Homepie is transforming the real estate industry with a marketplace that allows buyers and sellers of homes the ability to confidently act as their own agent and save a ton of money in the process. Homepie's step-by-step process is revolutionizing a traditionally complex transaction and making it easy for anyone to benefit.
Brad Rice is the founder and CEO of Homepie. Brad’s background is all about real estate. He founded and led a large mortgage company in the early 2000s and built it into a 43-state operation. He has also operated a real estate brokerage, escrow firm, and real estate investment company. So, when he decided to start Homepie, he did so with a ton of domain knowledge and the conviction to take selling and saving by owner mainstream.
“Through all the darkness, good emerges. In the face of adversity, opportunities happen.” - Brad Rice
Show notes by Podcastologist: Justine Talla
Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.
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I have another very cool interview for you. There are people that I get to preview for our show. I read bios. My team does a pretty good scouring job of looking out into the world of people that we can find for the interview that we think are going to bring some great insights to the table. I am quite confident that this won't disappoint. Say hi to my guest, Mr. Brad Rice. Brad, say hi.
Thanks, Steve. That was a nice introduction. I'm excited to have a chat with you.
Our little chats as it turns out end up being some cool fodder for insights. That's what we're trying to do. We're not trying to tell people what to do or give advice. Rather, I want to ask you some questions about your journey, your life, and your work because as I've come to know you a little bit, you have done some remarkable things. As you do that, the hope is always that our readers get some insights for themselves.
I'm here for you.
Here we go. You've listened to a couple of our episodes as well. Maybe you're ready for this one. I don't necessarily mean it to be a soft pitch but here it comes. It's late in 2022. On this particular day, you woke up, and I would like to know whether you thought about it intentionally or not. What were you grateful for?
This is significant because for the second time, I am listening to the book, The Gap and The Gain, by Dan Sullivan. Is that something you've heard before?
I've not read it but I know of it.
It's a pretty interesting book. What it does is it tells you about measuring your life against where you've come from as opposed to ideals that are unreachable and not giving yourself the opportunity to congratulate yourself for how far you've come. I am one of those guys like a lot of high achievers. We set lofty goals and along the way, we don't celebrate the wins.
One of the things in the section I was listening to was about your kids and what you're measuring them against. Is it against your goals and ideals for them? Is it against where they are, where they have come from, and where they are now? As I was driving, I was thinking about how grateful I am to have a wonderful family and good kids. They're contributors to society. They have got good heads on their shoulders. They're good people. There's certainly a great amount of gratefulness for my family.
That's wonderful. These are the insights. Even with that question, I start to think, "I love this question. What are we measuring them against?" I even thought, "Why are we doing that?" I don't know what Dan Sullivan said about it if our measurement is unhelpful to them or us. As you've thought about this, what is the helpful measurement? Is it to their abilities to where they came from? What's helpful to them?
It's a matter of stepping back and helping them to understand what they want to achieve and where they want to go instead of looking through the lenses of our life experiences. We have lived a lot longer than our kids have. We've got experience. We want them to learn from that and piggyback off of it so they don't have to bump into the same doors but that's not necessarily reasonable if we think back to our youth and possibly our folks trying to do the same thing to us. We didn't want to listen. They weren't right. It becomes a point of frustration as opposed to a point of encouragement and guidance.
Helping is really a matter of stepping back and helping them to understand what they want to achieve and where they want to go instead of looking through the lenses of our life experiences.
It's something that we need reminding of. We do fall back into habits. I do get frustrated at times with my kids. It talks about this in the book, which is interesting. It's not a unique feeling but I get frustrated. I wish they did something more. I wish they paid more attention to their finances and don't overextend themselves in their bank accounts or whatever it is instead of recognizing how much better they have done in different things. It's a matter of not trying to impose our feelings on them and listening to them to help them and guide them to achieve their goals.
I don't know if that is the gap he is talking about but you pointed out a gap. Maybe you can elaborate on it. How many times have you heard something about how most of our successes in life come through some adversity? Most of all the good things in life came because of some struggle. How many books are there on failing? Didn't John Maxwell write a book called Failing Forward?
Here's a gap that you pointed out. I would love to hear your thoughts about this. We don't want our kids to fail, hit their things, or bang their heads, yet we sit around and read books about all of those things that make us. We're trying to have them evade some of the very things in their life that are going to be their instructors for success. Isn't that funny? I do it too. I don't want them to suffer in any way, yet suffering is what made me.
That's a very good point. Out of nurturing and wanting to protect our kids and streamline things for them, we could cause them to avoid these things that will help them to grow. The good news is that they don't listen to us anyway.
