to QuickBooks, it'll automatically feed over to FlipperForce or vice versa.
So that'll be another big time saver that we'll likely launch for our teams or business plans down the road.
David: Does FlipperForce, does it pull data from the IOT or the web on, for instance, your estimator, right? Like cost of materials, is it pulling data on that kind of stuff to give you accurate estimates?
obviously if you have a comps tool, I would assume it's pulling from the MLS or some sort of, Source of data for that sort of information as well. But can you touch on that?
Dave: Yep. So FlipperForce has several different data integrations. So we do have property data and owner data integration. So we automatically download all the property specs and stuff like that. We also have owner information, so whenever you add a project, we're automatically going out and finding out who owns the property.
you can see their mortgage information, stuff like that. So if you are negotiating a deal, you can, you can see who owns it and see how much they owe, which is viable information if you're trying to negotiate with the seller. we also have other data integrations like comps. Yeah, you just mentioned our comps tool.
So we, in our comps tool, people can automatically search for recent comparable sales. And then I think your original question was about material data integration. So technically we don't directly integrate with material websites, but we do have a material catalog where. Users can create their database and their catalog of all of their commonly used materials.
And so when they add their materials to the catalog, it automatically goes out and finds the, the material from Home Depot, lows, whatever, downloads it to their database, and then you can automatically pull that into your. Your estimate. So you can save an estimate template, you can save all your material selections in your estimate.
So whenever you create a new budget, all that stuff will already be in there. So instead of it taking you several hours to create an estimate, it'll only, it'll hopefully take 15 minutes and you'll have a complete estimate created with all your materials and stuff like that. So that was a long-winded answer to say yes, we do have some integrations.
David: I like that. Double B. What else we got?
Brendan: Man, I think, I think we hit on most of it. I what I'm curious for the, for the listeners next is if they wanna learn more about FlipperForce or maybe just maybe even try it for themselves, how might they do that?
Haley: Yes. So if you're interested in trying FlipperForce, www.FlipperForce.com is where you're gonna find all the different plans that we offer. there is a free 30 day trial for any individual, no credit card required for the free 30 day trial, which is amazing because if you're like me, you will forget to cancel and you will get charged the next month.
so free 30 day trial, no credit card required, and we are gonna offer our listeners a 25% discount. So if you are listening and you are interested in an Annual subscription with us you'll get 25% off you. All you have to do is chat us directly on our website, mention that you listen to the podcast.
You can say unscripted, you can say you listen to the podcast, but we will apply a discount to your account and make sure that you're set up with 25% off.
Brendan: Look at that, David Haley's making us look good by adding some value to our listeners. There you go. 25% off.
Haley: It's like I'm customer success or something.
Brendan: Well, cool. We, we appreciate you guys coming in, Sharon, all the knowledge that is related to FlipperForce. Dave, as you kind of alluded to, I think there's a ton of really big things on the horizon, some that we can talk about right now, some that's coming soon. So if you're an avid listener to the podcast, continue to listen.
If not, check back periodically. Uh, a lot more to come on that front and super excited we were able to have you guys on, and thanks for offering the 25% discount to our
Haley: Yeah. Thanks for having us guys. It's been fun.
Dave: All righty. Yeah. Appreciate it.
David: You guys were awesome. I'll give us the, the proper sign off. So, for Brendan, for Haley, for Dave, I am David Duggan. This is Real Estate Investing Unscripted and thank you for listening. See you next time.
