The $50,000 Question: How Bōde is Fixing Home Selling

Paul Davenport: Hello and welcome to what the Tech from Boast, where we talk with some of the brilliant minds behind new and exciting tech initiatives to learn what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and eventually change the world. I'm Paul Davenport Boast, resident tech journalist and today I'm thrilled to welcome to the show Robert Price, founder and CEO of Bode Canada. At Bode, Robert and his team are passionate about supporting home affordability through their fully online platform driven service that transcends the transactional. To date, Bode has sold over 3,000 properties and counting, representing 2.25 billion in profits. Property across Alberta, B.C. and Ontario to homeowners, investors, builders and executors. As impressive as that track record is on its own, Robert has played a hand across the Canadian tech and entrepreneur ecosystem, serving as a director for Invest Alberta and even being named Canada's top 40 under 40. It's an amazing journey so far and I can't wait to pick Robert's brain on where he's been and what's next. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Robert. All right, Robert, I just gave an intro, tried to butter you up a little bit, but I'd love to hear in your words, tell me about yourself, how you got into the ecosystem and. Yeah, what gets you up in the morning and makes me want to be in the startup space.

Robert Price: Yeah, thank you. No, it's great to have the conversation. Uh, my background is actually previous company was fiber optics, so a uh, company called Axia. We built a multi billion dollar company by providing high performing network services to the cloud and to a variety of other customers or a variety of customers going back to the early 2000s, uh, back before it was obvious that the cloud was going to be the cloud. Um, so bringing that experience. This company actually reason I bring it up is a lot of that team ended up with me in this new venture after we sold it in 2018. But uh, where this idea came from was a combination of conversations with our founders. But really it's very painful to sell your home and it's also very expensive. It's fragmented and painful. And when I went through my own experience In Calgary in 2017, I was finding, I was doing the market research, I was figuring out, you know, pricing, positioning. I actually found the house that I wanted to buy. I uh, was selling my own house and buying at the same time and ended up writing a $50,000 check at the end and said this is out of control for what I actually just did maybe $500 but $50,000. Um, so fast forward a year, we sell our company. And I had about 20 ideas. This one just came right to the top because it's such a big factor for home affordability. For, um, a. If you take Canada and also the United States, 70% of our net worth as Canadians is tied up in our home. So to give away 30, 40, $50,000 of cash when we transact in a market that is fundamentally now digital and has been for some time for over 10 years, all the shopping is online, all the information's available online. Why do we need two brokers in order to transact a property? So that's where the company started, uh, with that purpose. And as you mentioned, 3,000 transactions later through a combination of consumers and large enterprise customers, uh, we're now venture funded. We're across most of Canada, have our sights set on the United States. Uh, so it's been an interesting ride because we started right at the beginning of COVID and went through that whole swing. And in real estate markets, the last five years have been tied for the most volatile in the last 50 at particular point. So it's been. I looked a lot younger than this five years ago.

Paul Davenport: No, that's incredible. Um, I can attest again, I'm the American on the Bose team. Uh, so I live in Boston. It's been a terrible housing market as long as I've been alive, more or less. But, um, affordability and especially the volatility during the pandemic is something that, yeah, I saw firsthand. I still rent. Um, I would love to get into the homeownership game, obviously get some equity in a property and have that be mine, but it's taking some time. Affordability is a huge issue just across the board. But I think the other point too that you even, uh, outlined was just the inefficiencies in the processes too. Like, it's already a painful process. Take the just like larger macroeconomics and microeconomics out of the equation. The broker to broker of it all. It's just like there's redundancies, there are just inefficiencies across the board. So let's make what is already a frightening process to some people a little less painful, I think. And I love that you're able to do that too in almost like a B2B2C way. So like, yeah, getting the minutiae out of the way for some of those broker interactions, but ultimately making it so that a human who wants to buy property is able to do it without going gray like I have.

Robert Price: So, yeah, exactly. Well, and you have the. To me, you elevate the experience by having it in one. One platform where everything is managed, everything is real. You have the convenience of. You think of most people, their recollection because they sold seven years ago. So they're trying to remember what that was. If you sell with an agent, they don't actually, they don't show your property.

Paul Davenport: Yeah.

