How A Serial Entrepreneur Identifies Promising Markets, Great Deals and Solid Partners w/ Gregor Watson

In this episode, Roofstock co-founder Gregor Watson shares about the his current businesses and about how he analyzes markets, deals and potential partners.  --- Transcript   Tom: Greetings, and welcome to The Remote Real Estate Investor. On this episode, we have the chairman and co founder of Roofstock, Gregor Watson, and we're going to cover a lot. We're going to talk about some of his other portfolio companies that he has either co founded, or is on the board of. We're also going to talk about his general principles and philosophies of analyzing markets and analyzing individual properties, all that good stuff.   All right, let's do it.   Gregor, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks or jumping on.   Gregor: I'm super excited to be here.   Tom: I think the main theme we were talking today is going to be just on some principles of analyzing the markets, businesses be at individual properties. But I want to start with you are a very busy serial entrepreneur, what's going on with some of your portfolio companies, either that you co founded or sit on the board of, and I'm just going to work down the list of your LinkedIn page. So Lessen what's going on with that company?   Gregor: Yeah, so this is a company we started about a year ago, with a guy out of Phoenix, Jamie key, he is longtime SFR background. And we we sat in a boardroom and kind of hashed out a plan and talked about some of the, you know, the real pain points around repair and maintenance and turns. And we started really thinking about Airbnb. So the super hosts and how there's all these companies that are being built, you know, to, to buy and, and renovate and manage short term rentals. But none of them are getting enough scale in a market to run an efficient model.   And so when we started talking about, you know, the money that was being made, on the SFR side, the multifamily side, the Airbnb side, you know, I said, Look, there's, it seems like all these, all of these widgets have similar problems, they, you know, the water heater goes out, you've got a leak in the kitchen, something happens. We don't need specialists. For each one of those, what we need is a real network effect. And so we started off down the path of really identifying where are those key pain points? And what are some of the drivers that most institutional investors and super hosts are looking for? And what are the vendors looking for.   So what we've done is we've created a, a marketplace for repair and maintenance. So when on one side of the marketplace, our large institutional investors, super hosts on Airbnb. Now on the other side are vendors that are, you know, looking for work in the middle, we lessen it as quality control, does routing of all of those requests. And then we create a digital wallet that allows vendors to get paid faster. So the vendors love it. Because typically, if you're doing a Blackstone or something like that can take 3090 days to get paid, we can pay them instantly once we and they'll take a discount, they get paid instantly. And they pay a SaaS fee to be a part of the part of the platform.   The real estate owners love it because they don't have to have a huge infrastructure out in the field. So it's a little bit of think of it like Amazon Web Services, where the more people that are plugging into this network, the better the costs are, the bigger the margins are, for both sides. It's pretty exciting. It's it's a it's about a year old, General catalyst, General catalyst, Nava toss. And Kosta ventures are back in that company on the board.   Tom: Very cool.   Michael: That's so cool. Yeah it makes total sense where the short term rental owner fits into that scheme. Do you have a place for long term investors as well, long term buy and hold investors that maybe are self managing from a distance?   Gregor Yeah, I mean, it's early, right. So it's early, a similar rootstock, we really started with a lot of the larger owners to really like, it's like going to the