Joseph Noor Podcast Transcript
Joseph Noor joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Joseph Noor. Joseph Noor is an innovator at the intersection of real estate and technology. As a co-founder and CTO of Ownwell, he is revolutionizing the way property owners manage their assets. Under Joseph’s leadership Ownwell is developing cutting edge technology solutions to reduce the costs and complexities of owning real estate.
Joseph always approached life as an entrepreneur, flipping golf balls, building sneaker bots, creating private MMORPG games, saving money on property taxes. Joseph was raised with the mentality of relentlessly chasing the hardest problems, pushing past what was initially thought possible, and leveling up in the process, and the unrelenting demand for academic excellence.
He was enrolled in elementary two years early and still pushed to skip grades. Enamored with the iPhone. He chose to study computer science to build software that can scale to the whole world. It wasn’t until the PhD where he met his first real estate academic challenge, developing AI to self optimize computer systems.
Well, good afternoon, Joseph. Welcome to the show.
Joseph Noor: Happy to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. We’re in the same time zone today. I’m in Kansas City. You’re in Austin. Love that. Traversing part of the globe. Anyway, Joseph, I’m gonna jump right into your first question. You’ve described your upbringing as one rooted in entrepreneurship and academic rigor.
How did those early experiences shape your drive to innovate in the real estate tech space?
Joseph Noor: Sure. So just to give a little background, you know, this is getting a bit to my kind of family history. My father immigrated here from Lebanon and so I was born in the US and you know, he was just trying to find success in any way that he could.
So he’s an avid entrepreneur and he’s had a, a number of companies ranging from starting a nightclub with some friends to having like a video rental store like Blockbuster before Blockbuster. To manufacturing and he’s been all over the place. But one thing that he always was involved in was real estate to this day, is a real estate investor.
And actually back in Lebanon, my grandfather was a real estate developer who actually built quite a bit of Beirut and my great-grandfather going all the way back, my great-grandfather back in Lebanon. Was a property tax collector, kind of like in Robinhood. You got the guy going door to door knocking on doors and collecting money.
And so, you know, real estate’s always been in my family. And so me personally, you know, when I was exploring what career I wanted to go into, I was really drawn to computer science and to into programming. I had a lot of experiences as a kid that I’m happy to go into, but you know, essentially I, I said, you know, this is what I wanna pursue.
And so I, I studied and chose that path and in some ways it always felt like maybe I was going against my family or my family history that like maybe I was supposed to be in real estate. And so that, that was kind of what steered my upbringing. Ultimately when I, when I met my co-founder and he presented this problem where there are these massive, massive gaps in the way that assessors are valuing real estate for property tax purposes, and that we could use technology to identify those gaps and help people make sure that they’re not paying any more than they should in property taxes through the appeal process.
I was just naturally gravitated towards it because it felt like I could bring my expertise in building software systems with. I could merge it with my ancestral history. So it felt very serendipitous and, and a large part is, is what drove me to, to kinda wanna build this company.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. Appreciate that. Love the story. Totally do I just, this is what gets me excited every day getting out of bed, do a podcast, is to just to hear the stories. And I love the fact that your family lineage goes way back, your great-grandfather in real estate essentially. And then of course, having the opportunities here in America with your background and working with your friend and coming up with a solution to fix the world’s problems.
That’s just awesome. I love it. Joseph from Sneaker Bots to AI-based computer optimization. Your journey spans a wide range of technical projects. How have those diverse experiences influenced your approach to building scalable real estate solutions?
Joseph Noor: I. So I think I’ll, I’ll start off by just maybe talking a little bit about when I, whether it was in high school, whether it was in college and so on.
I was always a tinkerer and so whenever there was something that I was dissatisfied with and I felt like I could build some software to solve that problem, you know, I, I just dove it. And so. Really, my background was so broad, even outside of school. I, nevermind the things that I studied and worked on and whether it’s academia, research or so on.
And so really exposed me to a lot of different ways of building software. You know, whether that’s looking at kind of how the internet works and, and trying to reverse networking and making sure that I’m optimizing that for the purposes of something, like making sure that I, I, I’m awake and, and on and, and able to check out the sneaker that I want to get for my personal use, whether that’s.
Me meeting some friends and them, them talking about this idea that they have for a delivery app and asking for help on how to build that. So, you know, I was, I was always just building things and so I got exposed to all these different ways of trying to build software systems. Some of them worked, some of them failed, and I had to try again and try again and try again.
And so really just gave me this really nice breadth of knowledge. Me personally, I always felt like I just wanted to get really, really good, really good specialized knowledge. I felt like I’ll be the person that has that specialized knowledge, particularly in building software systems. Never really thinking much more beyond that.
And just when an opportunity arose, I would try to seize it. And so ultimately when it came to building our company, you know, I think that as luck would have it, I had so many at bats, so many trials and errors that it gave me this. A pretty decent breadth of knowledge about how might I build this system?
What are the most important pieces? What do I need to optimize for? And so I remember when I was sitting in the room, when my co-founder had presented this idea, you know, before I even went up to him and introduced myself, I was already thinking about, okay, how am I gonna build this? What are the tools I’m gonna use?
How am I gonna scale it? And so on. So, you know, I think that it’s really just the interest that I had in things. Driving me to just tinker and, and, and try to build is what gave me that experience to ultimately be able to hopefully be valuable as, as we build this company.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Love the story. Always being a tinkerer, looking for solutions to fix problems.
