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TRANSCRIPT:

Hi everybody. And welcome to brokerage insider the podcast where we interview the leaders in real estate and technology. I'm your host, Eric Stegemann and I'm the CEO of Travis. We're one of the largest independent prop tech companies in real estate and provider of custom brokerage technology to medium and large sized brokerages in the United States, Canada, and even around the world.

In addition, I'm the managing partner of Travis' capital, a private equity fund focused on the prop tech industry. On today's episode, we have Michael Lucarelli. Now Michael is the co-founder and CEO of rent spree at leasing management tool that has been focused on the MLS industry recently. And I'll, we'll be sure to dive a little more into that, Michael.

Thanks so much for joining us today and thank you so much, Eric. Really glad to be here and excited to chat with you today. Yeah, so let's dive in. So, you know, the first question that I pretty much ask all of our guests is how did you get into real estate and real estate tech? Yeah. So going back a couple of years ago is when I first actually moved.

So I'm from the east coast and I moved to California. It was about 2014 or so. And so a lot of what I experienced was first originating as a renter. And so I had done it quite a bit of moving around up until that point and just saw how there's really a massive number of people that are renting. And the U S again, kind of looking at it from the renter lens and that it was just a completely fragmented process where when you're a renter, you're kind of thrown through these loops where you have to submit your application to many different properties if to pay fees over and over again, you don't really hear back.

There's a question of information security with your sensitive information. So I saw all that on the renter side and then kind of combining that a little bit. I actually ended up getting my real estate license and hung it at a local Remax. And so I really put both pieces together where on one hand I was renting and saw that.

And then I was working in the Remax office and I saw actually a ton of agents that were working with rentals or at least trying to, and at this office. Considering how many people were working with rentals on a regular basis? I was surprised that there was no tools. There was no resources, even like the broker didn't really have any feedback or advice to give to agents on how to handle these types of rental transactions when agents were working with lease listings and representing renters.

And so I just saw a huge gap in an opportunity and given how large renting is in the us. Just like saw big chance for me to kind of come in and create a standardization that can streamline these processes for renters. But of course, also now a lot of what we do is focusing on agents, brokerages landlords, property managers, MLS.

So from a high level, you know, just to, so that everybody is listening. And can you give us a high level understanding of exactly what rents Bree does for either the broker or the consumer? Yeah. W what rent-free does, is it really looks at You know, like these rental transactions, and this is not necessarily something designed for property managers.

Although we do have property management companies that use rent-free it's really for agents that are mainly focusing on selling and buying, but they may have from time to time the opportunity to work on a rental, whether they have a lease listing and they're representing a landlord, or they might represent a renter.

And so Given how many people, how many people are kind of working on those types of transactions and spree really seeks to streamline that process as much as possible, because we know that typically. Agents and...