Greg Clement Podcast Transcript
Greg Clement joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Greg Clement. Greg Clement is a visionary real estate entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Leadflow. The first AI powered lead generation system tailored for real estate professionals and small businesses.
With over two decades of experience in the industry, Greg has consistently led the charge of integrating technology with real estate processes. He’s renowned for his pioneering work and leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance market analysis and investment decisions. Greg’s leadership. Has been instrumental in developing tools like the Sellability Score, which has revolutionized how real estate professionals approach buying and selling.
Harnessing AI technology to streamline the process of identifying and capturing high quality leads. His insights and innovations continue to shape the future of real estate, making it more accessible, efficient, and profitable. As a sought-after speaker and thought leader, Greg is passionate about sharing his insights on AI’s transformative potential in real estate.
Well, good afternoon, Greg. Welcome to the show!
Greg Clement: Awesome to be here!
Brian Thomas: You bet. I appreciate it. And making the time. I know you’ve been in the Casey area, but you’re hailing out of the great state of Ohio there in Cleveland. And I appreciate that because I go out of my state virtually every day to meet somebody new.
So, this is really, really awesome. And Greg jumping into your first question here. Could you share more about your journey in real estate and what inspired you to integrate AI technology into this industry?
Greg Clement: Perfect. Yes. So, after college, I went to college here in Northeast Ohio. And then when I graduated, jumped into financial planning.
So, I had a business degree and, and sort of fell into financial planning, not really as a career choice, but just, it was, it was the opportunity right in front of me. I think I was really entrepreneurial and, I did that for seven or eight years. And the funny thing about financial planning, the interesting thing is that you get an opportunity to meet a bunch of people and you really peel back behind the curtain.
Right. And you’re able to see, you know, like net worth, you’re able to see income, you’re able to see how they’re building and growing assets. And it didn’t take me too long to figure out that many of my most successful clients had significant money in real estate. Both residential and commercial. So, you know, you always hear this concept in theory that real estate, you know, has made more millionaires than any other industry in the world, but it’s theoretical and right.
It’s not until you sort of jump in and you actually pick a niche in real estate and you actually build a business around that niche. So that’s what we decided to do. I was around 29 years old and we’re in Northeast Ohio and between Cleveland and Akron. So. Very Midwestern area, Midwestern part of the country and like the housing prices, we jumped into residential real estate housing.
Prices didn’t necessarily drastically increase like, you know, the sunbelt and sort of the coastal parts of the US over the past 15 to 20 years. So we had very flat price appreciation. And so, we, we had to get really good at negotiating debt because a lot, a lot of properties weren’t foreclosure. And so we did a lot of short sale work early on.
And then you know, as our business started to grow, we needed to develop some software to run our business. And, and as we did that, we originally wanted real flow to run our own business, but as we showed it to other investors, it didn’t, you know, take too long for us to figure out, Hey, that this technology could help a lot of other people, not just us here locally in Northeast Ohio.
So, we started real flow in 2006. And at first, we were more of a CRM platform, more of like a business management system. So, if you had a successful business, you would use our software to run your business. And then a few years into it is, as we started to grow, we realized that not every real estate investor or agent is good at marketing, that they need some marketing help.
So, we added data to our product. So, we allowed our users to, to use different data feeds like, you know, absentee owners or foreclosure properties, or. Cash buyers or vacant properties. You know, these are the types of niches in real estate that investors and agents focus on and actually can build a big, big business around.
So, it was interesting. I was in 2018, I was speaking in Las Vegas about our software and real estate convention, Real Estate Ignite, one of the biggest investing conventions annually in Vegas in December, about 5,000 investors and agents go out there every year. And I jumped off stage. And a guy grabbed me, and he said, Hey, Greg, you know, I live in Chicago, and I’ve quit marketing to every other lead source except this.
And so, he, he definitely piqued my interest. I’m like, okay. And he said, I market only to baby boomers who’ve recently subscribed to Southern living magazine. And I was like, really? And he stumbled upon what we now call propensity to sell. Like he was an investor in Chicago. So, in the Midwest, up north.
Marketing to people at or near retirement age who were just beginning to scratch that itch of maybe moving down south. And they weren’t ready to sell yet, but they would be in the near future potentially. Right. So, I went back to the office. I talked to, to 1 of my partners and that started a 9-month odyssey for us to for real float to develop the Sellability Scores, which measures, you know, propensity to sell.
