Evaluate Property Conditions Using Drones for Due Diligence | Real Estate Notes Show

Episode: Note Investing Due Diligence Evaluate Property Conditions using Drones Full Video Dave's Goals and Plans: - Planning to do a video about how to calculate returns for note investors - Has taken back properties and dealt with roof issues and legal/insurance claims - Uses satellite images and Google images for property evaluation but recognizes limitations Nathan's Goals and Plans: - Attending DME conference in St. Pete with networking focus - Planning to speak on stage in Vegas potentially this year - Consulting with clients on pricing, modeling, and property valuation challenges Key Recommendations: - Roof condition is the number one factor in property valuation - prioritize detailed roof inspection - Objective property condition assessments are critical - avoid subjective descriptions like rough shape - Use real-time drone imagery instead of relying on outdated satellite photos (months or years old) - Get inside properties or use aerial angles to assess damage below tree lines and backyards Topics Discussed: - Market direction and foreclosure/bankruptcy trends through 2024 - Return calculation methods for note deals - Property valuation challenges amid rapidly changing property values - Limitations of BPOs, satellite imagery, and traditional property inspections - Drone marketplace technology for on-demand aerial property assessment - Roof damage as critical factor in property condition evaluation Guest Insights: - Bobby's background: 13 years Air Force, pilot license, founded PayPixel drone marketplace - Commercial satellites have delayed recollection times - Google Earth imagery can be months to years old - PayPixel is a democratized marketplace connecting drone pilots with real estate investors for fast turnaround imagery - Drone technology enables angles below tree lines and multiple perspectives impossible with overhead satellite - Drone imagery stored on dashboard allows sharing and real-time property collaboration with partners you part of the whole deal and getting google images like we do satellite images is unknown we can't see everything we can't detail and i think we've i've talked to other people who are buying these people to go out and look at a property inspection i don't know what they do they don't know how what their evaluation is and a lot of people i don't want another report yeah and it's very subjective somebody will and i get this all the time a realtor will go look at a house that i've taken back they say oh it's in really rough shape and i just go uh-huh because rough shape is incredibly subjective what does rough shape mean you know like and does that mean torn carpet or does that mean it's down to the studs see that's very different things and and uh i need to know objectively if i can look at it then i can make the decision what's rough and what's not and you know what kind of damage there might be or it's not a big deal so what we've done in the past is kind of shot in the dark on condition of houses most of you can't get inside of them and you can't tell roof conditions and what we've learned over the years the roof is probably your most number one factor on alternation yeah if that roof has problems that house has problems yeah it's we're not just talking about right we're not just talking about worn shingles we're talking yeah holes in the ceiling yeah and that can destroy a house yeah and i've we've been through it i've had legal claims insurance claims it's just a nightmare so a while back i ran into this great person uh who was really helpful with things and then she introduced me to her husband bobby bobby was a guy that blew the top off the doors of his knowledge experience but also his personality so when bobby started explaining some of his stuff i was amazed at some of the stuff i didn't realize it didn't know or in that spot in near real time that you can get angles below tree lines uh you know from different angles and just miles above overhead you know maybe one or two degrees off of that house right now you're able to take a drone and get exactly where you need to so uh the the premise of the company paypixel what what are we what did i end up making out of it um it's it's a marketplace that allows anybody to easily find pilots across the country order and pay for images videos and 3d models on demand uh that's what we're building right now um we launched our beta last month and essentially right now we're we're building the software the core component of that marketplace that allows pilots to upload their images 3ds uh 3d models videos and share those with their customers in a in a in a map essentially so you can consider us like the the interface would look like zillow meets dropbox meets paypal right and it's a way for pilots to basically stage all of their imagery projects over time recall them on a map pull them up share projects out it's like a like a dropbox of the map component to it um now the reason i wanted to open this up to everyone so there's something else too is there's marketplace out there that currently exists right that we're competing with and the difference the major difference between us and them is they are there are drone service providers out there where you can go sign a drone service provider agreement with these people and or companies and you can ask for imagery in certain areas it's difficult to get their marketplace isn't perfect it takes days sometimes to get a return on your imagery and you're dealing with that singular company um that kind of closes off uh the concept of a marketplace so we wanted to create a true democratized marketplace very much like zillow where you can just go to the map you don't even need to sign in you can put a request in you can see the pilots here you can go directly with them and you can get a quick turnaround and the goal is to to hire on four new employees just to keep up with the sudden deluge foreclosure starts so you know i asked him our bankruptcies ticking up and he said well not yet but i expect they will in three or four months because it just takes that long you know as it goes through the process and then bankruptcies started creeping up as well so if in his opinion he you know where he's figuring fall summer uh we're gonna see a bunch more delinquencies so we'll see what happens you know i was just talking to someone today we did a consulting session with someone and they were asking questions about pricing and modeling and i found a lot of people are struggling with you know two big things right um calculating returns um which we should be doing a video about that sooner or later is you know how do you calculate your returns we didn't with joe and everything else but they're still bidding based on upb and that number of changes and the other side of it is valuation of properties right is so hard because values are going up dramatically quickly across the country and knowing where things are going to be is extremely difficult but the flip side is if you have a property that is going up they can and i'm segueing here right where condition the property means everything to you as an investor if it's in good condition you can assume the fact that as long as the market doesn't crash that property would continue to go up in value the question is condition right um so when we were bpos yeah what do we see we see the front of the house maybe the side maybe how many times have you had a roof issue or something that happened in the backyard it's ridiculous yeah whole issue roof issue anything right and we've taught the people who you know get these evaluations done and the roof is this percentage that percentage like how do you know right right um but it you know not only is the note the valuable part the asset is the second most valuable commercial intelligence products if you will but super cool right what i learned in that industry though from dealing in that job specifically with customers the commercial customers that were coming in they wanted to put eyes on locations of properties in real time that satellite's going to get too and a lot of people didn't realize at the time that like satellites don't have an immediate recollect time every day like they're not collecting tomorrow and the next day and the stuff that you're seeing online on google maps and google earth could be months years old wow so one of the things that i was like was you know even as an analyst if i'm doing an open source report or whatever i was like i need something that's more real-time than my own satellites that i have access to as that as that analyst and wouldn't it be cool if we could get those people that have drones in the us to go take pictures for us and this was back in 2015 so that kind of started the whole where i was going right um the short of that is i pitched it to digitalglobe you know to start a drone network and they were like hey we're satellite company so it was a great idea there's a very few competitors in space at the time and i i dropped out of grad school uh and i quit the company and i started uh paypixel effectively and that's my background very cool so i know like even when i'm looking at a google earth satellite view sometimes i can see the house itself sometimes i can see parts of the roof if i can see through trees or not and sometimes i can see parts of the backyard or not and again just depending on tree cover or maybe it's an older picture so it's very pixely and it's hard to get very detailed information on what i'm looking at so you're talking about taking a drone and flying over houses and being able to take much better quality yes yeah that was that was the core idea is you you're getting getting a camera essentially two seconds hey everyone dave putz here from jkp holdings alongside me mr nathan turner hello there live from a different location i love it i mean st pete look at this sunny skies palm trees all that good stuff ed dme right now i'm sure you say hello to mr nathan uh unfortunately i was unable to make it uh we're making arrangements we'll be speaking actually on stage uh possibly in vegas this year so it'd be fun awesome how has dme been what's the what's that what's the atmosphere like it is so nice to be all together again and just and just being able to just get together and chat and oh man that's invaluable and just that time to just do the face to face and connecting with friends and then meeting a lot of new people uh you know anybody from sellers to people that are brand new just looking for advice which is fine too but it's great just to get together and just chat and have that face to face it's nice yeah are you able to um when you're networking these people what is the energy like what are the people asking about what are they talking about what's the what's the talk right now that's on your you know around the atmosphere right now uh a lot of people are wondering kind of where we're going and that's you know what's going to happen with the market and i mean we've been talking about that for a year on this year with every guest that we've had so that's that's still a big topic conversation um and you know everybody's got their opinion but i one of the most interesting comments uh i was chatting with franco yesterday and he's an attorney and covers several states in the midwest and he was saying that starting january they were swamped absolutely swamped they had didn't realize the problem right so when talking to bobby i think it was the amazingness of not only i was learning what i didn't realize but understanding his knowledge his experience and why what he's bringing the market is needed in an amazing way so bobby welcome to uh our friday live um riding solo right now i know but bobby can you share a little about your background how did you get into this space what's your knowledge and what's his product ultimately solving sure hey thank you thank you so much for having me david and nathan and you really set that softball up nicely for me it was uh it was a really good intro i'm like yes that's perfect great sales pitch for me um so i am prior military on prior air force at 13 years total service and in 2009 i got my pilot's license and i found out you could get paid to fly essentially to own an aerial photography company um so i did that for three years until 2012 or so actively from an aircraft and that's when drones were like right on the horizon and i'm sitting here looking at like at the time investing another fifty sixty thousand dollars into buying an airplane and and doubling down or you know what's gonna happen when drones come in in