We didn't listen to ours. That's a generational gap right there.
It will perpetuate. The same thing will happen with their kids as well.
That's so good. In this show, we could end it, and people will be like, "Is Brad a counselor? What are we doing?" We're doing parenting stuff. That's awesome. Jason also interviews people. He and I are partners in our business. He will read off some of the things. I've certainly read up on you. I could read off some of the stuff about what you're doing, where you've been, some of your background in real estate, and certainly where you want to get to in Homepie. I always find it more interesting when you give the synopsis. I'm not going to time you or anything like that but in a fairly short period of time, take us from soup to nuts on the life and times of Brad Rice. Why are you on the show? What have you done career-wise? Catch us up if you don't mind.
I would be happy to. It's a story I like to tell. I as a young person was always an entrepreneur. I've only held a couple of jobs where I worked for somebody else. They were very short stints time, for example, a couple of weeks delivering pizzas for Dominoes in high school. Few people know this. I sold newspapers telemarketing over the phone for the Los Angeles Daily News while I was finishing college.
What I realized through that experience and my various entrepreneurial ventures as a young man was that I was always good at influencing people. I was good at "selling" and building relationships. At a very young age, as I was emerging from my first year of college and doing general education, I went to a real estate event at a local community college. I didn't know what to expect when I went to it but I went there primarily because I recognized who was speaking there.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of the speakers. There were a couple of others in real estate and another guy who was a young entrepreneur who had been given keys to the city. It was interesting for me but what I learned from that event was it didn't matter where people earned their money. They always wound up investing in real estate.
The event that I went to was a pivotal point of time in my life where I said to myself, "I don't know what I want to do but this real estate thing seems interesting. Why don't I cut out the middleman? I'm going to get in real estate." I declared my major in my college. It enabled me to qualify to get my real estate broker's license in California without having to do additional classes.
I graduated college and got my license. At the same time, I was getting married and buying my first house with my wife. We were sitting with the loan officer taking care of the loan application and so forth. I was intrigued by that. I was good at math. I thought, "I could do this." She said, "You could come to visit me for a day. I'll show you what we do." That got me hooked.
I've been in the mortgage business since the early '90s. I was a top originator within the first two years that I started in the business by listening to a mentor who would say, "Do this and that." I did it blindly. That led me to be a partner in the company I was working for where I opened up a separate branch and then ultimately started a company in the late '90s called Mortgage Corporation of America that I grew over the course of eight years into a 43-state operation. It's very sophisticated.
I was doing wholesale retail mortgages and selling products directly to Wall Street. I wrote our product. Things were great. I was in the process of a potential acquisition. I had two companies vying for us when the onset of the recession started. It was a short period of time before the wheels fell off the bus. There was nothing I could do about it. Two of our big investors that we were selling products to were Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. If you remember, they were on the front end of it.
That was a big life reset for me. I spent a couple of years in forced retirement. I was cleaning up the corporate mess and selling corporate property and all sorts of things but ultimately, I realized this was what I wanted to do. I looked at other things and thought about buying a franchise and doing other things. I got back into the mortgage business.
I wound up hiring back some key personnel that helped me grow the mortgage company that I had. A number of these folks have been with me now for more than twenty years, which is wonderful. We know how we think and how we act. It makes life very easy in the office. I got back into the mortgage business. I've kept things small and tidy and boutiquey for the last decade.
You mentioned Homepie. A couple of years ago, my focus changed. My kids started to move out of the house. They're a bit older now. I thought, "I've got one more big one in me. What do I want to do?" I thought more broadly about my career, where I've been, and what I learned. One other thing that interests me is over the decades I've been in the mortgage business, I had seen and participated in probably a thousand transactions that didn't have a real estate agent in them.
This is a buyer of the landlord's policy, people that knew each other, or family members. They didn't need an agent. They needed somebody to walk them through the process. As loan originators, we know the process and the ingredients that we can plug in. That intrigued me. I went online, looked around, and thought, "There's no guidance for people that want to sell by owners. There are very few resources out there that you can google and that sort of thing."
I thought, "This is an opportunity." I had known how to build tech. I'm not a tech type of founder but I built the technology that we ran my mortgage company on. I set out to solve this problem using technology to enable buyers and sellers of real estate to act as their agents and be able to facilitate the real estate transaction without the heavy expense of large commissions.
Learning Process: There's no guidance for people that want to sell by owner. There are very few resources out there. And this became an opportunity to digitalize the process.