It’s basically predictive analytics. We put a score on almost every property in America. And how likely that is to go on the market in the next 90 to 180 days. So it’s really been a pretty dramatic improvement for investors and agents to really hone in on their marketing. So pretty amazing technology.
And we launched that in 2019. Today, we’re on the 11th generation of that model.
Brian Thomas: Amazing. I appreciate that stepping us through the backstory and launching something to help others. And it’s sometimes happenstance, right? You can call it destiny, kismet, whatever it is, but, you know, jumping off stage and meeting that individual, obviously catapulted your business in a different direction.
So, I appreciate the story really do. Greg, next question I have for you, can you explain the concept of the Sellability Score and how it utilizes AI to improve the buying and selling process for real estate professionals?
Greg Clement: Yeah, absolutely. So, what we did when we developed the Sellability Scores, we had to look back at transactional data.
So, we went back to 1980 and we looked at every property transfer in the United States. So, we attempted, we use machine learning specifically. So artificial intelligence, but really machine learning to crunch all these numbers and find patterns in the data. So, for example, if we know that that someone sold the house 5 years ago, we looked at what happened right before they sold that house.
Like, Did someone move out of the house where there are 2 incomes paying the mortgage and then there was a separation or a divorce, or 1 of them even had a change of address. So, it went down to 1 mortgage or was there a death of disability. We looked at, you know, the age of the home, we looked at the age of the development, we looked at, you know, all of these factors, including.
How close is this property to a school, to a cemetery, to a park? And we started to notice through AI that there were definite patterns in the data that there were precursors, which could predict not with 100 percent certainty, because in data, right? You’re never 100 percent certain when you’re trying to predict the future.
You’re never 100 percent certain. I don’t believe that we live in a world of certainty. We live in a world of possibilities and probabilities. So most investors and agents really focus and they’re hopeful when they market to a list of prospects, they think it’s possible that one of these prospects will be interested in selling their home or listing their home with the Sellability Score.
We moved it into the probability zone. So, there’s a high degree of probability that this person will list their property and it allows investors and agents to reach them before. Right before their competition does so we just, you know, if you can imagine 100,000,000 plus residential properties in the United States, we track over 800 data points on each property.
So, the calculations are in the billions, like, you know, 800,000,000, 000 different calculations going on to sort of predict. When someone is going to want to sell their property. So, it’s pretty amazing and what the human brain, one of the interesting things here is that I had a lot of experience as an investor.
I had almost 15 years experience when we were working with, with our engineers, our data science team to build this. And so I had all these, I had all these hunches and I was sending them a daily email with, you know, Hey, so let’s look at this. Let’s look at that. And they, they finally told me to just shut up because my, my emotions, my, my judgments, my intuition, even wasn’t important.
The only thing that was important was the data. What is the data telling us and, in the data, told it verified some of my, my expertise, but it also. Flew in the face of conventional wisdom. There were some, you know, indicators that I didn’t think had anything to do with people wanting to sell their house, but that were very important in the Sellability score, raise the Sellability score. So again, just pretty amazing concept.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really do like that concept. Something that I learn something every day here on the podcast, but didn’t know much about the Sellability score. And I appreciate you sharing that with me and, and our audience today, for sure. And Greg, looking ahead, what are some of the emerging AI technology or trends that you believe will further revolutionize the real estate sector?
Greg Clement: Sure. I think AI this past 12 months has obviously blown up. So, you could say ChatGPT last year really helped spearhead sort of the revolution, but companies have been using AI and machine learning and generative AI for years. Actually, for decades, but I think now it’s hitting the mainstream. So, I think real estate investors and real estate agents tend to be very entrepreneurial.
And I think the good news is that, you know, entrepreneurs tend to be on the cutting edge and want to use tools to make them more efficient to, to really allow them to make more money with less effort, right? Because we’re small business owners and we don’t, if we don’t have to put 50, 60, 70 hours a week into our business, if we can put 30, 40 hours or 20 hours, right.
We’d rather do that if we can make the same income or increase our income, reach our goals, whether it is income or net worth, if we can do it faster and more efficiently, we’re open to that. So, I think generative AI like chat, what we see a lot of our users doing now is instead of even hiring a graphic designer to design their logo for a new company, they’re using generative AI to design the logo, you know, and they’re designing it in seconds versus the typical process, which could take days or weeks.