a year from then uh and put us out of business right so uh obsolescence hurts uh i ended up leaving that job i still did it part-time you know and then started using drones for but i got into flying drones in afghanistan for a couple years to get into the unmanned industry um did that for a couple years in afghanistan came back and worked as a satellite intel analyst uh for the the biggest commercial satellite company was digital globe at the time uh where i used satellite and had access to commercial satellites it was awesome by the way you guys might see a lot of this imagery in ukraine right now coming out it's like get that imagery fast uh store it on your dashboard forever you can share you can collaborate with it you can download the imagery send it to a partner and they can see in real time what's going on with that property so that's amazing and you know you're kind of helping out two different parties here right you're helping out the real estate investor and you're helping that drone person who enjoys this hobby of flying and make it a business for them as well not only you know or if they already have existing business to expand on that business right uh marco added that he actually the drone pilot with part 107 i guess license part 107 you know so and you're doing both parts of it and i'm sure he would love to be able to use his drone for other than personal use other things right so when you look at these images that you've seen what are some of the stuff you've noticed about houses you know in the real estate world what are some of the things you've seen going holy goodness that we probably are not seeing through google images or any other company what are you seeing with the property backyard roof of the house what kind of stuff are you seeing so for us what we're what we're noticing is you know when you have three centimeter resolution you can see the individual tiles you can see the condition of the roof you can see if a fence is torn down in the backyard or the paint is real bad even on the sides of the house as this drone orbits around the property you know you're able to look at an oblique angle of all different angles of the roof so for roofs you know you got different uh grades of the roof you're able to see on one side of that grade and go around you can see where there's uh potential leaks um discoloration damaged tiles you know we have terracotta roofs here in florida the spanish roofs are common um and any visible damage around that roof is a lot more noticeable than you'll see in the that 30 centimeters uh satellite imagery resolution that you get from google earth you know or big maps so we're looking at 10 times the resolution of that commercial product we want this or we want that yeah absolutely so so what we're doing is we're incorporating apis and we're using a web order form where the customer will be able to use our standard web order form and also go into the description put some more information in there to really tailor it and when when the app is at full maturity you'll just be able to go direct with the pilot that you choose and you can dm them directly in the chat so there's a log of what's going on there's the web order form everything is there and it's bound to the order so when you get your payment when you get your order rather it's on your dashboard all the communication has been there and it just makes things easy it puts it right there and then when the project is done a year later you can go back to your dashboard and see all of the products so all the orders that you've ever had like zillow on a map you can click on one see the output again still download and share the imagery later on down the road if you need to so commercially it's a significant um boost to insurance and proptech where you have companies that can order autumn through automation with the api they can take a standard order form and say okay for every property that we have to come in now distribute an order here on the api so and the the pilots will receive it just as if they're talking to a person be able to fulfill those orders and those auto you know the orders are filled uh through automation via the api so yes that that's that's the direction that we're going oh that's cool so are there any uh privacy concerns with with a drone flying around a person's house how does that access absolutely that's a good question um and this is something that is is because the industry is early uh they this is where public opinion meets the lack of education meets um ad hoc legislation and this is uh this is a common push so i think it was 2011 if i'm not missed i think it was 2011 2007 or 2011.

uh google street view came under fire google went to a class action lawsuit that's out there with a current look as it is today and not like months or years ago that's awesome yeah that's mind-blowing that's really cool it's amazing we look at images all the time and we use our those images as fact as as property conditions and i'll bounce between google maps and bing maps just to get the most newest map but when you get these images and how soon if i make an order today how soon that typically come in for me as a consumer and be able to see the images sure uh so you know to keep in mind we're early on and we're in the beta right now but the the the way that we built the marketplace differently from other people is it's enticing to the drone pilots that are out there um the offer to them so to answer your question quickly our goal is to get within 24 hours you know there's there's obvious weather conditions that may delay that it might be raining there may be a hurricane you're not getting a quick turnaround there right so it's there's there's a sense of you know you got to be realistic about the turnaround um but as far as getting the the density of pilots in the network to to make a quick turnaround that's where we had to look at our business model and analyze like okay what's the best business model that's going to get us more pilots on the network quickly that's also going to give them a little bit more demand so they can put more money in their account each month and um the the major difference that we're doing there to enable that is we're not we're not we're almost removing ourselves almost completely as the intermediary between the two um our product isn't the drone pilot's imagery if that makes sense so when you order through paypixel it's not going to be we're not controlling that product what we're doing is we're building the software to remove the friction in the process of finding people if that makes sense and the pilot gets to take away the majority of the payment that the order cost right we take a small transaction fee and they can continue to grow and the judge ruled in favor of google and it was basically the um the expectation of privacy uh was pulled into effect and and the judge basically deemed if you're taking imagery from a public area uh it's not an invasion of privacy if you are trying to defeat somebody's personal fence or you know you're on their private property taking imagery that's another problem so but this google car going down the road in the public domain was deemed uh by all intents and purposes uh safe it was it was not something that you could say was an invasion of privacy so they there's a push right now some states are different they don't agree not necessarily with other states there are regions and states that don't agree um what is considered an invasion of privacy from the air we've got to keep in mind that this is a new technology people freak out we've had satellites for years be able to look down in your backyard not only that but we've had airplanes flying over and creating 10 centimeter resolution imagery and you can see people in the backyard with that imagery and that's been they've been flying every month they'll fly over your house and people don't even realize it it's not until you get a drone that you can hear and you can see that people start getting concerned with the technology that's been around for forever right and so that's that's the issue and now the public awareness is there there's a stigma that we got to work through so in the industry we're still in the education phase of saying look we're not trying to look at you in the backyard tanning we're trying to get access to this roof so we have to be smart about it as well and this is a give and take situation people that are using drones to inspect properties also need to know some of the limitations that are there as well and it's important to say like say if you have a uh a tenant in the home and you're trying to do due diligence on a property that they might not even be aware of that's up in the air right you don't necessarily want to alert that tenant that you're inspecting the property you don't want and bugs which we need right now we we have uh again we launched last month and we have just over 350 users right now helping us out um we have about 14 maybe 15 000 images uploaded already uh so yeah it's it's going pretty quick and uh the people in canada are like when we start fulfilling orders when can we use this to deliver our existing files to our existing customers and we just have to get that stripe integration there so we're looking at like maybe a month for for canada to come online so let's let's go a little different direction here right we have a bunch of people listing this who are investors and business owners next christmas i want to ask my wife for a drone how easy or is it not so easy to literally plug and play this possibility for people who may be a little handy with the stuff to move right in or is there a skill set that needs to be had um you know not so two two parts of that question not everybody has the ability to fly a drone not everybody has the ability or the eye to get imagery and that's why it's important to create a marketplace of people who have that skill that can do that for you right and it's true like you're not going to go put a great marketing video together at fpv where you're flying through the property or inside of the house uh like a professional on day one and some people will never get to that point on the on the flip side of that it's never been easier to operate a drone the gps the autopilot systems are so advanced right now you let go of the controls it holds it in place with precision and you can fly very smoothly better than you've ever been able to before so it takes less skill than ever to do just that um so that's kind of a two-sided way to answer your question i would say go get it play around with it see how difficult it is you might love it and then when you're ready to start sharing your imagery for free download paypixel and when you share that that project out you can share it on a map you can share just for fun with people on your social media page and say hey look at these pictures from our vacation and the cool part is is all it's edited video that could go hundreds of dollars more um and then that edited video so marketing people are are going to be using the platform as well to find skill pilots to do like complete editing and those could be anywhere from five hundred dollars up to fifteen thousand right but for this sake you're looking between the 100 and 150 range for a photo video which is not a whole lot more than a regular vpo so that's that's well worth it fantastic thank you yeah well i'm looking forward to it man i i mean when we talked last year about this idea this is something i was like this is amazing but we both knew when i talked to you that this would be a long process and it sounds like you're at the talent which is awesome here um so it's great to hear that you're finally getting there well dave the same for you because i've i've seen you build your own product and you know and i know times you like you've reached out and asked for resources that i was struggling to get myself so congratulations to you for getting your product out and i i would love to see your product grow as well yeah awesome we'll probably connect definitely have some symmetries that we can definitely connect with so hey guys i encourage you guys check out pay pixel online facebook group youtube all the good stuff where you can go to uh this will be recorded onto youtube for our channel um and make sure you take a look at stuff if you're going to be going imn and you're not a dme uh nathan will be there so definitely say hello and wave yeah shake hands with them uh introduce yourself so well bobby i hope you enjoy the rest of the afternoon i know you're flying solo with the wife uh at the conference so i hope things go well