Homebot

Transcription:

Ernie Graham (00:08):
Thank you. A quick show of hands, how many in here have heard of Homebot before this conference? Okay, nice group. For those of you who didn't raise your hand, really quick, Homebot is a home ownership platform that lenders give all of their clients and prospects to drive more repeat and referral business. It's a native mobile app, it's a web app, and it's always branded to the lender. Currently today, one out of four homeowners with a mortgage in America are on Homebot. 10 years ago, we started Homebot after learning that the typical homeowner in America retires on home equity, not 401(k)s, not pension funds where all the suits are helping them manage that. Home equity is 80% of what people in America are retiring on, and yet they had no one to really help them manage it.

(01:08):
So we created a platform, a beautiful digital home for the Holly Homeowners—that's what we call them, Holly Homeowners—and her trusted lender that helps her build wealth through home ownership. Now, I'm going to take you through a little journey of Holly. I know statistically that about 80% of this room are also Hollys; you own homes. So I'm also speaking to you. Let's get started. Holly the homeowner bought a home seven years ago and she used a lender, Larry the Lender. The day after closing, Holly got this email that's on the screen right here, and this email came from Homebot and her lender, Larry. She clicked on "See Your Value," and it takes her to this private branded portal just for her. You can see right there, there's Larry's brand. It helps her track her home value, her equity, and so much more.

(02:06):
But the other thing that it does for her is it helps her understand how to build wealth with her home or to save money. In this case, it's always tracking how much equity could she pull out to maybe consolidate high-interest debt or things like a refi. When should she refi? She doesn't need to track rates; she just needs to look at the Homebot refi calculator. Right here, you can see it shows her that for a 30-year fixed, she'd save over $40,000. Now, here's one other thing that's important to us: we know that Holly did not get a degree in finance. Holly is like all of us; we're just trying to live our life and we don't have time to do this stuff. So it has to be super easy to understand. Green is good, red is bad. In this situation, if Holly sees something that looks interesting to her, she says, "Get Rate."

(02:52):
And guess what? It connects her with her lender, Larry. We're not going to go through all this, but I do want to show you one other thing here. Homebot has now added listings to this home portal experience. This listing right here is actually a listing in Holly's neighborhood of a property that just recently sold. She wants to see what's going on because she understands, and Homebot is teaching her, that the way other things transact in her neighborhood affects her value. Let's take a look at that. It takes her into a full search experience, and now she's looking at that sold property. The first thing I want to point out is that Homebot knows who her buyer's agent was when she originally bought her home and automatically brands this experience to Adam, her agent. Trusted and known, she can now ask Adam a question about a sold or an active listing right here in the experience.

(03:49):
But let's move into a buyer's journey. Now that we're in search, the other thing that we're doing here is tackling affordability for her. If she wants to search for any properties—and this is a nationwide search—she can come in here and apply a filter for concessions. I don't know of any other portal in the world that does this, but if she applies the concession filter and she's in Denver, she now gets to see every home in the market where the seller is actually offering incentives. Let's go look at a particular listing here. They're all concessions. We're going to look at this one. Let me show you something: concessions in the MLS and in the search world are all buried in the gobbledygook of remarks. It's not normalized. Homebot uses AI to read all of the remarks sections for every listing in America and normalize that to a concession so that Holly can find them.

(04:41):
You can see it right here. This seller is offering $10k in concessions. But we didn't stop there. Let's move down the page a little bit more to the mortgage payment calculator. Since Homebot knows that there's a concession being offered on this property, Homebot has automatically suggested to her that she should look at maybe doing a buydown. It can describe to her how a buydown works, and right there it shows her how she could use concession dollars to drive that monthly payment down. She loves this experience too because she can search and dream anywhere in America to find a home. For her, it's like Zillow but better. It's better because this is all private. She doesn't have to worry about playing around with one of these calculators and her phone blowing up with emails and calls from all these people because it's private, just between her and Larry the Lender.

(05:37):
Let's move on to the next part of her journey where she's actually selling her home. Holly has decided to sell her home and, of course, she didn't tell her lender Larry because why would she do that? But guess what? Homebot knows. Homebot knows that she just listed her home. On behalf of Larry, Homebot sends her an email that says, "Congratulations, you're on your way to selling your home." If she clicks right here, this will take her right into the listing for her home, which she cannot resist clicking because she wants to see what her home looks like for the whole internet. Now, there's a bigger narrative here. What Homebot is really doing is connecting Holly now to Larry the Lender so that he can get her pre-qualified for her next home.

(06:25):
This is a super important part of this process, and once she has clicked on "View Your Listing," as it turns out, Larry decided to send her yet another email. Let's take a look at that email. Larry has sent her an email and it looks like he actually recorded a video for her as well. Let's take a look at the video that Larry the Lender has sent Holly Homeowner: "Hi Holly, Larry here. Hope you're doing well. Homebot just told me that you've listed your home on Winta Court, so congrats. Given your high equity position and with the interest rates starting to move down, we should probably look at options for financing on your next home. Also, I'm seeing a lot of sellers out there buying rates down with concessions, so you might want to consider this on either the sale of your home or the purchase of your next one. I'm happy to explain how it all works if you want to give me a buzz. Talk to you soon."

(07:15):
The first thing I have to say about this video: it wasn't me. That is not me. I did not do that video. That is my AI digital twin pretending to be Larry the Lender. Since Homebot knows about Holly's home, what Holly's interested in, her engagement with Homebot and all of this content, and the image and likeness of Larry the Lender, this is what's possible to drive engagement even deeper. What's the bigger point? Let's take a step back. Remember I said repeat business? Homebot has proven that there is a 96% probability that, as a lender, your client's next transaction will be with you if they're engaged with Homebot. I'm Ernie Graham, the CEO and co-founder of Homebot, and this is the type of retention that we want to bring to the entire industry by empowering Holly to build wealth through home ownership. Thank you.