That’s usually how businesses start in some fashion, but the exposure to so many different use cases in application development brought that deep experience and knowledge where you’re now able to leverage that in your existing company, and I think that’s amazing. So thank you for sharing that, Joseph.
Ownwell is tackling the complex challenge of reducing property ownership costs. What specific pain points are you solving for property owners and how does your technology make a measurable difference?
Joseph Noor: You know, it really depends on the homeowner and what I’ll say is that there are certain types of, of unwell clients and, and we began by focusing on property taxes, making sure that your taxes are fair.
And since then we’ve expanded to other ways that we can help you save on your home expenses. And so some of our, our clients on the platform, you know, they come in and they, they already understand the problem. They already understand that, you know, the assessor has to come up with the value of what your real estate is worth, and that you pay a percentage of that in taxes.
The assessor can get it wrong, and so you should always make sure that you’re. Scrutinizing their number and potentially appealing, protesting, grieving, whatever the process is in your particular jurisdiction. So we have these kind of highly educated clients on the platform, but myself and, and, and really a lot of first time homeowners and so on, there’s this huge awareness gap that we see where actually the majority of folks.
On our platform have, don’t even know that this is something that you can do before us. And, and they’ve never appealed their property taxes, so they don’t even know that this is something. And so a, a lot of what we have to do is not just provide the best solution, but also educate people as to look, if you have these home finances, here are the different aspects of those home finances.
Here’s how you can optimize every single piece of that. And so what we’re looking to is really build that digital assistant that is. Analyzing all aspects of those home finances, whether that’s, you know, your insurance renewal is coming up for your home insurance, are you doing the appropriate shopping to make sure that you’re getting the best quote from the best carrier?
You know, that’s something that we want, that, that, that we’re solving. Whether that’s, you know, making sure that if there’s an opportunity to refinance, here’s what it looks like, here’s what the expected cost would be, here’s the payoff, and so on and so forth. So kind of going through every single aspect of those home finances, which for the majority of Americans is the largest expense that they have, over 50% in most cases.
Your expenses are actually associated with, in some way, shape, or form your home. And so we really want to basically provide what we think the classroom education failed to provide, which is that knowledge and understanding of how to truly own your home well and make sure that you are optimizing every single aspect of those finances.
Brian Thomas: Thank you really for breaking that down. I liked how you started out looking at different ways to help people save in home ownership, and really what you started into really got you rolling up your sleeves, is trying to save people money on their property taxes, which obviously we all wanna do that. But what I took away from our conversation here is what you’re finding is that education is the key to people’s success in their home ownership.
Their finances. They’re so closely tied together. So it’s something that’s very, very important and I’m, I’m glad you shared that today with our audience, Joseph. The last question of the day, as someone who thinks deeply about longevity and optimization, how do you see the convergence of health tech and real estate tech shaping future smart homes or living environments?
Joseph Noor: That’s such an interesting question. It’s not something that I’ve really spent too much time thinking about, but, you know, hearing you say it, it kind of, it makes me wonder, so me personally, I always had this goal. There’s just this personal goal that I wanna live to a hundred years old. I wanna hit those triple digits and, you know, I don’t, I don’t know where that came from, but, you know, it’s just a personal goal.
And so. You know, I always try to stay abreast of the literature and the, you know, latest and greatest research about what are the different ways that I can make sure that I’m maximizing my health. So that way, not only am I hopefully God willing living to a hundred, but I’m, I’m able to be healthy at that age and able to live my, my life to the fullest.
And so I. For me personally, whether that’s, you know, making sure that I’m getting the right sleep and doing everything that I can to maximize that sleep with the appropriate wind down, not having screen time and so on. Whether that’s studying what’s the right kind of exercise and the right amount of exercise that I should be engaging in to try to minimize, for example, cardiovascular risk, which is the number one cause of death.
You know, all those different aspects, nutrition and so on. And so that’s something that’s always been. Personal, it’s been kind of a personal project that maybe I don’t bring into the workplace or I don’t think about in, in terms of what we’re building here at Ownwell. It’s a very interesting idea to think about these two seemingly separate worlds could converge.
My background actually, during my PhD, I worked in an embedded systems lab where smart homes, smart buildings, and smart systems was kind of a huge piece of what we tended to emphasize. And so certainly I, I love tinkering with my smart home. I have all these different gizmos and gadgets that are all talking to each other through my shared server.
And you could certainly see a world where, you know, especially with these recent advancements in ai, that the home itself could become smart and could almost be listening and watching how we’re living and try to provide or steer or recommend us towards ways to improve our health. Uh, not just so we can live longer, but we can live better and we can live healthier.
And so I, I absolutely love that. It’s not something that I’ve thought about too much, but it’s a wonderful thought experiment.
Brian Thomas: Very cool. We talk a lot about that. In fact, just had a couple guests on the show talked about health devices and, and healthy eating habits and that sort of thing, and I’ll have to let you know what their names are after the show here.
But I think it’s really interesting that you have that strong interest and personal goal to live to a hundred years old. I think everybody would love to do that as long as they were healthy. To your point, there’s definitely, I think, some relationship there between real estate, home ownership and health.
And I certainly see them converging, especially with these new gadgets and smart homes and and whatnot. You spend a lot of your time in your home and sleeping especially and eating. So I think that’s important. But I appreciate that. And Joseph, I just wanna let you know it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Joseph Noor: Absolutely. It was a pleasure to be on. Thank you.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Joseph Noor Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
