Real Estate Sessions Rewind - March 2023 - Kurt Uhlir, Chief Marketing Officer

The Real Estate Sessions

Kurt Uhlir is a man of many talents with an extensive tech and entrepreneurship background and unconventional experiences in high-angle rescue operations, scuba diving, and stunt work. As he transitioned to real estate, he brought a wealth of knowledge and skills, such as spatial data analysis, website creation, gaming, and targeted advertising, giving him a unique approach to the industry. Uhlir's perspective on transitioning to real estate revolves around the idea that agents should see themselves as representatives of brokerage and independent business entities. He underscores the importance of agents owning their website, a central hub for their marketing efforts. Furthermore, he highlights the significance of maintaining a clean database of contacts and the value of past clients and referrals. His experiences have shaped his belief that agents should take control of their marketing strategies and prioritize building their personal brand in the real estate industry.

(00:01:47) Early Exposure to Tech through Family Involvement

(00:06:00) Alligator Handling and Stunt Experience Mirrored

(00:14:30) Revolutionizing Real Estate with Spatial Data Technology

(00:15:51) Standardizing Data for Real Estate Success

(00:20:30) "Real Estate Transition: Unique Marketing Insights"

(00:25:46) Modern Search Tools on Agent Websites

(00:35:14) Maximizing Agent Success Through Personal Websites

Transcript

00:00:00 - Bill Risser

Hi, everybody. Welcome to another Real Estate Sessions Rewind. This week we're going back to March of 2023 with marketing expert Kurt Uhlir, as well as some expertise in some other areas, which I'll save for the introduction. So enjoy.

00:00:15 - Kurt Uhlir

But if it's your business, do you have a site with technology that you control that that is the focal point for anything else that you do marketing wise, whether you're great with email and KVcore or follow up boss or you're wonderful on TikTok or social like, when those algorithms change, when Google spam filters change, have you trained your audience to come find you on kurtulur.com? And that's that second big thing, because then it doesn't matter where you choose to invest in marketing, you have a central hub that everything focuses back to.

00:00:47 - Bill Risser

You're listening to the real estate sessions, and I'm your host, Bill Risser. With nearly 25 years in the real estate business, I love to interview industry leaders, up and comers, and really anyone with a story to tell. It's the stories that led my guests to a career in the real estate world that drives me into my 9th year and nearly 400 episodes of the podcast. And now, I hope you enjoy the next journey. Hi, everybody. Welcome to episode 348 of the Real Estate Sessions podcast. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for telling a friend. Today. We're going to have a lot of fun. Today we are talking to Kurt Uhlir. This guy did a lot of things prior to the world of real estate, including stuntman scuba rescue and high angle rescue. And he's a certified alligator handler. Yes. That's the first time I've ever mentioned that phrase on the real estate sessions podcast. So you want to listen in? Let's get this thing started. Kurt, welcome to the podcast.

00:01:45 - Kurt Uhlir

Hey, thanks for having me, Bill.

00:01:47 - Bill Risser

Well, look, most of my listeners know that I like to start at the beginning. I really, I am fascinated where people come from, how they got to be where they're at. And so the easiest way to start with that is, is your childhood. And I'm going to go, I'm going to ask you, looking at some of the things I could. In my research, I found out that it seems like you were preordained to have a life in tech and entrepreneurship. Let's talk about that. Your parents, I think your father was early on in this game, if you wanted to call it that. So let's talk about what role that your mom and dad played getting you.