We have learned a lot since we launched. That is where my career took me. I turned over the day-to-day reigns of my mortgage company to my longtime confidant and now partner who is wonderful. Her name is Jamie Cavanaugh. I play an advisor now in the mortgage company. My full efforts are toward building this real estate marketplace called Homepie.
What's the name of the company that Jamie and you have? Is it still Mortgage Corp of America?
It isn't. That company was shut down in 2007. It's called Amerifund Home Loans.
What a cool story. I want to go back quickly. It might be painful for you. I'm not intentionally trying to induce pain here. You went through the two-year forced retirement. The way that you shared that, we have the luxury of looking back now if you can believe it. That was years ago. Every time I say that, I want to pause and go, "We're getting older." It was for a lot of people a very difficult time. When you talk about Lehman and Bear doing what they did, you couldn't do anything about it. You had to have gone through a fairly dark time. Let me ask. Was there some darkness in there?
It was extremely difficult. I felt like I had the world on my shoulders. It was a situation where financially, I was almost wiped out. I was fortunate to have not signed personal guarantees on everything but I did have some debt I needed to take care of that I personally guaranteed. Not due to anything that we had done but I had to participate with the FBI in their investigations for loan fraud. It was a broad investigation, not on us in particular but on file sharing and things of that nature.
I didn't have staff to help with shutting down the company and getting rid of and shredding documents. This is back before everything was electronic. There was actual physical shredding of documents and things of that nature. My mom had been diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer at the time. She's still living, knock on wood. She got through it but it was a crazy time.
This was a time when I saw a lot of my colleagues' marriages fall apart. They were divorced and complete wrecks. I was fortunate enough to have a wonderful wife. This helped us to grow closer. We have now been married for years. It was an eye-opener for me that I had the right partner in life. Through all the darkness, good emerges. You say in the face of adversity, "Opportunities happen."
In the face of adversity, opportunities happen.
When we look back on things that happened to us years ago, and we have the ability to have that perspective, I would have done things differently for sure. Number one is I wouldn't have shut the company down. I would have negotiated like heck to keep that company open and everything that we accomplished, all the licensing, and the things that we have done to get to that point, and told my creditors to hang out, "Things will come back. We will take care of it." I didn't have that perspective at 39 years old that I do now. There are many things that you reflect on that you might have done differently but it did create where I am. I'm happy with where I am.
That's back to what we talked about earlier. You can say you would have done that differently. There are probably some time travel movies about that. Let's pretend you could have gone back. Who's to say that what you went through wasn't required even some of the decisions that you would have done differently? Would you be where you are now? I want to focus on all the good you're doing. I only paused there because you and I both know there are people going through some semblance of that.
I sometimes wonder. Is it possible for us to bring the past and go, "How do we live differently in the present as a result of what we learned?" You went through it pretty quickly because I asked you to but you said, "I got back in," and then you talked about the people that had been with you. I was like, "You got back in." There was a whole piece there where you didn't in at least two years that I know of. That sounded pretty dark, yet you did get back in.
It was a tough two years. It was working from home but there were some good things that came out of it. It's hard for me to dive into the darkness and say how difficult it was because it's not the way my mind operates. If something negative happens, I immediately flipped, "What's the next step? Where do I go from here? How do I resolve the next problem?"
That's the way I'm wired or rewired as it were. There were some good things that happened. I was on retirement when my kids were at a formal young age. I was able to take them to school every day and show up at all their events. I was Mr. Dad. That was good. That was fulfilling for me. In every life event, whether it's positive or negative, you can pull positive out of it. That's what I choose to do.
In every life event, you can pull something positive out of it.
It sounds like not only you did choose to do it. You're choosing to do it currently. I want to point out that might be a uniqueness to you. I can continue to learn from that because when we're in the midst of it, I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be good to have that recollection and history to know that whatever it is we're going through, it's going to be okay. That gets awfully philosophical. Maybe we don't need to go there. There are some people that believe it's not going to be okay. That reminds me of Henry Ford, whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right.
Are there people going, "This won't be okay." What can we learn? I love that. I wanted to focus a little bit on what you're excited about and where you're going. I want to ask you some more questions about Homepie and what you're doing there. You also made another comment where you said, "My focus changed." It was from restarting your company with Jamie probably but then your focus changed. As a guy that owns a company called Rewire, I'm particularly interested in, "My focus changed." What was that about?
This is in 2018, which was not particularly a robust year for mortgages. It wasn't terrible but things were slow. My kids were leaving the house and began to become empty nesters. My wife certainly doesn't want me at home bothering her all the time. I'm going to continue to work but I also get a lot of life fulfillment out of work. I started to think about what else I could do with myself. When I say my focus changed, it was a big deal for me to step away from the day-to-day decisions I made for the mortgage company and turn that over to somebody else.