for you hopefully the kids will drive you crazy so everyone super dad definitely take a look at everything guys enjoy his website and uh have a great weekend everyone enjoy thanks guys business with you so if you have other houses in that area you can go back and store them as a favorite pilot they can continue to fly again wow so um so it's good to just mention the business model itself in the marketplace right you said it yourself like you're you're dealing with problems on two sides so for you guys you want the ability to see quickly i've dealt with investors who said that they had ubereats go to a location take pictures and then keep the pizza that they ordered they'd text back and forth the driver said hey thanks for the photos and that was it that was a really cheap way for them to get imagery but that shows the pain like it's difficult to get that so if i ask people today like where would you go find imagery where would you go to have somebody take photos for you for a property and they go oh i don't know facebook uh maybe word of mouth that would i don't know so first thing is facebook and it's a place that's not really built for what this is um the other side of that is the pilots and who are mostly photographers as well which means if we have somebody go to a house for you to take drone imagery they can easily use a camera to get on the ground imagery as well so if they have access where they have access in the public viewing they can take the picture the side of the house the front of the house so it can go you know not just aerial but um on the ground and in some cases even interior if that's accessible to the people legally right um so that's where we're at the problems that they have though is important to note these guys are there's 250 000 pilots across the us and the average pilot makes 12 000 a year so it's a gig work for most pilots out there it's a it's a side job we want to we want to increase that market by increasing the demand to have more people come in and buy imagery to make a million pilots making thirty thousand dollars a year you know that that boosts the the the industry ten times just by making the software that that allows that transaction to occur naturally right and that's what we're trying to do for them as well i presume you guys do commercial work too right you can check out any kind of property any anything you need from a point of view um and from the customer point of view can we direct what we're looking for hey you know three people a day going on the door asking to be led into the house to take pictures yeah so you gotta kind of be discreet right and you want to be discreet within the bounds of the law so you don't necessarily want to put a drone three feet over the roof scanning the roof and looking at every single tile that doesn't make sense but what does make sense is if you put it in the public domain you put it 50 to 100 feet above the roof you still get amazing imagery you can circulate the roof and then you can take off and go that's a better situation a solution you still get amazing accuracy in your images and you're still able to tell a lot of the story we also have to educate pilots on that as well because there's a lot of pilots out there that don't understand they still feel like they need to go knock on the door for every one of these houses and let them know that they're there and that's not the case either they can do standoff inspections so it's it's we're in an education phase we have to educate what the limitations are to the customer and we have to educate what's legal and what is acceptable in our pilot community as well so no nothing like an uphill struggle but it's it's important this is this is how we key yeah you have a picture of a kid on there you can get legally in trouble for having an image of a kid without permission right if those kind of things are crazy i've also seen and cindy asked a question we'll get to in one second cindy that when you look at google maps a lot of times license plates are you know grayed out or a whole house can be completely blurred is that going to be turned into this where if the house is on that do not show list you guys will be flagging that as well yeah you know this is something that we want to put in there too uh privacy it plays right into the public stigma we want to reduce that stigma uh you know so we understand i i respect people's privacy all day long i'm also a proponent of the fourth amendment right and we want to make sure that people are using our platform legally uh ethically so yeah of course give them the opportunity if they don't want to be there then we remove that house from our map if you will um you know in any future orders that conflict with that area will flag it and we'll say this is unable to collect there as far as facial those pictures are mapped and you can see on a map where they were taken and that's just a completely different way to share the imagery that's amazing outside of the inspections outside of the marketplace on your own to share so yeah um what what limitations do you have right now besides expansion um from my experience the limitations really technology just making sure everything works right um what are the limitations you have right now from a user point of view that we can't do the biggest number one problem is regulatory it's it's true um this is why we have the model where you go direct with the with the the drone pilot rather than us taking your order and distributing that as an order to the pilot um we can't do that because of all the ad hoc regulation that's out there so regulatory restrictions are the number one thing you know some towns and some areas don't allow drone pilots to take off in that area yet and fly overhead so it's not everywhere is friendly in the u.s we are moving uh where states are putting in regulations that uh or legislation that nobody below the state can make a more restrictive law than the state itself which is super helpful for us i think minnesota is one of the states right now that just enacted that so not one city in minnesota is gonna make a more restrictive thing and you're not gonna you're removing that ad hoc regulatory map right that's the number one problem uh that we face but that's quickly going away the public stigma is laying to rest i mean we have it's been 2013 is when drones came out so uh seven nine years now that this technology has been around give it a few more that stigma is going to die down a little bit more it'll be easy to get the imagery that you need where you need it unfortunately we'll be in the position to help you out that's awesome excellent um cindy asks how we can sign up for your service um as a user i'm presuming cindy i'm presuming you're not flying them uh if you are awesome but those people who are looking recognition license plates and pii the private information that you can you know detect an imagery fortunately there's algorithms that can remove those automatically thank you facebook for making that open source um but yeah we can easily go and blur those out post-processing so cindy uh coleman asks you know are we limited to united states on this i'm presuming in the beginning it is but you want to go farther than that would that be correct absolutely we do we're so this is a fun time to talk about it um how we plan on how we plan on using crypto you know right now uh we're using stripe as an interface and stripe has all these different countries so as we continue to grow and we add on support like the next thing is we're going to do canada south america we'll we'll be looking at that as well so we plan on expanding but we have to test here in the us first we want global domination that's why we started the company um in order to do that there's it's there crypto is an avenue that we're looking at that pilots and people can optionally pay in crypto for their for their orders and that means that i can pay a pilot in another country that strike doesn't necessarily support where they can get that crypto payment they can take it out and they can you know that's that's how they can gain wealth from fulfilling that order um so that that's on the burner as well that's so cool so coming up to canada aaron and i already discussed it you guys are coming at christmas time we're getting part of the hockey hall of fame truck so we're all excited thank you i didn't know that and most people probably don't know that you know aaron yeah you said aaron quinn is my wife uh big hockey fans i'm a huge fan of canada i've never been able to make it i just told you that the other day when i saw you nathan in person yeah but um yeah so thank you for talking my wife and uh it's all planned it's awesome we actually have you oh go ahead sorry i was just gonna say and then we can start your your uh canadian expansion project at that time you know we already have users in canada and that's the thing is they're helping us test and uh they're reporting issues to start using your service tomorrow to look at properties so yeah we're so we're not we don't have the marketplace set up just yet however you can still register it's going to look a little weird because we're going to talk to you like you're a pilot today although we have that list growing so everybody on the list and when you register you're going to determine whether you're a pilot or a client and so if you say your client will have all of those people in our database as this progresses over the next month to 45 days and the marketplace opens up you'll get an email and hey paypixel is ready to go and when you log back in it's going to look a lot more like zillow than the website does today but if you want to register you want to get more information we would love to have you love to have you come in and check it out it's paypixel.io that's p-a-y-p-i-x-l dot io and uh and we'll be looking forward to having you on yeah super cool i think it's been completely changed a lot of the market um right now it's simple picture of property from the outside proving their location and we have to get they have to take a picture of the property dress right and it's it's so antiquated where this is using real technology that's out there available for everyone to not be guessing and taking street signs and really getting evaluations so i'm looking forward to it look forward to playing with it looking at stuff and really using it for everything else this is not just a note thing this is a real estate thing and this is even bigger than that this is just everything right so yeah cool well do you know what you're charging for the reports yet yeah what yeah do you know what your cost would be so uh so right now to to capture a basic imagery of a property um the the national average is about 110 to 120 for that you got to think the pilot's going to go out fly the drone get the imagery come back upload it so 110 120 is a national average that can go up or down 30 um on average across the rest of the country if you're if you're wanting video if it's unedited video and they're just like taking video of the property around you might add another 20 to 50 if ticking up and he said well not yet but i expect they will in three or four months because it just takes that long you know as it goes through the process and then bankruptcies started creeping up as well so if in his opinion he you know where he's figuring fall summer uh we're gonna see a bunch more delinquencies so we'll see what happens you know i was just talking to someone today we did a consulting session with someone and they were asking questions about pricing and modeling and i found a lot of people are struggling with you know two big things right um calculating returns um which we should be doing a video about that sooner or later is you know how do you calculate your returns we didn't with joe and everything else but they're still bidding based on upb and that number of changes and the other side of it is valuation of properties right is so hard because values are going up dramatically quickly across the country and knowing where things are going to be is extremely difficult but the flip side is if you have a property that is going up they can and i'm segueing here right where condition the property means everything to you as an investor if it's in good condition you can assume the fact that as long as the market doesn't crash that property would continue to go up in value the question is condition right um so when we were bpos yeah what do we see we see the front of the house maybe the side maybe how many times have you had a roof issue or something that happened in the backyard it's ridiculous