Robert Price: So you're you. That's. There's no difference there. The way that the market actually functions is buyer searches for property online, buyer contacts whoever's the seller. In our model, it's the seller itself versus themselves versus a realtor. Interaction happens. Buyer very discriminating based on looking at the property. They do their walk through. It either fits or it doesn't. And then a deal happens or it doesn't. But it isn't a sales job, so to speak. Right. The selling broker isn't selling the property. They're posting it online where all these listings are, which is what we do as well. Um, and then now you, ah, have the person that cares about that last $50,000 of equity fully connected to buyers. They know their home better than anybody because they live there. They know why they bought it. They have the emotion and the passion that goes with that. So it's really not as scary as it sounds. It's actually simpler than it's made to sound. Um, because the market is now online and it's not. You don't need to be a professional salesperson. You're not selling the property, you're picking the price and then you're agreeing on offers and that's it.

Paul Davenport: That's. I'm thinking back to shout out to my landlord, Brian, who was below me in Boston, um, when I went to look at this place, I love my apartment again, love it. I had a broker who literally was just following me and Brian around on the show. And Brian's like, oh, I updated that. I put this new molding up there. I redid the whole kitchen. I was like, wow, you love it. Me and him are shooting the shit. Pardon my French. But it, uh, that guy was just standing there and then I had to pay him for showing me the place. When he didn't show me the place, I had a very passionate person who was. He had invested in the property, he made the deal, we clicked. And it was also that, I think personality fit too. It's different when it's a renting scenario, obviously, but I mean, I think taking that middleman out of the situation to the effect that they're a Middleman. This isn't to say that every real estate broker is cut from the same cloth. But that was my personal experience and that makes me again not want to go look for new apartments even if I'm happy where I'm at. But it's a disincentive and we, and

Robert Price: we hear that story often, um, or that a similar story often. Uh, and we didn't start the company on the basis of thinking real estate agents are bad. We just looked at a system that is. Doesn't have competition. Everybody charges the same amount of money. Right. It's the same. It's the same in Alberta wide like by province as it is Ontario, as it is BC within those provinces, similar states in the United States they have the same regulatory environment the way it's all set up at a national level and a state level. So um, I just looked at it and said there is a complete lack of modernization of the experience here. And for a segment of the market that would really want this kind of experience, they're also going to make 15 to $20,000 more at a time when we have huge affordability pressures, unaffordability pressures and inflation in the rest of our lives. So that really is the passion behind where the company started. M. Where we're going gets a lot, I would say a lot more interesting because AI or just talking about the knowledge and the availability of data and decision making is more powerful already today um, than a human can be. As you're aggregating, you mentioned macro micro data, right? You have property level data, you have all the inside of the home and upgrades and you combine all these facets of location and attributes within that location and property classes and all of that can be understood instantly by AI in a. Uh. More. You're basically combining a PhD in economics with an expert in construction with a realtor that has local feel, with a uh, sage, just a wise person that is objective and thinking about your interests.

Paul Davenport: Mhm.

Robert Price: You're combining like five capabilities and an instant 24, seven access to information. So for us AI is a huge transformation in this industry. For a real estate agent to use it. It's a small incremental gain because they are the ip, right? They are the intelligence. So we are where we see this world going. It is platform plus AI to fully automate your experience and give you the absolute best intelligence you can't get from a human is where the world is in the next five years.

Paul Davenport: I love how you phrase that especially as like that agent is the ip. It's. I don't kill me listeners. I gotta draw the simpatico and the ethos that is shared with both because that's very similar to how our platform operates. We aren't taking that expertise out of the equation, but we're using AI to make our experts better at what they do. So it's not sending your shred claim over to an AI platform that's just going to pull it all together for you. Because if it does that, there are products on the market that do that. It's checking boxes. It doesn't actually speak the technical language, it doesn't actually understand. Again, it's almost like that local feel to every single R and D project is unique and you need to be able to speak that technical vernacular. That's not something someone in finance can do and at the same time someone in tech can't speak the finance language. So giving that expert on our Bose team the superpowers to be able to be very efficient and again to streamline the process and actually drive better claims, similar to again, how it's just probably a better fit in the actual property for the buyer too, at the end of the day.