Fortunately, I am one that did have somebody by my side. She knows how I think. I know how she thinks. We're each other's yin and yang. This reminds me of another book that I read about the visionary and the implementer or something of that nature. I'm a visionary. She implements. We have that relationship. I was given the opportunity to make the decision that she could take over the day-to-day and I could focus on something much bigger in a disruptive idea, whereas mortgage is a necessary thing.
Learning Process: Find the opportunity to have someone you trust take over the day-to-day so you can focus on something that is a much bigger and more disruptive idea.
We do a good job of it. We have 25,000 clients we have helped over the course of three decades. I enjoy seeing the growth in that company that she is pushing forward on but there was something inside of me that said, "I want to do something grander. I want to do something that's going to benefit a larger number of people in a way that they have never benefited before." That's what I mean by changing my focus.
That's so great. Is this a few years now with Homepie that's in the making?
The idea was formulated in 2018. I did not share it with anybody until 2019. I sat with a few key people, some friends, Jamie, and a couple of other people in the office. I shared with them what my idea was. I'm going to reiterate that we have learned a lot since then. I can tell you what we have learned and where perhaps the thinking is slightly different.
At the time, it was developing this peer-to-peer marketplace. Imagine an Autotrader where you would sell your used car there to somebody else looking to buy a used car. Buying and selling a home is far more complicated. It's a free open marketplace where you could create your listing as a seller. Buyers could find your listings using technology to make the process very easy in a step-by-step wizard format.
Probably the best description I could say to help the average person understand it is what TurboTax does for complicated tax returns. Anybody can do these bite-sized answers to questions through TurboTax and produce a professional tax return. That's what I wanted to do for the real estate process because I know all the pain points. We hear it from customers. We know their frustrations, not knowing the roadmap, what's next, and last-minute surprises and not having that roadmap.
It's largely dependent on who they chose as a real estate agent but even deeper than that, who their real estate agent has on their team walking that customer through the process. It's inconsistent. It depends on that relationship or the experience, whether it's good or bad. I thought, "We could make it consistent by digitizing it." What we set out to do is be a tech company that enables a real estate transaction and in doing so, allows peer-to-peer transactions to take place on the platform.
Learning Process: The pain points and frustrations of customers come from not knowing the roadmap, last-minute surprises, and it being largely dependent on who they choose as a real estate agent.
I'm trying to pick a point in time. It's the end of 2025. When you look back specifically at this element of your business, what do you hope you see?
I hope that we get recognized more broadly and get known by the general public as that website or that forum. If you want to sell your home, that's where you would go and spin up a listing very easily. We're emerging from our beta phase. I'll give you a timeline here. During this beta phase of the company where we have closed a couple of hundred transactions, we have noticed network effects.
When we have a listing in a neighborhood, and that owner puts us our sign up, we tend to get 3 or 4 more listings in that same neighborhood because they love to talk about it, "Check out the savings. What is this Homepie thing?" We do believe that at scale, we will have great network effects on this. We want to be different than everybody else. We're not the first ones to come up with this idea. We certainly are unique in our approach but this is an idea that has been around for a long time. Approximately 10% of all sales for decades have been agentless. That's directly out of the National Association of Realtors report that they do annually.
They're friends and family. That makes sense. I wouldn't have known it was that high but that's cool.
That's a large beachhead market. I'm giving you some perspective there. In 2021, Compass Real Estate became the number one brokerage by volume. They controlled 5.6% of the market. That gives you an idea of how large this is. That's where I would hope to be in that period of time, being a very easy-to-use platform and enabling the transaction. In 2018, this was an idea in my head. In 2019, I shared it with some teammates. We began to put together the technology and launched what we call an MVP, which is a Minimum Viable Product.
A lot of the things that we have in there didn't have that. It was the base product, ability to list, and ability to negotiate the contract, automatically populate a purchase contract, and eSign it. That was part of our MVP. We released that at the beginning of 2020. You can probably guess where I'm headed with this. After the release, we got immediate traction out of the gate. We had 107 listings in the first 30 days. It was extraordinary but then COVID hit. Our plan was to raise money and go to market money.
Instead of that because of the turbulence and because nobody was putting money into companies at the time, I decided to do a lot of bootstrapping, meaning I put my money into the company. We hunkered down into beta mode. We have been testing the product in small groups. We're in California only. We're getting a tight feedback loop from our customers. Going on to what we learned through the process, the number one thing we learned is we needed to be a real estate company to be able to syndicate out listings and have them show up on Zillow, Redfin, Realtor, and all those.
