Mar 20, 2022
Is it possible to find and list commercial real estate properties for free?
Caleb Richter has made it possible already through his company, MyEListing. Unlike other platforms where you still need to create an account then log in, you can simply search a city, county, Zip code, or even property ID on MyEListing, and thousands of search results will appear right away.
The best part of this experience is that it is totally free. Caleb will talk about his motivations for offering this service to real estate agents without asking for any money and their business model that still allows them to generate revenue.
[00:01 - 03:42] Opening Segment
- Caleb Richter is now focusing on commercial real estate technology
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- What’s the story behind
- He says that you necessarily need a technology background in this space
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- Here’s why
[03:43 - 13:14] Finding and Listing Properties for Free
- Caleb gives a sneak peek into the services offered by MyEListing
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- The business model currently not present in commercial real estate
- Why uploading a listing on MyEListing is totally free
- If their service is free, how does Caleb’s company generate revenue?
[13:15 - 15:44] Navigating the MyEListing Website
- How to utilize the Comp Software in the MyEListing website
- Caleb talks about how he funded the launch of MyEListing
[15:45 - 16:58] Closing Segment
- Reach out to Caleb
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- See links below
- Final words
Tweetable Quotes
“The idea is we want everyone to come to us so that we can monetize the traffic just like what [Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter] do. It's not a new business model, but this business model doesn't exist in the commercial real estate space [yet].” - Caleb Richter
“You can come to our site (MyEListing.com) and post [your listing] and the whole world can see it without even logging in.” - Caleb Richter
“We take a ton of pride in that we have no automation. [There are] people on the line…” - Caleb Richter
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Email caleb@myelisting.com to connect with Caleb or follow him on LinkedIn. Go to MyEListing to find and list properties for free! You can also reach out to them by calling 512-923-6373.
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Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:
Caleb Richter 00:00
A solution that we're providing is every listing on our site gets a demographic report, and it's the best demographic report you can get. So I had an individual call me and say, “Hey, during COVID, you just because you're giving away demographic reports, I don't have to fire two people at my firm because I'm saving money on that.” Yeah, so the solutions are endless for brokers because we want to give them everything for free everything, and we want it to be the best.
Intro 00:26
Welcome to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate Show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we will teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big.
Sam Wilson 00:39
Caleb Richter is the CEO of MyEListing.com, which is a site to list and find commercial real estate for free. Caleb, welcome to the show.
Caleb Richter 00:48
Thank you. Glad to be here. This is one of my first podcast, so I'm excited about it.
Sam Wilson 00:54
Oh, good. Well, I'm gonna be sure to grill you hard and make it super uncomfortable. I'm just absolutely kidding. Caleb, there are three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show. In 90 seconds or less, can you tell us where did you start? Where are you now? And how did you get there?
Caleb Richter 01:07
Yeah, okay. Yeah, so did real estate, was a real estate agent for a while, did a lot of cool things. As an agent, I did some projects where we raised money for value-add deals, usually industrial office, warehouse, parks, those kinds of things, and then I shifted into tech, but commercial real estate tech, primary drive now is to change commercial real estate commerce itself, and that's why I'm here to tell more people about it.
Sam Wilson 01:38
Man, that's super interesting. Did you have a tech background before? Or was this just kind of random? Like, oh, wait, there seems to be an opportunity here and I want to fill it.
Caleb Richter 01:47
My tech background is playing a lot of video games as a kid and having an iPhone. That's about my tech background. I have zero and I don't think you need it. But yeah, it's no tech background.
Sam Wilson 02:01
That's interesting. You say you don't think you need it? Why do you say that?
Caleb Richter 02:04
Because the tech of it is an art form and people, so if you're building a tech company, usually it is an application or software, and if it's an application or software, to have it be decent, it has to be better than WordPress, okay, WordPress are the linking or the Legos of the internet world that 99% of websites are made off of. You put this leg on top of that Lego and you have a website that's good for 99% of people. If you have a tech background and can do that quickly. That's great. But a custom web application where there's an interactive map, users accounts, that's an application, well, you have to be a lifetimer to be able to do that, right? It is a form of art. And so having a tech background is usually, means that well, you're going to outsource it. Like you can't just have a tech, even people who say they have a tech background usually can't do good web applications. So it's truly an art form. And it's kind of like, well, I went to law school to be my own attorney, which I did go to law school for a year. And I thought, “Hmm, do I want a half-decent attorney that doesn't practice law doing all my legal work, aka me or do I want a real attorney who lives it to do my legal work?” So I was like, “Well, I want a real attorney to do my legal work, and it's the same thing with everything else, right?” That's my opinion on it. Right. You don't need a tech background.
Sam Wilson 03:43
No. Understood, let's jump right into what MyEListing is. What if you didn't have a tech background? And you said, okay, you know, I see a hole in the marketplace, what hole did you see? And how did you decide to fill it?