00:02:21 - Kurt Uhlir

Yeah, my dad was. I'd say a glorified grunt at actually, Bell Labs used to be like the apple or Tesla of the day. And so I build my first hours thanks to him, when I was like eight or nine with Bell Labs. So I was really good at math, even very early on. And my dad was the person that would take all like, say, cell phones. Now somebody else came up with the whole network on schematics, and he would lead the teams to actually go build it in the field and so, and take what was on paper and make it, make it reality. And they'd had some problems and he happened to take me in an office and I solved something they'd been struggling with. And he was like, well, we pay people for this. So he built hours for it. So I got to be around some high techs very early on, but it was just also weird from a tech perspective. And I didn't think about it was growth takes time. And my dad is blessed with one of those people where he didn't sleep. And so, like, until he had cancer the third time, I think he slept an hour to an hour and a half a night. Then he started sleeping more like a normal person. And so between, he just put in more hours than anybody I'd ever seen. And my mom just had this country work ethic where, I mean, I remember, like, I mean, I did spend, we moved to Alabama when I was eleven. I mean, I still remember, I was probably like seven, maybe eight, in Michigan where we had cat outages when we lived in Chicago. And like, it's, it's late at night, late enough that the moon is way up in the sky. And I just remember telling my mom, like, when can we go to bed? Well, we were out, like, raking leaves for this like one acre, like, garden that she had. She's like, we'll go to sleep when we're done. Wow. That work ethic, I didn't even, I had no, there's no way I could ever go and pay for that kind of like, basically coaching and consulting that taught me, like, what it's like and exposure to both working hard and really just like, technology at an early age.

00:04:15 - Bill Risser

Yeah, I think that, that probably drives into the fact that when you attended school, you went to Vanderbilt, which very cool school, you were a track athlete, you loved running, and, which is, for me, that's, that's, I don't get that, but that's awesome for you. And, and I think you, you talked about the fact that, you know, being an athlete and having that discipline and all of the stuff that that takes, especially at a collegiate level, really primed you for what you're going to do in your life, you know, running companies and growing businesses and things. Let's talk about that.

00:04:47 - Kurt Uhlir

Yeah. I mean, even now, it's like, you know, if you want to ring my bell, if I'm hiring something, like, I love hiring athletes and healthy addicts, and, I mean, every, every athlete is a healthy addict. But I mean, to say that in terms of people that have had, like, true, like. Like, bad addictions but have overcome that, I mean, that's a huge kind of, like, that's a process into itself. But, I mean, as an athlete, it's like, there's nothing you could do, like, from a running perspective or pick any sport where you could make up for a week or three weeks of, like, screwing off by just going and make up practice in one day. And so, like, I was running, you know, 60, sometimes 120 miles a week, especially, like, in the summer when we're working on things. And it's like, you couldn't. You can't do all of that mileage, like, in one or two days. It has to be spread out. So it's small things done consistently, which is what it takes to be successful running companies. I mean, at the end of the day, it's perseverance that wins. Perseverance and operations. Like, everybody has good ideas. I mean, and good ideas and bad ideas. Like, they're the. They feel the exact same until you realize that a bad idea was bad and you shouldn't have been doing it for six months. But what matters is operations and just putting in the time you get out of school.

00:06:00 - Bill Risser

And I, first of all, you have the most varied background of anyone in the tech world that I've ever interviewed. And. And I'm probably, you know, this is episode 348, so there's a lot of people I've chatted with, but I'm going to throw some things out there, like stuntman, unbelievable, a certified alligator handler. And I live in Florida now, so that really is intriguing to me. And a member of something called high angle and scuba rescue teams. I get the scuba part right, especially with what I'm watching in California, where I grew up, there's a lot of rescue going on in water. But let's talk about, first of all, what's high angle rescue and then really, alligators?

00:06:41 - Kurt Uhlir

Yes. On both, it goes back to largely, I mean, to my dad as well. I mean, I picked up those genes where I do not need to sleep like most people. And so I'm in my mid forties. But, you know, when you only sleep two or 3 hours a night, you get more hours to do things. And so, like, when my wife and I got married, it was like, hey, do you want to go to. Do you want to go to go to bed with me or wake up with me? And I asked her that a couple weeks before we got married, and she was like, it took her a minute. She was like, you do email me at, like, 03:00 in the morning. And then, like, that was just like a mind shift for her. And I was like, so I get a little bit more time. But literally, I became a member of the Alabama state rescue squad in Marshall County, Alabama, at 14, shouldn't have been able to, but there was a bad ice storm, and in the county, there were four total people, my dad and me being two of them, that could drive on the snow and ice that we had. And so he got permission at the. At the state level for me to join the rescue squad. And I was using a suburban or, you know, an old jeep to help pull out Hummers from the National Guard that were off in the ditch. Between that kind of allowance and skills my dad had taught me when I was younger and maybe wasn't the wisest, but still taught. Learn scuba very early. High angle. Think about anything with cliffs, rappelling. I'm not really a rock climber, but I can go down and I'll do a lot of controlled risk, but you and I both do in work. And so I started that when I was 14, and so did that for many years, actually, even when I moved, after I moved up to Chicago, I'd still go down and join Alabama when there was different things that went on. So.