Robert Price: Well, and that's. And so with this power, and this is part of the original vision as well, of course we've proven the transaction works very well done. 3,000 of them, um, homeowners and enterprise customers are making more money, love the experience, more efficient. It's just a elevation in that respect. So we, so check there. We've proven that where we want to take this and where we think an even bigger opportunity is to build on that is the life cycle ownership value of your home. So now you own the property, what are all the ways that you can optimize your biggest asset in a way that is predictive decision grade, level, quality and ready for you to take action? For example, 50, um, percent of people renovate their home, how do they make the decision on kitchen upgrade versus finish, the basement versus new garage door versus Right. How do they make that call? Well, the vast majority of people, it's feel it's what they want to do, but it's not contemplating. Well, if this home, in this community, this property type, has this and this price band, has an upgraded kitchen, you can double your money that investment versus this garage door is like a 30% return. Right. So you still might do the garage door if that's what you want to do. But the intelligence now exists in this, what we call our intelligence layer, to make really smart decisions about what makes the most sense for your asset. And at the same time, what you want to do personally. Obviously there's about 10 big categories of that. There's what is my short term rental value at, uh, what seasonality, long term rental, If I decide to rent my basement, what does that look like? What does my overall picture look like? Can I pull out some equity? My property's appreciated. How much equity? If I need to refinance and move money around for this renovation or other investments, what are my options? How do I best do that? So we see when you combine all of that intelligence to your specific home, uh, your typical Canadian Property can make 50 to 60 thousand dollars more, or call it financial benefit through cost savings, through income generation, and through value maximization just by having our free service that's live in beta. But over the next five years, this will all become, I believe, a huge change to the homeownership journey.

Paul Davenport: Yeah, and it's a one stop shop for so many different stakeholders too. I think that's what's really interesting here. There isn't just one Persona who can get value from this platform. It is, I mean, like that whole home buyer scenario that you outlined there, where it's like, pick the most valuable renovation. Like, sure, if you're going to stay in your house forever and you want the kitchen of your dreams, go make the kitchen of your dreams. If you want to turn a guest room into a luxury suite for a big bath or something like that, go for it. But if you're being strategic about your investment and what you want to get out of the property when you offload it, it's great for that individual, it's great for the buyer, it's great for. It just brings it all into one stop shop. I know that's, uh, again, I'm using an abusing jargon here, but it's true. Um, going back a little bit too, you had mentioned your founding team and, um, obviously again, you had said that you started at the beginning of the pandemic. I applaud you for taking on that risk. Uh, at the same time too, I was talking to Omar and even Sebastian beforehand, um, just about how the pandemic changed where people want to be. I'm fully remote right now. I live in Boston. It's not cost effective. I don't know why I didn't move to Calgary, because apparently there was great real estate up here. All of my coworkers have been telling me. Um, but you also had a similar team at a previous job and you brought them with you here. That's another thing that has actually turned up to be a theme of these podcasts that I'm recording here in Calgary. It's people who have met the people they want to be their family. Now, of course, no job is legitimately a family. We all have real lives. Uh, but you are going to be in the trenches with these people and you want to make sure that you're comfortable being in the trenches with these people. And tell me a little bit about just like why these personalities, we're the ones that were going to come with you for this new journey and what you should be looking for when you're building that early team.

Robert Price: Yep. Well, it's interesting you say family because in this case, some of them actually are family. I love it. Others are very much like family. So, uh, we started to me, you want to build a team first with skills. It's not who your close friends are. It's not who your best, closest family members are. It's what. What is this particular vision of this business? Ah. Who can. What skill set do I need with boxes?

Paul Davenport: Mhm.

Robert Price: So to speak of. Of skill set. Then you say with that in mind, who are people I want to go to war with and also have those skills. So that's what we did with this business. So, uh, my sister actually from Axio, at previous exit joined as the chief marketing officer, the broker that helped me buy and sell the property. In my example, he joined. Love it. So a close friend of mine, to his total credit, he agreed with me in that $50,000 at the time. Right. He's like, yeah, it's crazy. It's gotten out of control. Uh, and then the other founder was actually my university roommate, Brilliant career in consulting and worked at King for Candy Crush and has called the quantitative and strategic and growth skills to complement the team. So that's the way we looked at it. I was also a bit unique in that my previous company, not mine, one that I was part of, small shareholder in, had um, a really good board. So I was as a senior executive in that business, I was exposed to that board pretty regularly and saw how powerful it was to have that high quality of team at that level. So I was a bit unique in that. And we as a team were unique in that. I started with a board like day one. We had three directors, myself included, and then we now have four. Um, but really wanted the gray hair in the room that now joins my gray hair. But having the, uh, right there with you, Robert Silver. Silver Foxes. Um, to have that guidance right from day one on how to think through all of these challenges, the challenge we took on is massive. It's one of the biggest challenges left in tech. Right. Real estate industry is one of the biggest in the world. And this challenge has been around for decades. So I knew I uh, wanted as many smart people surrounding this and part of this and passionate about it from day one rather than kind of leaning on part time advisors and other folks. Formalize it and then when we're set up to scale, then we've got the team as opposed to we start with a very small or non advisory group and then we kind of add it on as we're scaling and build that way. So to each their own. I liked that style for this situation, for the team and the quality of directors and management we had. But that was the way I looked at it.