Caleb Richter 03:54
So listing and finding commercial real estate cost money, right? It can be expensive, which is relative, but it can be expensive currently. And I was we were in the space. I was in the space. I was thinking, you know, Facebook's free, big company. Google's free, pretty big company. Pinterest is free, pretty big company, Instagram, Twitter. Those are all pretty big companies. And they're also the most, some of the most valuable companies in the world. And so we started looking at this and we're thinking, why don't we create a business model that is similar. We want to generate as much traffic as possible through you know, just user experience, quality of listing, so we give everything away to the agents for free, and that includes flyer creation demographic reports, traffic reports, comps off where we power people's websites, like we power in NAI global, we give everything away for free, and we're super amazing, right? And the idea is we want everyone to come to us so that we can monetize the traffic just like what those companies previously listed do. It's not a new business model. But this business model doesn't exist in the commercial real estate space. And so our goal is to bring it to commercial real estate.
Sam Wilson 05:16
That's really intriguing. You know, so are you dealing with residential? Are you dealing with strictly commercial, what's your target real estate that gets listed on my listing?
Caleb Richter 05:26
So it is strictly commercial real estate. As of now, all companies, if they live infinitely will begin to enter in other markets and began to spread to different parts of the world. Think about Amazon, right? They sell books, then they sell toys, and then they sell Amazon, you know, fire sticks, whatever. So we're yes, it's just commercial right now. But as we grow, we intend to enter into other markets and other parts of the world. But it is strictly at this moment, commercial real estate in the United States.
Sam Wilson 06:01
Right, and tell me what did someone if they go to your site, what do they find?
Caleb Richter 06:04
So when you go to our website, you have a search bar right on the homepage. And you can and this is for someone looking to find a property, you can search by city, state, zip, county, and we're adding neighborhoods this week, and then the property type, and then you search. And then you can see all the listings in your area. We don't allow people to pay us to post their listings. That is strictly everyone can post listings, if they want to.
Sam Wilson 06:36
What are you solving that maybe Crexi, CoStar, LoopNet, what are you solving that those platforms haven't already solved?
Caleb Richter 06:44
So there is not one spot that everyone goes because of price and networks within certain cities. And what we're solving is the quality of the, of where you're searching itself. So in multiple cities, you got to look here, you got to look at this website, and this website and LoopNet and Crexi to see every single listing. But what we're doing is we're saying, Look to upload a listing, it's completely free. And we don't even allow you to pay us to get your listing on more exposure, it's a Puritan, you can come to our site and post and the whole world can see it without even logging in. So the solution that we're providing, even today, if you pick a random city, and every time I talk to them, like just pick a random city, search it on our website, Crexi, LoopNet, there has been countless times where I would say that we have, I would argue and say we have more listings and Crexi and LoopNet does on both of their platforms. It's like, okay, that's fine. You say you have this many listings, let's all search a random city together and see how many listings show up on my listing your website and your website. And I would do that in front of the whole world with everyone watching 100 times over. And it's because we're free, right. So since we're free, we have the most listings, and we give your listings the most exposure because you don't have to be logged in to see anything. Like they do say that they do that. But you can't download the flyer without creating a profile. That's a barrier, right? And people claim so many things that their website does. And we don't have to claim and then be like, “Oh, look at the fine print.” It's we're a pure come Puritan, when it comes to you come to our site, you list properties, and you find properties. And on top of that the powering of the website, right, so you can come to us, we give you one line of code. And you have a map that displays all your listings. You can see in NAI Global, they're the second biggest commercial brokerage firm in the world. We power their Mapping Display. Okay, we also do agent directories. We do it for brokerage firms that have two listings or 26,000 listings, it doesn't matter. We've talked to all the top 10 brokerage firms to do the same thing. And demographic reports, right, a solution that we're providing is every listing on our site gets a demographic report, and it's the best demographic report you can get. So I had an individual call me and say, “Hey, during COVID, you just because you're giving away demographic reports, I don't have to fire to people at my firm because I'm saving money on that.” Yeah, so the solutions are endless for brokers because we want to give them everything for free everything. And we want it to be the best, yeah.
Sam Wilson 09:34
So you've gotten all these brokerage houses? You guys are powering an NAI Global's would you say it was their Mapping…
Caleb Richter 09:40
Display. Yeah, like on their own map. It's the map that shows all the listings with pins, and then their own listing pages.
Sam Wilson 09:46
Right, you guys are powering now, which is really cool. You're giving away free demographic reports. And your idea behind this is that you can then monetize the traffic through paid ads and other things there than on the site. Is that right?
Caleb Richter 09:56
Correct. So we identified 48 different vendors that were all around the commercial real estate industry. So think title companies, plumbers, roofers, phase one, guys, everything, electricians, architects, and we say, “Hey, if you want to be in front of our users and little ad boxes on the right-hand side of all listings, pay us.” And that's how we make money.
Sam Wilson 10:19
That's really, really intriguing. Now, does a broker when they log in, or not log in, do they have when they want to post a listing? Let me start my question over, do they have to log in in order to post a listing?
Caleb Richter 10:31
Yes, they have to log in to post the listing because we require that you show your contact information when you create a listing.
Sam Wilson 10:39
Right, that's really intriguing. I mean, I haven't heard of your website until you know, here maybe a week or so ago when you guys reached out. And so I'm really curious, how are you guys really driving traffic to it right now? And what's your plan for that going forward?