00:08:21 - Bill Risser

Wow. So how did Gators come into play? Come on, Kurt. I mean, seriously.

00:08:25 - Kurt Uhlir

Well, the stunt work, again, I don't sleep. And so Chicago was doing a lot of movies at the time, and I met a gentleman that I was out, and I was like, well, what do you do? And he was like, well, I'm a database programmer by day, but really, I'm a stuntman. Cause there wasn't a real full time movie industry in Chicago at that time and not enough for full time stunt people. And I was like, what does that look like? So I started hanging out with them and literally started training stuntmen and women and training with them. And so people for Batman's, you know, dark knight movies and public enemy and some others, and so friends that have a lot cooler experiences than me, but I took a friend with me to some of the training sessions that he hurt his back pretty bad, and so he needed an epidural. And so I went with him, took off work to go with him, because I'm like, well, I kind of broke you, so I'll go with you, Mike, to bring you back after you get the epidural to lower the inflammation. And as I'm sitting in this doctor's office for basically people with disposable income or time to do stupid stuff like us, I read, hey, there's only one place in the United States that you can legally go learn to handle alligators unless you work for a company for, like, six months full time, because Florida, Louisiana, like those legislators, because the animals are native there, they've done the wise thing. You have to go work for a company for, like, six months full time before they can let you touch an alligator over about this big, maybe, you know, 30 inches long without its mouth taped. And I was like, hey, you're supposed to be good in, like, a week or two, right? He's like, yeah. I was like, all right. I booked his flights to Colorado. And so Alamosa, actually, about 15 minutes north of Alamosa, Colorado, which is still the middle of nowhere Colorado, there's Colorado gators, and it's this animal sanctuary with on a geothermal spring, and that's where I first learned to kind of handle alligators. And so, like, there's 1100 alligators in the middle of nowhere, Colorado, that it's a tilapia farm. And so they literally fillet the top of tilapia. They brought in gators, like, decades ago to be the trash compactors for them. And it's just great business. All you do is insert labor, and you get money out the other side. And so that's where I first learned to do it. So anything up to about maybe an eight foot gator I can handle by myself. Wow.

00:10:37 - Bill Risser

All right. All right. So, yeah, that's never been said on this show before.

00:10:42 - Kurt Uhlir

You may just need to ask some people some questions. I'm sure some agents out there have that experience.

00:10:48 - Bill Risser

I'll have to. It's got to be someone that grew up in Louisiana or Florida, though, not. Not Chicago, and went to Denver. That's great. Well, let's talk about, really, some of your real early successes. When you got into the heavy into the space, there's a lot of things you played in. There's some gaming and website creation and that sort of thing. The spatial data, I mean, I think especially as important as that is today, which is unbelievably important in our world. You talk about targeted ads and all kinds of great stuff. Let's talk about how you got into that world. And maybe for those who don't know, we'll talk about real quick what it is and some of the things that it's being used for today that we wouldn't even think.