And they’re able to get, you know, 10 versions of a logo. They’re able to pop it up on social media, have their friends and family vote for it. And then they have a new logo that that sort of represents their company. I think, you know, AI generative AI is great in writing. It’s great at taking complex subjects and breaking it down into bite size, man, so manageable pieces.
I think predictive AI is essentially what we’ve built. And I see predictive AI being used more and more. In real estate, because it’s because it’s harder and harder as an agent, we have all these rulings, all these lawsuits happening in the past, like, 6 months. And so the real estate agent industry, that industry is changing right before our eyes.
It’s growing up, so to speak, and it’s so some agents are going to be out of the business, but I think the professional, the career agents, the people who hunker down. And get through this period, they can use AI to help them be much more efficient, target the right people at the right time. Because timing really is everything when it comes to property, like to reach people a year before they’re ready to sell, you know, that’s not the best timing and you don’t really know how to follow up.
You should follow up every week, every month, but I think reaching them a few months before. Or at least making contact and then letting them know when they start to get that itch, you can help them scratch it. So, I think those are some, some things that can really impact real estate in a positive way.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And we have seen such a change in disruption in a lot of industries. Part of it was due to AI, but part of it is we’re seeing this word disruption has been probably truly disrupting all industries over the last decade due to people finding better processes, newer technologies. To really meet the needs of the consumer.
So, I appreciate your insights on that. Greg really does. And Greg, last question of the day, as lead flow continues to grow, what are your long term goals for the company? And how do you plan to continue influencing the real estate industry with AI?
Greg Clement: So great question. I think we’re going to continue to lean into AI.
You know, I have three boys, three sons. One is 24, one’s 21 and one’s in high school. And my two older boys are, you know, entering the workforce and I’m encouraging them to lean into AI, not, not to stick their head in the sand and, and, and worry about, you know, the negative ramifications of AI because there are some, you know, if we’re so honest with ourselves, AI has the potential to completely transform how we live and work and play.
And I think it’s very important. Like we’ve been the past five years in the forefront of developing new AI technology. Like you got to lean into it. You got to embrace it because it’s here. It’s not going anywhere. It’s here. Whether you or me or anyone listening, whether we like it or not, it’s, it’s here and I think the best way to use it is, is to understand it.
And instead of it being a theory, theoretical, has it been so practical in your life. And so here’s 1 of the most exciting things that we’ve uncovered in the past 24 months. Is that real flow primarily focuses on real estate investing lead flow is the property data division and AI division of real flow.
So, what we realize is that agents have been using our AI for the past 5 years, even though we haven’t marketed it. To real estate agents, they’ve been using it to find new listings. So that’s why just last month we rolled out, you know, lead flow AI. So, agent and that product is growing significantly in just the past couple of weeks.
What I see in the future as is we are a property data company first, and there are many industries that property data can transform. For example, a landscaper. Landscapers could use our technology to identify people who need landscaping refreshes, you know, people who might have built a property 1012 years ago, who now are at the point where they want to completely revamp all of their landscaping.
A roofer could use our AI technology, our property data. To gauge when someone is going to have to replace the shingles on their house. You can actually target our AI. Geocentrically, so if there’s, let’s say, a hailstorm in just certain parts of your city, you can do a wraparound with our AI and target only the leads who live in this little polygon.
A search. So, so what we’re finding, which is absolutely incredible. And that’s, that’s what has us so excited here at lead flow is our property data is so useful into any business that touches property. It’s not just investing or the agent, the brokerage industry, it’s the mortgage industry, it’s roofers, landscapers, remodelers, windows, siding installers, it’s electricians and plumbers.
You know, anyone that touches A property retail or commercial, our property data can help them find customers and find new clients faster and more efficiently.
Brian Thomas: Really love that. And especially, you know, you’re teaching your sons some great things, you know, you and I have been kind of a little bit over heels as far as our background, our technology and our career, but you’re embracing the technology, which is really cool.
And you’re encouraging your sons to jump in, which is awesome. And I just love the tool, the fact that you’re integrating AI to make searches a lot easier around property management in general, not just real estate, which I really, really enjoy. Greg, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Greg Clement: Yeah, Brian, thanks. Thanks for the opportunity and we’ll definitely talk to you soon. We’ll keep plugging away over here and keep transforming, you know, how people reach customers, reach property owners with AI for sure. We’re excited. Thanks.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Greg Clement Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