Caleb Richter 10:53
Right. So it's a light switch that I call it a light switch. So we spent with a huge team, one year cold calling every single commercial brokerage firm in the world, in the country. And we said, hey, we're MyE Listing, we're free, we're always going to be free, would you like us to upload your listings for you? And then when they say, yes, we follow up with an email saying, “Hey, you said yes, over the phone, say yes, over email.” And then we go to their website. And once they say yes, over email, so that we have a paper trail for every listing, we went to their website, organized it all, by agent-created profiles for them, and uploaded their listings. And we did that for over a year with a massive team to do it all legit, because you think, well, I haven't heard of you. It's like, I don't want you to hear about me. Because if you're in Waco, Texas, and we just haven't gotten there yet, or gotten enough traction, and we track every single city and how many listings it has, and we didn't want people to come to the site because if they come to the site, and there's no listings for the first time, it's like this is bad. And on even further, the SEO aspect of that is terrible. If you get a ton of bounces, meaning someone goes and then immediately leaves, there's a lot of consequence to that when it comes to ranking. But we just flip the light switch, and again, challenge anyone to compare us to any other website and say, Google Austin, Google St. Paul, Minnesota, do it on ours do it on another one. And then the lights, which I'm referring to is all the SEO terms. So it's all the property types combined with sale for lease with city, zip code. So Austin, retail for sale, we're on the first page of Google when you Google that. Now we are, but we haven't indexed for yet, because we did it in phases, we have an index for 78613 Industrial for lease, it's a slow trickle. But the first step of it was the light switch with the city combined with the property type. And that's just now indexing on Google. So you will start to see us.
Sam Wilson 12:56
Gotcha, that's really, really intriguing. And the value proposition for the end-user, not necessarily the listing company, but the end-users that they can get in, they can see all the data, they can generate all the reports, and you're not monkeying with, hey, login, hey, look at this, look at that, it's you can just get in, take a look at it and then move on if it's not for you.
Caleb Richter 13:15
Correct. Yeah. And in the Comp Software, we organize all of our live listings in the form of a map. So if you click comps off where it takes you to a new page, you can search, but it'll have the map and an Excel below it. So you can change the zoom of the map in certain areas. So if you want to look over a whole city, or you just want one little block, all the listings that meet your parameters, like if you search retail, 10,000 to 50,000, square feet, all of those listings will show up in the Excel below the map. And it'll show the average price per square foot, the average land price per square foot, the average square foot. So that's free as well, we give away all of our data, our live data, so anyone in any place in the United States can be an expert in any market. So that's another value add prop, but it's pretty cool, man. I'm really excited about it.
Sam Wilson 14:13
That's absolutely fantastic. I love the run-up in the runway, I mean spending a year cold calling all the major brokerage houses by getting their listings getting organized, getting them on the site. I mean, that's no small task. Caleb, one of the things that I think is intriguing, I mean, is really just how I mean to have the run-up, the runway to say, man, you know, we're going to put all these people in place, we're going to spend a year kind of developing the plan, getting everybody on board, reaching out to brokers that cost a lot of money in time, you know, is this something, did you sell fund this, that you go out and raise money from investors, just how did that process work, and just kind of break that down for us?
Caleb Richter 14:48
Yeah, so when I got the idea, I really just loved it. And I went all in and I had a couple 100 grand, it was two or 50 grand, I can't remember if it was 250, grand or 200, I went to zero. And I was like, shoot, I need money, and then I raised like 500, and then in March or raising or not in March, January of 2021, raise another 2 million and plan on raising more.
Sam Wilson 15:15
Right. You guys are a couple of to 3 million bucks in and you know, you still have some ways to go, I guess, you know, maybe on the development side, but it sounds you basically got the product developed. So that's absolutely intriguing. I love that. Caleb, thanks for taking the time to jump on today. It's been a blast. I've certainly enjoyed it. Certainly enjoyed learning a lot about your business, MyELlisting. I mean, that's a lot of fortitude. And you know, a lot of just foresight to say, hey, here's a hole in the marketplace. And we think we can fill it. So I look forward to seeing where you guys and your company as a whole goes. If listeners want to get in touch with you or learn more about you, what is the best way to do that?
Caleb Richter 15:48
Yeah, so the best way to reach us is to call our office number. It's 512-923-6373. We take a ton of pride in that we have no automation. There's people on the line if you want to talk to me directly, ask for me, whoever answers and if you want to talk to any of anyone in any of our divisions at the company, just say can I talk to one and sales are the comp software or flyer creation? I forgot to mention that. We do flyer creations as well. No one ever asked. We do custom fliers. Yes, completely free. And it's sweet. Like just trust me. It's incredible. Yeah, that's pretty much it.
Sam Wilson 16:29
That's awesome. Caleb, thank you for your time today. I do appreciate it. It was great learning about you guys and your business.
Caleb Richter 16:35
Alright, sir. Thanks for your time.
Sam Wilson 16:37
Hey, thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate Podcast. If you can do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever platform it is you use to listen, if you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners, as well as rank higher on those directories. So I appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.