Quality data is incredibly important in every industry, and this holds true for real estate. For companies in this space, from insurance and home services to lending, accessing data on private real estate is incredibly important, and unquestionable accuracy is a must.
This is what Estated offers. Estated is a real estate data company that provides businesses with data on more than 150 million homes in the United States. This data includes details like market value, property or parcel boundaries, and ownership information.
Josh Fraser, the CEO and Founder of Estated sat down with Tony Zayas, Insivia’s VP of Growth, for a wide-ranging conversation. Fraser and Zayas’s conversation covered everything from the origins of Estated and their primary target audience to the importance of mentorship. Below, we’ll cover the five biggest takeaways from the 40-minute interview between Fraser and Zayas.
Pricing is one of the crucial decisions every business has to consider. You want to ensure profitability while not over-pricing your service above what consumers can afford. For Fraser, the solution was tiered pricing.
Tiered pricing allows Estated to meet multiple different customer needs. “Learning how to tier and have that sliding scale of this customer, a business, needs to look up 5000 properties first, and Customer B needs to look up 2 million. And having that scale in between where they fit,” explains Fraser.
While this system has enabled Estated to appeal to different types of customers, it remains a work in progress. “We’re still constantly iterating with pricing and how we get to something that’s that that’s all-inclusive and works for everyone. But you know, you can’t always make everyone happy,” observed Fraser.
Finding an audience is one of the critical steps every business needs to take. Many operations choose to focus on small niches. But by creating something useful within the entire real estate industry, Estately found a massive general customer base consisting of many different kinds of businesses.
“Real estate has all kinds of different use cases; that was always a bucket where I think we have a lot of customers in,” says Fraser. “Home Services is a new one that we’re absolutely obsessed with. Like we have a lawn care company that looks up I think 80,000 90,000 properties a month, and they do instant quotes.”
Focusing on a less narrow audience has allowed Estated to thrive and build a substantial B2-B client base. “It’s a broad range, but we kind of know that we’ve always had these five markets that our data fits into. And, you know, we just we take what we can get,” states Fraser.
Churn is an issue in every industry. It is impossible to retain every customer, and it is just part of running a business that some customers won’t stick around. But what Fraser found in his experience is that B2B businesses have a significantly lower churn rate than B2C.
“Our churn on average is like between one and 2%, 2% being very high, usually sub 1%. So that’s where the B2B part changed a lot to is like our churn, B2C was like 15 to 20%, churn, you go to B2B, and we’re like one to 2%,” explains Fraser.
Fraser says this minimal churn rate is on the higher end this year due to market conditions, and Esated is still managing to move past it. “The market is just like, every day we get worse and worse news. And so this year, we’ve seen churn, and we’re like, it has nothing to do with us. It’s everything to do with the market,” notes Fraser. “And it’s not detrimental in any way, I’d say. But it’s like, it’s definitely one of those things where you just have to learn as you go.”
Entrepreneurship is inherently a leap of faith. It requires business owners to take a massive risk, and not all of them will pay off. Zayas asked Fraser about his experience in the Techstars accelerator program. Fraser stated that one of his biggest takeaways was not to fear failure.
“Don’t be afraid of failure. TechStars is like, you’re spending three and a half months with a bunch of companies that like every single day or week. Someone’s like trying something massively failing. And so you kind of get over that fear of failure,” notes Fraser.
Fraser shared his perspective on failure brought on by his career. “I don’t think failure is the greatest thing in the world. But I think you just have to like quickly learn from it, keep moving forward and get those wins,” states Fraser. “And as your company gets bigger and bigger, I actually would say that you get less and less wins. But like, it’s like your 10 losses to your one massive win is so much better.”
The role of a mentor can’t be overstated. The value of experience and a willingness to offer insight is critical and something Fraser found vital to his success. Zayas asked, “if you were to go back in time and have this conversation with your former self, what is the one piece of advice that you’d give to your former self?” Fraser’s answer centered around mentorship.
“If I had to, like tell myself one thing when I was 20, again, I would have been like, go even deeper into it. Like get as many mentors as you can, and stay in touch with them for as long as you can because there will be weird times when they will pay dividends,” notes Fraser.
Fraser talked about the value starting earlier with mentorship could’ve had. “I just have countless other mentors that have helped me through things that, you know, they could charge a lot of money for. But just because I’ve nurtured a relationship over the last eight years, I think I would have just gone way deeper into that. I probably have like 10 or 15 that are amazing. But if I could have 50 in that Rolodex…” says Fraser.
These takeaways are just the beginning of an excellent conversation that covered additional topics like leadership strategies, the state of the market, and much more. If you’re interested in hearing the rest of Estated’s Founder Josh Fraser and Insivia’s VP of Growth Tony Halko’s conversation, watch the full interview above.