Although we are a tech company, we do have a real estate license that enables that. You can be on the MLS and show up everywhere. Beyond that, we learned that 70% of our buyers are coming in represented by real estate agents. That was another eye-opener, "Here's a peer-to-peer platform we built but they still have agents that are running them through the system."
It was clunky for them because we had set it up peer-to-peer. We had to redesign the product to accommodate them. We invite the agent into the process to lead their client through it. They invite their clients to attach to their persona on the platform. It's nicely done but the feedback loop I referred to or the learning of the value that these buyers had placed in their agents was an eye-opener for us.
You know, especially through COVID, more people are working remotely. More people are moving to different states where they have never lived before for a lower cost of living and things of that nature. When you move to an area that you didn't grow up in, you don't know, and you barely visited, it is tough to google and try and figure out the right neighborhood for you. You can go and search for homes but how do you know the neighborhood?
You can see walking scores and schools in the neighborhood but that's not knowing it. That local neighborhood domain knowledge is extremely valuable. We have shown we can replace the listing agent via a seller selling their property. We recognize that the agent on the buyer's side is far more valuable. We have done some things in the platform that we didn't start with that have accommodated agents to help buyers buy properties directly from sellers.
What we have done is opened up this inventory that didn't exist before. Before Homepie, if you found a For Sale By Owner online, they simply didn't want to talk to an agent. They despise the agents. They don't want anything to do with them. They wouldn't pay them a commission. We have turned on this inventory and enabled the agents to monetize on that and earn their commission. We have done a great thing for real estate agents as well along the way. We're satisfying a need that's out there in For Sale By Owner and at the same time making it easy for agents to interact with these FSBO sellers For Sale By Owner.
That is so cool. I'm sensitive to our time. I'm bummed because I have 50 questions for you about all of this stuff. Thank you for all of that. I have to start wrapping it up. Brad, this is amazing stuff, even from what you did for us. I don't know if this was the insight you intended because it was a passing thing. I'm fascinated by the feedback loop. You certainly sound like, "This guy knows what he's doing." You've done the research. You're a thoughtful guy. You're a good business guy but you're intentionally listening.
I sit there even in my business and go, "How much more can I listen?" How many people fall in love with their marketing ideas and are doing them because they think it's great but they're not listening? It sounds to me like your feedback loop and what you're learning from people, not even listening for the sake of listening, regeared you in some ways. The thing that you said at the end there about buyers' agents is cool. You wouldn't have known that if you weren't listening.
That is true.
This is great stuff. I've got insights coming out of the wazoo. I have to sign off. Was there something that you hoped I asked you that I didn't ask you?
Unfortunately, I could continue to talk. I get so passionate about this. There's a lot to it but if this is something that intrigues your readers, and they want to learn more about what we're doing, they can certainly go to Homepie.com and take a look at it. I am reachable through the chat. My team can get somebody to reach out to me directly. I don't hide my email as well. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm Brad.Rice@Homepie.com.
This is something I like educating people about. I do think that real estate is changing rapidly. There are a lot of terrific and disruptive concepts that are out there. We're just one of them. There's room for all. This is not a one-size-fits-all. This isn't for everybody but I do think that a large segment of buyers and sellers but sellers specifically need more equity out of their home when they sell it so that they can move into the next home or get into retirement to pay kids' college or whatever it is. We're helping facilitate that.
I didn't get to ask this question when I asked you that. We have to go. Maybe you and I can talk about it offline, which will bum out our readers because maybe they want to hear about it. I would be curious to hear you talk about what you've already possibly heard listing agents say about your disruptive concept not because I want to be negative but because I could learn from what we hear, "That won't work. Here's why." To me, there are so many great learnings in what we hear from other people but that's for another show.
I promise to have you back on the show so that we can keep going on this. I've got questions about Amerifund and your relationship with Jamie. There were insights for me. Some of this seems possible for you because you've done a good job of picking people like your wife, for the love of God, even people like Jamie, and all these people that have been with you.
There was a back insight about that where I was like, "Had you not picked the right people to be around you, could you have pulled off what you have pulled off?" Thank you very much for being part of the show. I'm so grateful to you. I appreciate you saying it out loud. We love it if people want to reach out to you and hear more. I for one am grateful for your time. I want to thank you for taking the time to be with us.
I'm grateful for you as well, Steve. Thank you.
You're welcome. Brad gave me more than I can even share here at the end of wonderful insights and passion. He didn't even mention that but did you hear the energy? That's so great. There are so many insights but it doesn't matter what his are. It doesn't matter what mine are what matters, reader, is what was yours. We will see you next time.