yeah whole issue roof issue anything right and we've taught the people who you know get these evaluations done and the roof is this percentage that percentage like how do you know right right um but it you know not only is the note the valuable part the asset is the second most valuable part of the whole deal and getting google images like we do satellite images is unknown we can't see everything we can't detail and i think we've i've talked to other people who are buying these people to go out and look at a property inspection i don't know what they do they don't know how what their evaluation is and a lot of people i don't want another report yeah and it's very subjective somebody will and i get this all the time a realtor will go look at a house that i've taken back they say oh it's in really rough shape and i just go uh-huh because rough shape is incredibly subjective what does rough shape mean you know like and does that mean torn carpet or does that mean it's down to the studs see that's very different things and and uh i need to know objectively if i can look at it then i can make the decision what's rough and what's not and you know what kind of damage there might be or it's not a big deal so what we've done in the past is kind of shot in the dark on condition of houses most of you can't get inside of them and you can't tell roof conditions and what we've learned over the years the roof is probably your most number one factor on alternation yeah if that roof has problems that house has problems yeah it's we're not just talking about right we're not just talking about worn shingles we're talking yeah holes in the ceiling yeah and that can destroy a house yeah and i've we've been through it i've had legal claims insurance claims it's just a nightmare so a while back i ran into this great person uh who was really helpful with things and then she introduced me to her husband bobby bobby was a guy that blew the top off the doors of his knowledge experience but also his personality so when bobby started explaining some of his stuff i was amazed at some of the stuff i didn't realize it didn't know or didn't realize the problem right so when talking to bobby i think it was the amazingness of not only i was learning what i didn't realize but understanding his knowledge his experience and why what he's bringing the market is needed in an amazing way so bobby welcome to uh our friday live um riding solo right now i know but bobby can you share a little about your background how did you get into this space what's your knowledge and what's his product ultimately solving sure hey thank you thank you so much for having me david and nathan and you really set that softball up nicely for me it was uh it was a really good intro i'm like yes that's perfect great sales pitch for me um so i am prior military on prior air force at 13 years total service and in 2009 i got my pilot's license and i found out you could get paid to fly essentially to own an aerial photography company um so i did that for three years until 2012 or so actively from an aircraft and that's when drones were like right on the horizon and i'm sitting here looking at like at the time investing another fifty sixty thousand dollars into buying an airplane and and doubling down or you know what's gonna happen when drones come in in a year from then uh and put us out of business right so uh obsolescence hurts uh i ended up leaving that job i still did it part-time you know and then started using drones for but i got into flying drones in afghanistan for a couple years to get into the unmanned industry um did that for a couple years in afghanistan came back and worked as a satellite intel analyst uh for the the biggest commercial satellite company was digital globe at the time uh where i used satellite and had access to commercial satellites it was awesome by the way you guys might see a lot of this imagery in ukraine right now coming out it's like commercial intelligence products if you will but super cool right what i learned in that industry though from dealing in that job specifically with customers the commercial customers that were coming in they wanted to put eyes on locations of properties in real time that satellite's going to get too and a lot of people didn't realize at the time that like satellites don't have an immediate recollect time every day like they're not collecting tomorrow and the next day and the stuff that you're seeing online on google maps and google earth could be months years old wow so one of the things that i was like was you know even as an analyst if i'm doing an open source report or whatever i was like i need something that's more real-time than my own satellites that i have access to as that as that analyst and wouldn't it be cool if we could get those people that have drones in the us to go take pictures for us and this was back in 2015 so that kind of started the whole where i was going right um the short of that is i pitched it to digitalglobe you know to start a drone network and they were like hey we're satellite company so it was a great idea there's a very few competitors in space at the time and i i dropped out of grad school uh and i quit the company and i started uh paypixel effectively and that's my background very cool so i know like even when i'm looking at a google earth satellite view sometimes i can see the house itself sometimes i can see parts of the roof if i can see through trees or not and sometimes i can see parts of the backyard or not and again just depending on tree cover or maybe it's an older picture so it's very pixely and it's hard to get very detailed information on what i'm looking at so you're talking about taking a drone and flying over houses and being able to take much better quality yes yeah that was that was the core idea is you you're getting getting a camera essentially in that spot in near real time that you can get angles below tree lines uh you know from different angles and just miles above overhead you know maybe one or two degrees off of that house right now you're able to take a drone and get exactly where you need to so uh the the premise of the company paypixel what what are we what did i end up making out of it um it's it's a marketplace that allows anybody to easily find pilots across the country order and pay for images videos and 3d models on demand uh that's what we're building right now um we launched our beta last month and essentially right now we're we're building the software the core component of that marketplace that allows pilots to upload their images 3ds uh 3d models videos and share those with their customers in a in a in a map essentially so you can consider us like the the interface would look like zillow meets dropbox meets paypal right and it's a way for pilots to basically stage all of their imagery projects over time recall them on a map pull them up share projects out it's like a like a dropbox of the map component to it um now the reason i wanted to open this up to everyone so there's something else too is there's marketplace out there that currently exists right that we're competing with and the difference the major difference between us and them is they are there are drone service providers out there where you can go sign a drone service provider agreement with these people and or companies and you can ask for imagery in certain areas it's difficult to get their marketplace isn't perfect it takes days sometimes to get a return on your imagery and you're dealing with that singular company um that kind of closes off uh the concept of a marketplace so we wanted to create a true democratized marketplace very much like zillow where you can just go to the map you don't even need to sign in you can put a request in you can see the pilots here you can go directly with them and you can get a quick turnaround and the goal is to get that imagery fast uh store it on your dashboard forever you can share you can collaborate with it you can download the imagery send it to a partner and they can see in real time what's going on with that property so that's amazing and you know you're kind of helping out two different parties here right you're helping out the real estate investor and you're helping that drone person who enjoys this hobby of flying and make it a business for them as well not only you know or if they already have existing business to expand on that business right uh marco added that he actually the drone pilot with part 107 i guess license part 107 you know so and you're doing both parts of it and i'm sure he would love to be able to use his drone for other than personal use other things right so when you look at these images that you've seen what are some of the stuff you've noticed about houses you know in the real estate world what are some of the things you've seen going holy goodness that we probably are not seeing through google images or any other company what are you seeing with the property backyard roof of the house what kind of stuff are you seeing so for us what we're what we're noticing is you know when you have three centimeter resolution you can see the individual tiles you can see the condition of the roof you can see if a fence is torn down in the backyard or the paint is real bad even on the sides of the house as this drone orbits around the property you know you're able to look at an oblique angle of all different angles of the roof so for roofs you know you got different uh grades of the roof you're able to see on one side of that grade and go around you can see where there's uh potential leaks um discoloration damaged tiles you know we have terracotta roofs here in florida the spanish roofs are common um and any visible damage around that roof is a lot more noticeable than you'll see in the that 30 centimeters uh satellite imagery resolution that you get from google earth you know or big maps so we're looking at 10 times the resolution of that commercial product that's out there with a current look as it is today and not like months or years ago that's awesome yeah that's mind-blowing that's really cool it's amazing we look at images all the time and we use our those images as fact as as property conditions and i'll bounce between google maps and bing maps just to get the most newest map but when you get these images and how soon if i make an order today how soon that typically come in for me as a consumer and be able to see the images sure uh so you know to keep in mind we're early on and we're in the beta right now but the the the way that we built the marketplace differently from other people is it's enticing to the drone pilots that are out there um the offer to them so to answer your question quickly our goal is to get within 24 hours you know there's there's obvious weather conditions that may delay that it might be raining there may be a hurricane you're not getting a quick turnaround there right so it's there's there's a sense of you know you got to be realistic about the turnaround um but as far as getting the the density of pilots in the network to to make a quick turnaround that's where we had to look at our business model and analyze like okay what's the best business model that's going to get us more pilots on the network quickly that's also going to give them a little bit more demand so they can put more money in their account each month and um the the major difference that we're doing there to enable that is we're not we're not we're almost removing ourselves almost completely as the intermediary between the two um our product isn't the drone pilot's imagery if that makes sense so when you order through paypixel it's not going to be we're not controlling that product what we're doing is we're building the software to remove the friction in the process of finding people if that makes sense and the pilot gets to take away the majority of the payment that the order cost right we take a small transaction fee and they can continue to grow business with you so if you have other houses in that area you can go back and store them as a favorite pilot they can continue to fly again wow so um so it's good to just mention the business model itself in the marketplace right you said it yourself like you're you're dealing with problems on two sides so for you guys you want the ability to see quickly i've dealt with investors who said that they had ubereats go to a location take pictures and then keep the pizza that they ordered they'd text back and forth the driver said hey thanks for the photos and that was it that was a really cheap way for them to get imagery but that shows the pain like it's difficult to