00:11:29 - Kurt Uhlir

Yeah, I mean, every one of us used spaceship aid in ways that, like, 20 years ago, nobody used it. And so I went to go work for. Didn't mean to, but I was meaning to go. I was looking for jobs with investment banks and kind of being that go between, between the IT programming side and the top leaders and those working in algorithms. And I got a call from a retained search firm that said, hey, look, we're looking for somebody to come work with. Denise Doyle and Saladin Khan at this little company at the time called Navigation Technologies became nav tech. Now it's called hear technologies. They're literally the spatial data. I mean, many people think about Google Maps, but Google Maps is nowhere near the largest provider of this stuff. We provided all that data. And so if you use, you know, like, I invented the core technology behind Waze, like the navigation apps. And so that IP has been licensed by Google and Apple and a bunch of others. But think about all the places where, like, spatial digital data. Like, every time you do a route from one place to another, or in real estate, we do. I want to search for homes within 2 miles or 20 minutes driving of this school. Like that. All YEet needs two d and three dimensional spatial data behind the scenes. And so I had ten and a half years at this company that we took from $85 million a year in revenue to $1.44 billion. And it was like, I mean, it was like being at McKinsey or Bain basically for ten years, being mentored by people. Like I mentioned, two of them. And then later by Jetson Green. He was the president of Disney theme parks and came kind of as his semi retirement to nav tech until he realized, like, there's a lot of money here. And we were just at that place where the rest of technology picked up. And he went from, like, navigation systems being like a $20,000 add on to, like, it being in your cell phone and doing mapquests for free. Like, I was there for all of that. And so I would walk out of a meeting from Siemens VDO that makes the navigation system for Lexus, and then walk into FedEx Logistics, which is using it for getting packages. And then I walk into my innovation teams where I had friends in the video game industry was like, well, like on the back shelf behind me. I mean, I know we're audio, but it's like, I've got Microsoft Flight Simulator X. Because I had this crazy idea to walk into Microsoft and say, hey, how about we save you $20 to $40 million in building your next flight simulator game? And they were like, let's have that conversation. That was like, literally like 08:00 a.m. At 09:00 a.m. And a 10:00 a.m. But we did that across, like, eleven industries for spatial data. And it was like I could have gone to Bain or McKinsey and may not, maybe not have had that same background.

00:14:03 - Bill Risser

Let's talk about in the real estate space how that's exploded over the last, let's call it ten years, RPR. RPR launched a while ago, and it struggled to get a foothold. I think it's a great tool. I think there's some great stuff in it. I'm guessing your stuff is in there because they do that 20 minutes from here or 2 miles to the office. That's one place. Agents are using spatial data daily if they're using RPR.

00:14:30 - Kurt Uhlir

Well, and there's tons of things like that. I mean, anytime that any, literally any search that you're. That you're just comparing, like, distance or time or anything. I mean, a lot of the applications like RPR might use the United States government's census tiger data, but that data is basically free because the government came to our company and paid us an exorbitant amount of multiple, multiple millions of dollars so that we would give them a snapshot of that data and so for their purposes. And so, like, they've kind of bought data to open source, but it's still not nearly as good as what you can kind of get on the private market. And now there's companies like Mat box and others that Google collects their own data. But, yeah, there's places like, anytime you do a home search, the listing alerts, we all get that come out. And then there's, you know, a ton of other things that we have on there, too. It's like, you know, there's applications that consumers or agents can go to that says, here's the seven homes I want to go look at. Give me the optimal route between those. And then you'll get. And then you'll schedule your times at those based on 1234 as opposed to crisscrossing across town. That's just some of the places that we see the data used.

00:15:41 - Bill Risser

Yeah. So it seems there's this natural connection between what you did in nav tech in here with MLS's, I would guess. I mean, data. It's data all over the place, right?

00:15:51 - Kurt Uhlir

Very much both because it involves spatial data. But like in 2019, RESO, the real estate standards organization, brought me and Scott Lockhart in to talk about kind of two things. One was Showcase IDX had been one of the first companies to start using web API at that time, which was meaningful for accessing the MLS data. But on the other side, like, my 15 to 20 minutes that I really talked about was really meant to scare MLS into why they need to work better together with Riso. And so the, one of the. Oh, one of the reasons that nav tech here technologies exist so well now is they take disparate data, just like real estate. And so we created this multi-billion dollar a year revenue product by going out to all the local municipalities, the states, the...