get that so if i ask people today like where would you go find imagery where would you go to have somebody take photos for you for a property and they go oh i don't know facebook uh maybe word of mouth that would i don't know so first thing is facebook and it's a place that's not really built for what this is um the other side of that is the pilots and who are mostly photographers as well which means if we have somebody go to a house for you to take drone imagery they can easily use a camera to get on the ground imagery as well so if they have access where they have access in the public viewing they can take the picture the side of the house the front of the house so it can go you know not just aerial but um on the ground and in some cases even interior if that's accessible to the people legally right um so that's where we're at the problems that they have though is important to note these guys are there's 250 000 pilots across the us and the average pilot makes 12 000 a year so it's a gig work for most pilots out there it's a it's a side job we want to we want to increase that market by increasing the demand to have more people come in and buy imagery to make a million pilots making thirty thousand dollars a year you know that that boosts the the the industry ten times just by making the software that that allows that transaction to occur naturally right and that's what we're trying to do for them as well i presume you guys do commercial work too right you can check out any kind of property any anything you need from a point of view um and from the customer point of view can we direct what we're looking for hey we want this or we want that yeah absolutely so so what we're doing is we're incorporating apis and we're using a web order form where the customer will be able to use our standard web order form and also go into the description put some more information in there to really tailor it and when when the app is at full maturity you'll just be able to go direct with the pilot that you choose and you can dm them directly in the chat so there's a log of what's going on there's the web order form everything is there and it's bound to the order so when you get your payment when you get your order rather it's on your dashboard all the communication has been there and it just makes things easy it puts it right there and then when the project is done a year later you can go back to your dashboard and see all of the products so all the orders that you've ever had like zillow on a map you can click on one see the output again still download and share the imagery later on down the road if you need to so commercially it's a significant um boost to insurance and proptech where you have companies that can order autumn through automation with the api they can take a standard order form and say okay for every property that we have to come in now distribute an order here on the api so and the the pilots will receive it just as if they're talking to a person be able to fulfill those orders and those auto you know the orders are filled uh through automation via the api so yes that that's that's the direction that we're going oh that's cool so are there any uh privacy concerns with with a drone flying around a person's house how does that access absolutely that's a good question um and this is something that is is because the industry is early uh they this is where public opinion meets the lack of education meets um ad hoc legislation and this is uh this is a common push so i think it was 2011 if i'm not missed i think it was 2011 2007 or 2011.

uh google street view came under fire google went to a class action lawsuit and the judge ruled in favor of google and it was basically the um the expectation of privacy uh was pulled into effect and and the judge basically deemed if you're taking imagery from a public area uh it's not an invasion of privacy if you are trying to defeat somebody's personal fence or you know you're on their private property taking imagery that's another problem so but this google car going down the road in the public domain was deemed uh by all intents and purposes uh safe it was it was not something that you could say was an invasion of privacy so they there's a push right now some states are different they don't agree not necessarily with other states there are regions and states that don't agree um what is considered an invasion of privacy from the air we've got to keep in mind that this is a new technology people freak out we've had satellites for years be able to look down in your backyard not only that but we've had airplanes flying over and creating 10 centimeter resolution imagery and you can see people in the backyard with that imagery and that's been they've been flying every month they'll fly over your house and people don't even realize it it's not until you get a drone that you can hear and you can see that people start getting concerned with the technology that's been around for forever right and so that's that's the issue and now the public awareness is there there's a stigma that we got to work through so in the industry we're still in the education phase of saying look we're not trying to look at you in the backyard tanning we're trying to get access to this roof so we have to be smart about it as well and this is a give and take situation people that are using drones to inspect properties also need to know some of the limitations that are there as well and it's important to say like say if you have a uh a tenant in the home and you're trying to do due diligence on a property that they might not even be aware of that's up in the air right you don't necessarily want to alert that tenant that you're inspecting the property you don't want you know three people a day going on the door asking to be led into the house to take pictures yeah so you gotta kind of be discreet right and you want to be discreet within the bounds of the law so you don't necessarily want to put a drone three feet over the roof scanning the roof and looking at every single tile that doesn't make sense but what does make sense is if you put it in the public domain you put it 50 to 100 feet above the roof you still get amazing imagery you can circulate the roof and then you can take off and go that's a better situation a solution you still get amazing accuracy in your images and you're still able to tell a lot of the story we also have to educate pilots on that as well because there's a lot of pilots out there that don't understand they still feel like they need to go knock on the door for every one of these houses and let them know that they're there and that's not the case either they can do standoff inspections so it's it's we're in an education phase we have to educate what the limitations are to the customer and we have to educate what's legal and what is acceptable in our pilot community as well so no nothing like an uphill struggle but it's it's important this is this is how we key yeah you have a picture of a kid on there you can get legally in trouble for having an image of a kid without permission right if those kind of things are crazy i've also seen and cindy asked a question we'll get to in one second cindy that when you look at google maps a lot of times license plates are you know grayed out or a whole house can be completely blurred is that going to be turned into this where if the house is on that do not show list you guys will be flagging that as well yeah you know this is something that we want to put in there too uh privacy it plays right into the public stigma we want to reduce that stigma uh you know so we understand i i respect people's privacy all day long i'm also a proponent of the fourth amendment right and we want to make sure that people are using our platform legally uh ethically so yeah of course give them the opportunity if they don't want to be there then we remove that house from our map if you will um you know in any future orders that conflict with that area will flag it and we'll say this is unable to collect there as far as facial recognition license plates and pii the private information that you can you know detect an imagery fortunately there's algorithms that can remove those automatically thank you facebook for making that open source um but yeah we can easily go and blur those out post-processing so cindy uh coleman asks you know are we limited to united states on this i'm presuming in the beginning it is but you want to go farther than that would that be correct absolutely we do we're so this is a fun time to talk about it um how we plan on how we plan on using crypto you know right now uh we're using stripe as an interface and stripe has all these different countries so as we continue to grow and we add on support like the next thing is we're going to do canada south america we'll we'll be looking at that as well so we plan on expanding but we have to test here in the us first we want global domination that's why we started the company um in order to do that there's it's there crypto is an avenue that we're looking at that pilots and people can optionally pay in crypto for their for their orders and that means that i can pay a pilot in another country that strike doesn't necessarily support where they can get that crypto payment they can take it out and they can you know that's that's how they can gain wealth from fulfilling that order um so that that's on the burner as well that's so cool so coming up to canada aaron and i already discussed it you guys are coming at christmas time we're getting part of the hockey hall of fame truck so we're all excited thank you i didn't know that and most people probably don't know that you know aaron yeah you said aaron quinn is my wife uh big hockey fans i'm a huge fan of canada i've never been able to make it i just told you that the other day when i saw you nathan in person yeah but um yeah so thank you for talking my wife and uh it's all planned it's awesome we actually have you oh go ahead sorry i was just gonna say and then we can start your your uh canadian expansion project at that time you know we already have users in canada and that's the thing is they're helping us test and uh they're reporting issues and bugs which we need right now we we have uh again we launched last month and we have just over 350 users right now helping us out um we have about 14 maybe 15 000 images uploaded already uh so yeah it's it's going pretty quick and uh the people in canada are like when we start fulfilling orders when can we use this to deliver our existing files to our existing customers and we just have to get that stripe integration there so we're looking at like maybe a month for for canada to come online so let's let's go a little different direction here right we have a bunch of people listing this who are investors and business owners next christmas i want to ask my wife for a drone how easy or is it not so easy to literally plug and play this possibility for people who may be a little handy with the stuff to move right in or is there a skill set that needs to be had um you know not so two two parts of that question not everybody has the ability to fly a drone not everybody has the ability or the eye to get imagery and that's why it's important to create a marketplace of people who have that skill that can do that for you right and it's true like you're not going to go put a great marketing video together at fpv where you're flying through the property or inside of the house uh like a professional on day one and some people will never get to that point on the on the flip side of that it's never been easier to operate a drone the gps the autopilot systems are so advanced right now you let go of the controls it holds it in place with precision and you can fly very smoothly better than you've ever been able to before so it takes less skill than ever to do just that um so that's kind of a two-sided way to answer your question i would say go get it play around with it see how difficult it is you might love it and then when you're ready to start sharing your imagery for free download paypixel and when you share that that project out you can share it on a map you can share just for fun with people on your social media page and say hey look at these pictures from our vacation and the cool part is is all those pictures are mapped and you can see on a map where they were taken and that's just a completely different way to share the imagery that's amazing outside of the inspections outside of the marketplace on your own to share so yeah um what what limitations do you have right now besides expansion um from my experience the limitations really technology just making sure everything works right um what are the limitations you have right now from a user point of view that we can't do the biggest number one problem is regulatory it's it's true um this is why we have the model where you go direct with the with the the drone pilot rather than us taking your order and distributing that as an order to the pilot um we can't do that because of all the ad hoc regulation that's out there so regulatory restrictions are the number one thing you know some towns and some areas don't allow drone pilots to take off in that area yet and fly overhead so it's not everywhere is friendly in the u.s we are moving uh where states are putting in regulations that uh or legislation that nobody below the state can make a more restrictive law than the state itself which is super helpful for us i think minnesota is one of the states right now that just enacted that so not one city in minnesota is gonna make a more restrictive thing and you're not gonna you're removing that ad hoc regulatory map right that's the number one problem uh that we face but that's quickly going away the public stigma is laying to rest i mean we have it's been 2013 is when drones came out so uh seven nine years now that this technology has been around give it a few more that stigma is going to die down a little bit more it'll be easy to get the imagery that you need where you need it unfortunately we'll be in the position to help you out that's awesome excellent um cindy asks how we can sign up for your service um as a user i'm presuming cindy i'm presuming you're not flying them uh if you are awesome but those people who are looking to start using your service tomorrow to look at properties so yeah we're so we're not we don't have the marketplace set up just yet however you can still register it's going to look a little weird because we're going to talk to you like you're a pilot today although we have that list growing so everybody on the list and when you register you're going to determine whether you're a pilot or a client and so if you say your client will have all of those people in our database as this progresses over the next month to 45 days and the marketplace opens up you'll get an email and hey paypixel is ready to go and when you log back in it's going to look a lot more like zillow than the website does today but if you want to register you want to get more information we would love to have you love to have you come in and check it out it's paypixel.io that's p-a-y-p-i-x-l dot io and uh and we'll be looking forward to having you on yeah super cool i think it's been completely changed a lot of the market um right now it's simple picture of property from the outside proving their location and we have to get they have to take a picture of the property dress right and it's it's so antiquated where this is using real technology that's out there available for everyone to not be guessing and taking street signs and really getting evaluations so i'm looking forward to it look forward to playing with it looking at stuff and really using it for everything else this is not just a note thing this is a real estate thing and this is even bigger than that this is just everything right so yeah cool well do you know what you're charging for the reports yet yeah what yeah do you know what your cost would be so uh so right now to to capture a basic imagery of a property um the the national average is about 110 to 120 for that you got to think the pilot's going to go out fly the drone get the imagery come back upload it so 110 120 is a national average that can go up or down 30 um on average across the rest of the country if you're if you're wanting video if it's unedited video and they're just like taking video of the property around you might add another 20 to 50 if it's edited video that could go hundreds of dollars more um and then that edited video so marketing people are are going to be using the platform as well to find skill pilots to do like complete editing and those could be anywhere from five hundred dollars up to fifteen thousand right but for this sake you're looking between the 100 and 150 range for a photo video which is not a whole lot more than a regular vpo so that's that's well worth it fantastic thank you yeah well i'm looking forward to it man i i mean when we talked last year about this idea this is something i was like this is amazing but we both knew when i talked to you that this would be a long process and it sounds like you're at the talent which is awesome here um so it's great to hear that you're finally getting there well dave the same for you because i've i've seen you build your own product and you know and i know times you like you've reached out and asked for resources that i was struggling to get myself so congratulations to you for getting your product out and i i would love to see your product grow as well yeah awesome we'll probably connect definitely have some symmetries that we can definitely connect with so hey guys i encourage you guys check out pay pixel online facebook group youtube all the good stuff where you can go to uh this will be recorded onto youtube for our channel um and make sure you take a look at stuff if you're going to be going imn and you're not a dme uh nathan will be there so definitely say hello and wave yeah shake hands with them uh introduce yourself so well bobby i hope you enjoy the rest of the afternoon i know you're flying solo with the wife uh at the conference so i hope things go well for you hopefully the kids will drive you crazy so everyone super dad definitely take a look at everything guys enjoy his website and uh have a great weekend everyone enjoy thanks guys you two seconds hey everyone dave putz here from jkp holdings alongside me mr nathan turner hello there live from a different location i love it i mean st pete look at this sunny skies palm trees all that good stuff ed dme right now i'm sure you say hello to mr nathan uh unfortunately i was unable to make it uh we're making arrangements we'll be speaking actually on stage uh possibly in vegas this year so it'd be fun awesome how has dme been what's the what's that what's the atmosphere like it is so nice to be all together again and just and just being able to just get together and chat and oh man that's invaluable and just that time to just do the face to face and connecting with friends and then meeting a lot of new people uh you know anybody from sellers to people that are brand new just looking for advice which is fine too but it's great just to get together and just chat and have that face to face it's nice yeah are you able to um when you're networking these people what is the energy like what are the people asking about what are they talking about what's the what's the talk right now that's on your you know around the atmosphere right now uh a lot of people are wondering kind of where we're going and that's you know what's going to happen with the market and i mean we've been talking about that for a year on this year with every guest that we've had so that's that's still a big topic conversation um and you know everybody's got their opinion but i one of the most interesting comments uh i was chatting with franco yesterday and he's an attorney and covers several states in the midwest and he was saying that starting january they were swamped absolutely swamped they had to hire on four new employees just to keep up with the sudden deluge foreclosure starts so you know i asked him our bankruptcies ticking up and he said well not yet but i expect they will in three or four months because it just takes that long you know as it goes through the process and then bankruptcies started creeping up as well so if in his opinion he you know where he's figuring fall summer uh we're gonna see a bunch more delinquencies so we'll see what happens you know i was just talking to someone today we did a consulting session with someone and they were asking questions about pricing and modeling and i found a lot of people are struggling with you know two big things right um calculating returns um which we should be doing a video about that sooner or later is you know how do you calculate your returns we didn't with joe and everything else but they're still bidding based on upb and that number of changes and the other side of it is valuation of properties right is so hard because values are going up dramatically quickly across the country and knowing where things are going to be is extremely difficult but the flip side is if you have a property that is going up they can and i'm segueing here right where condition the property means everything to you as an investor if it's in good condition you can assume the fact that as long as the market doesn't crash that property would continue to go up in value the question is condition right um so when we were bpos yeah what do we see we see the front of the house maybe the side maybe how many times have you had a roof issue or something that happened in the backyard it's ridiculous yeah whole issue roof issue anything right and we've taught the people who you know get these evaluations done and the roof is this percentage that percentage like how do you know right right um but it you know not only is the note the valuable part the asset is the second most valuable part of the whole deal and getting google images like we do satellite images is unknown we can't see everything we can't detail and i think we've i've talked to other people who are buying these people to go out and look at a property inspection i don't know what they do they don't know how what their evaluation is and a lot of people i don't want another report yeah and it's very subjective somebody will and i get this all the time a realtor will go look at a house that i've taken back they say oh it's in really rough shape and i just go uh-huh because rough shape is incredibly subjective what does rough shape mean you know like and does that mean torn carpet or does that mean it's down to the studs see that's very different things and and uh i need to know objectively if i can look at it then i can make the decision what's rough and what's not and you know what kind of damage there might be or it's not a big deal so what we've done in the past is kind of shot in the dark on condition of houses most of you can't get inside of them and you can't tell roof conditions and what we've learned over the years the roof is probably your most number one factor on alternation yeah if that roof has problems that house has problems yeah it's we're not just talking about right we're not just talking about worn shingles we're talking yeah holes in the ceiling yeah and that can destroy a house yeah and i've we've been through it i've had legal claims insurance claims it's just a nightmare so a while back i ran into this great person uh who was really helpful with things and then she introduced me to her husband bobby bobby was a guy that blew the top off the doors of his knowledge experience but also his personality so when bobby started explaining some of his stuff i was amazed at some of the stuff i didn't realize it didn't know or didn't realize the problem right so when talking to bobby i think it was the amazingness of not only i was learning what i didn't realize but understanding his knowledge his experience and why what he's bringing the market is needed in an amazing way so bobby welcome to uh our friday live um riding solo right now i know but bobby can you share a little about your background how did you get into this space what's your knowledge and what's his product ultimately solving sure hey thank you thank you so much for having me david and nathan and you really set that softball up nicely for me it was uh it was a really good intro i'm like yes that's perfect great sales pitch for me um so i am prior military on prior air force at 13 years total service and in 2009 i got my pilot's license and i found out you could get paid to fly essentially to own an aerial photography company um so i did that for three years until 2012 or so actively from an aircraft and that's when drones were like right on the horizon and i'm sitting here looking at like at the time investing another fifty sixty thousand dollars into buying an airplane and and doubling down or you know what's gonna happen when drones come in in a year from then uh and put us out of business right so uh obsolescence hurts uh i ended up leaving that job i still did it part-time you know and then started using drones for but i got into flying drones in afghanistan for a couple years to get into the unmanned industry um did that for a couple years in afghanistan came back and worked as a satellite intel analyst uh for the the biggest commercial satellite company was digital globe at the time uh where i used satellite and had access to commercial satellites it was awesome by the way you guys might see a lot of this imagery in ukraine right now coming out it's like commercial intelligence products if you will but super cool right what i learned in that industry though from dealing in that job specifically with customers the commercial customers that were coming in they wanted to put eyes on locations of properties in real time that satellite's going to get too and a lot of people didn't realize at the time that like satellites don't have an immediate recollect time every day like they're not collecting tomorrow and the next day and the stuff that you're seeing online on google maps and google earth could be months years old wow so one of the things that i was like was you know even as an analyst if i'm doing an open source report or whatever i was like i need something that's more real-time than my own satellites that i have access to as that as that analyst and wouldn't it be cool if we could get those people that have drones in the us to go take pictures for us and this was back in 2015 so that kind of started the whole where i was going right um the short of that is i pitched it to digitalglobe you know to start a drone network and they were like hey we're satellite company so it was a great idea there's a very few competitors in space at the time and i i dropped out of grad school uh and i quit the company and i started uh paypixel effectively and that's my background very cool so i know like even when i'm looking at a google earth satellite view sometimes i can see the house itself sometimes i can see parts of the roof if i can see through trees or not and sometimes i can see parts of the backyard or not and again just depending on tree cover or maybe it's an older picture so it's very pixely and it's hard to get very detailed information on what i'm looking at so you're talking about taking a drone and flying over houses and being able to take much better quality yes yeah that was that was the core idea is you you're getting getting a camera essentially in that spot in near real time that you can get angles below tree lines uh you know from different angles and just miles above overhead you know maybe one or two degrees off of that house right now you're able to take a drone and get exactly where you need to so uh the the premise of the company paypixel what what are we what did i end up making out of it um it's it's a marketplace that allows anybody to easily find pilots across the country order and pay for images videos and 3d models on demand uh that's what we're building right now um we launched our beta last month and essentially right now we're we're building the software the core component of that marketplace that allows pilots to upload their images 3ds uh 3d models videos and share those with their customers in a in a in a map essentially so you can consider us like the the interface would look like zillow meets dropbox meets paypal right and it's a way for pilots to basically stage all of their imagery projects over time recall them on a map pull them up share projects out it's like a like a dropbox of the map component to it um now the reason i wanted to open this up to everyone so there's something else too is there's marketplace out there that currently exists right that we're competing with and the difference the major difference between us and them is they are there are drone service providers out there where you can go sign a drone service provider agreement with these people and or companies and you can ask for imagery in certain areas it's difficult to get their marketplace isn't perfect it takes days sometimes to get a return on your imagery and you're dealing with that singular company um that kind of closes off uh the concept of a marketplace so we wanted to create a true democratized marketplace very much like zillow where you can just go to the map you don't even need to sign in you can put a request in you can see the pilots here you can go directly with them and you can get a quick turnaround and the goal is to get that imagery fast uh store it on your dashboard forever you can share you can collaborate with it you can download the imagery send it to a partner and they can see in real time what's going on with that property so that's amazing and you know you're kind of helping out two different parties here right you're helping out the real estate investor and you're helping that drone person who enjoys this hobby of flying and make it a business for them as well not only you know or if they already have existing business to expand on that business right uh marco added that he actually the drone pilot with part 107 i guess license part 107 you know so and you're doing both parts of it and i'm sure he would love to be able to use his drone for other than personal use other things right so when you look at these images that you've seen what are some of the stuff you've noticed about houses you know in the real estate world what are some of the things you've seen going holy goodness that we probably are not seeing through google images or any other company what are you seeing with the property backyard roof of the house what kind of stuff are you seeing so for us what we're what we're noticing is you know when you have three centimeter resolution you can see the individual tiles you can see the condition of the roof you can see if a fence is torn down in the backyard or the paint is real bad even on the sides of the house as this drone orbits around the property you know you're able to look at an oblique angle of all different angles of the roof so for roofs you know you got different uh grades of the roof you're able to see on one side of that grade and go around you can see where there's uh potential leaks um discoloration damaged tiles you know we have terracotta roofs here in florida the spanish roofs are common um and any visible damage around that roof is a lot more noticeable than you'll see in the that 30 centimeters uh satellite imagery resolution that you get from google earth you know or big maps so we're looking at 10 times the resolution of that commercial product that's out there with a current look as it is today and not like months or years ago that's awesome yeah that's mind-blowing that's really cool it's amazing we look at images all the time and we use our those images as fact as as property conditions and i'll bounce between google maps and bing maps just to get the most newest map but when you get these images and how soon if i make an order today how soon that typically come in for me as a consumer and be able to see the images sure uh so you know to keep in mind we're early on and we're in the beta right now but the the the way that we built the marketplace differently from other people is it's enticing to the drone pilots that are out there um the offer to them so to answer your question quickly our goal is to get within 24 hours you know there's there's obvious weather conditions that may delay that it might be raining there may be a hurricane you're not getting a quick turnaround there right so it's there's there's a sense of you know you got to be realistic about the turnaround um but as far as getting the the density of pilots in the network to to make a quick turnaround that's where we had to look at our business model and analyze like okay what's the best business model that's going to get us more pilots on the network quickly that's also going to give them a little bit more demand so they can put more money in their account each month and um the the major difference that we're doing there to enable that is we're not we're not we're almost removing ourselves almost completely as the intermediary between the two um our product isn't the drone pilot's imagery if that makes sense so when you order through paypixel it's not going to be we're not controlling that product what we're doing is we're building the software to remove the friction in the process of finding people if that makes sense and the pilot gets to take away the majority of the payment that the order cost right we take a small transaction fee and they can continue to grow business with you so if you have other houses in that area you can go back and store them as a favorite pilot they can continue to fly again wow so um so it's good to just mention the business model itself in the marketplace right you said it yourself like you're you're dealing with problems on two sides so for you guys you want the ability to see quickly i've dealt with investors who said that they had ubereats go to a location take pictures and then keep the pizza that they ordered they'd text back and forth the driver said hey thanks for the photos and that was it that was a really cheap way for them to get imagery but that shows the pain like it's difficult to get that so if i ask people today like where would you go find imagery where would you go to have somebody take photos for you for a property and they go oh i don't know facebook uh maybe word of mouth that would i don't know so first thing is facebook and it's a place that's not really built for what this is um the other side of that is the pilots and who are mostly photographers as well which means if we have somebody go to a house for you to take drone imagery they can easily use a camera to get on the ground imagery as well so if they have access where they have access in the public viewing they can take the picture the side of the house the front of the house so it can go you know not just aerial but um on the ground and in some cases even interior if that's accessible to the people legally right um so that's where we're at the problems that they have though is important to note these guys are there's 250 000 pilots across the us and the average pilot makes 12 000 a year so it's a gig work for most pilots out there it's a it's a side job we want to we want to increase that market by increasing the demand to have more people come in and buy imagery to make a million pilots making thirty thousand dollars a year you know that that boosts the the the industry ten times just by making the software that that allows that transaction to occur naturally right and that's what we're trying to do for them as well i presume you guys do commercial work too right you can check out any kind of property any anything you need from a point of view um and from the customer point of view can we direct what we're looking for hey we want this or we want that yeah absolutely so so what we're doing is we're incorporating apis and we're using a web order form where the customer will be able to use our standard web order form and also go into the description put some more information in there to really tailor it and when when the app is at full maturity you'll just be able to go direct with the pilot that you choose and you can dm them directly in the chat so there's a log of what's going on there's the web order form everything is there and it's bound to the order so when you get your payment when you get your order rather it's on your dashboard all the communication has been there and it just makes things easy it puts it right there and then when the project is done a year later you can go back to your dashboard and see all of the products so all the orders that you've ever had like zillow on a map you can click on one see the output again still download and share the imagery later on down the road if you need to so commercially it's a significant um boost to insurance and proptech where you have companies that can order autumn through automation with the api they can take a standard order form and say okay for every property that we have to come in now distribute an order here on the api so and the the pilots will receive it just as if they're talking to a person be able to fulfill those orders and those auto you know the orders are filled uh through automation via the api so yes that that's that's the direction that we're going oh that's cool so are there any uh privacy concerns with with a drone flying around a person's house how does that access absolutely that's a good question um and this is something that is is because the industry is early uh they this is where public opinion meets the lack of education meets um ad hoc legislation and this is uh this is a common push so i think it was 2011 if i'm not missed i think it was 2011 2007 or 2011.

uh google street view came under fire google went to a class action lawsuit and the judge ruled in favor of google and it was basically the um the expectation of privacy uh was pulled into effect and and the judge basically deemed if you're taking imagery from a public area uh it's not an invasion of privacy if you are trying to defeat somebody's personal fence or you know you're on their private property taking imagery that's another problem so but this google car going down the road in the public domain was deemed uh by all intents and purposes uh safe it was it was not something that you could say was an invasion of privacy so they there's a push right now some states are different they don't agree not necessarily with other states there are regions and states that don't agree um what is considered an invasion of privacy from the air we've got to keep in mind that this is a new technology people freak out we've had satellites for years be able to look down in your backyard not only that but we've had airplanes flying over and creating 10 centimeter resolution imagery and you can see people in the backyard with that imagery and that's been they've been flying every month they'll fly over your house and people don't even realize it it's not until you get a drone that you can hear and you can see that people start getting concerned with the technology that's been around for forever right and so that's that's the issue and now the public awareness is there there's a stigma that we got to work through so in the industry we're still in the education phase of saying look we're not trying to look at you in the backyard tanning we're trying to get access to this roof so we have to be smart about it as well and this is a give and take situation people that are using drones to inspect properties also need to know some of the limitations that are there as well and it's important to say like say if you have a uh a tenant in the home and you're trying to do due diligence on a property that they might not even be aware of that's up in the air right you don't necessarily want to alert that tenant that you're inspecting the property you don't want you know three people a day going on the door asking to be led into the house to take pictures yeah so you gotta kind of be discreet right and you want to be discreet within the bounds of the law so you don't necessarily want to put a drone three feet over the roof scanning the roof and looking at every single tile that doesn't make sense but what does make sense is if you put it in the public domain you put it 50 to 100 feet above the roof you still get amazing imagery you can circulate the roof and then you can take off and go that's a better situation a solution you still get amazing accuracy in your images and you're still able to tell a lot of the story we also have to educate pilots on that as well because there's a lot of pilots out there that don't understand they still feel like they need to go knock on the door for every one of these houses and let them know that they're there and that's not the case either they can do standoff inspections so it's it's we're in an education phase we have to educate what the limitations are to the customer and we have to educate what's legal and what is acceptable in our pilot community as well so no nothing like an uphill struggle but it's it's important this is this is how we key yeah you have a picture of a kid on there you can get legally in trouble for having an image of a kid without permission right if those kind of things are crazy i've also seen and cindy asked a question we'll get to in one second cindy that when you look at google maps a lot of times license plates are you know grayed out or a whole house can be completely blurred is that going to be turned into this where if the house is on that do not show list you guys will be flagging that as well yeah you know this is something that we want to put in there too uh privacy it plays right into the public stigma we want to reduce that stigma uh you know so we understand i i respect people's privacy all day long i'm also a proponent of the fourth amendment right and we want to make sure that people are using our platform legally uh ethically so yeah of course give them the opportunity if they don't want to be there then we remove that house from our map if you will um you know in any future orders that conflict with that area will flag it and we'll say this is unable to collect there as far as facial recognition license plates and pii the private information that you can you know detect an imagery fortunately there's algorithms that can remove those automatically thank you facebook for making that open source um but yeah we can easily go and blur those out post-processing so cindy uh coleman asks you know are we limited to united states on this i'm presuming in the beginning it is but you want to go farther than that would that be correct absolutely we do we're so this is a fun time to talk about it um how we plan on how we plan on using crypto you know right now uh we're using stripe as an interface and stripe has all these different countries so as we continue to grow and we add on support like the next thing is we're going to do canada south america we'll we'll be looking at that as well so we plan on expanding but we have to test here in the us first we want global domination that's why we started the company um in order to do that there's it's there crypto is an avenue that we're looking at that pilots and people can optionally pay in crypto for their for their orders and that means that i can pay a pilot in another country that strike doesn't necessarily support where they can get that crypto payment they can take it out and they can you know that's that's how they can gain wealth from fulfilling that order um so that that's on the burner as well that's so cool so coming up to canada aaron and i already discussed it you guys are coming at christmas time we're getting part of the hockey hall of fame truck so we're all excited thank you i didn't know that and most people probably don't know that you know aaron yeah you said aaron quinn is my wife uh big hockey fans i'm a huge fan of canada i've never been able to make it i just told you that the other day when i saw you nathan in person yeah but um yeah so thank you for talking my wife and uh it's all planned it's awesome we actually have you oh go ahead sorry i was just gonna say and then we can start your your uh canadian expansion project at that time you know we already have users in canada and that's the thing is they're helping us test and uh they're reporting issues and bugs which we need right now we we have uh again we launched last month and we have just over 350 users right now helping us out um we have about 14 maybe 15 000 images uploaded already uh so yeah it's it's going pretty quick and uh the people in canada are like when we start fulfilling orders when can we use this to deliver our existing files to our existing customers and we just have to get that stripe integration there so we're looking at like maybe a month for for canada to come online so let's let's go a little different direction here right we have a bunch of people listing this who are investors and business owners next christmas i want to ask my wife for a drone how easy or is it not so easy to literally plug and play this possibility for people who may be a little handy with the stuff to move right in or is there a skill set that needs to be had um you know not so two two parts of that question not everybody has the ability to fly a drone not everybody has the ability or the eye to get imagery and that's why it's important to create a marketplace of people who have that skill that can do that for you right and it's true like you're not going to go put a great marketing video together at fpv where you're flying through the property or inside of the house uh like a professional on day one and some people will never get to that point on the on the flip side of that it's never been easier to operate a drone the gps the autopilot systems are so advanced right now you let go of the controls it holds it in place with precision and you can fly very smoothly better than you've ever been able to before so it takes less skill than ever to do just that um so that's kind of a two-sided way to answer your question i would say go get it play around with it see how difficult it is you might love it and then when you're ready to start sharing your imagery for free download paypixel and when you share that that project out you can share it on a map you can share just for fun with people on your social media page and say hey look at these pictures from our vacation and the cool part is is all those pictures are mapped and you can see on a map where they were taken and that's just a completely different way to share the imagery tha....