Paul Davenport: Yeah. And I think to your point about formalizing it early on too, they have a vested interest, they have skin in the game from the get go. Which again, like Boast has been around for a long time. But I don't think that's dissimilar from how we really built our company. Um, Shout out to Lloyd, who I'm going to be seeing in Austin next week. But uh, him and Alex and the original founding crew, they built an awesome company. It's a different team today. But to your point about the board too, we've had a board as long as I've worked at Boast and they've been a very active and engaged board, which is not something I was familiar with. Um, I've been in the startup space, more or less. Journalism background, I was in marketing, so less like in house. But our board, they get their hands dirty. Garrett, he's been my marketing go to um, Shout Out. Hopefully he's listening and hopefully I'm not speaking out of class talking about the structure of the organization. So might have to cut some of this. But um, I love when to your point, I think they feel like they have a vested interest too because I can reach out to them. I'm not um, in our SLT on a formal basis, but I can reach out to the board. I can reach out to Lloyd, our CEO. Ahmad, even today, like it's purely a horizontal organization, but we all feel ownership of what we do and I think that's something that's really critical. Maybe the unspoken thing here too.

Robert Price: Yeah. If you don't. And said another way, if you're the CEO and you don't have a board, when you start, you're a king. Right. You have no, you have the biggest Shareholding. And you're. You have nobody to answer to that M. You're building a kingdom, so to speak. In the early days, like I say, teach their own. I just looked at that as I liked also being accountable myself to the board. Now everybody is accountable.

Paul Davenport: Mhm.

Robert Price: Board's accountable to shareholders. I'm accountable to the board and shareholders. Management's accountable. Myself and the board, um, through. And very, very much engaged in all those conversations as well. I wanted to have that collaboration happen as often as possible. Um, so I just thought from a team culture perspective, I liked creating the accountability across the board. That creates equality, so to speak, and a different team environment.

Paul Davenport: I love that. And again, it makes you better. Uh, if you're working in a vacuum, if you have your king hat on and you're plebes, don't come to me. Come on. That's not going to actually advance the product. That's not how you innovate. Yeah, I'm trying to stop myself from tying it back to RD tax credit just because I'm even thinking about that claim process. It's not the same as a board scenario, but the government has to vet what you're doing and then they'll say this is tackling technological uncertainty. For instance, I think having that similar gut check at every stop, no matter how high you are up in the company, it's good. And it's also a cycle too because the board also gets the feedback from you. Again. Hopefully I'm not stepping in it by referencing our board so much, but I think uh, that's a good point to make. And it's also just a different structure than a lot of what uh, the conversations have been recently. Um, so I'm glad that we could cover that now. I'd love to know. We did talk about kind of what's on the roadmap, but over the next year, two years even, what's going to be next for both?

Robert Price: Yeah, I think our belief is if you kind of take a step back or look back the last 10 to 15 years in prop tech, so property technology, um, about $15 billion has been burnt on these various models of trying to create competition or adjust or um, disrupt this space. And a lot of that's gone into the ibuyer model. You'd probably be familiar with Open door in the us so they will buy your house and you will pay them 5% commission, but you get to walk away with a check. So ultimate convenience. But you're ultimately getting. It's an expensive transaction and it's going to be typically below market because they need some cushion so that when they resell that property, um, they can make some money at it. I always thought that was an extremely risky balance sheet, heavy approach to solving this problem. Uh, when we started the company, Opendoor was doing its thing. Zillow then got into it. There's others in it. Um, so. And they've all since pivoted or exited comprehensively that way. So a lot of money has been spent and burned there. In my mind. If you have an algorithm that can predict the real estate market, then you should sell that. Don't buy the house, sell that algorithm. Of course, nobody has that. AI might be stepping in and facilitating that, but that model's been kind of disproven. Um, the hybrid model is the other one Red Redfin or Purple Brick. Some of these, you get a real estate agent in a call center. Kind of half tech, half human experience. Those companies have consultative unit economics. They're not able to make Even Redfin with 1% of the United States market adoption, which is impressive, still can't turn a profit because they can't scale the human. So you go back in time, of course, that company's since been acquired and they're amalgamated vertically integrated. So there's, it's just clear to me the next five years are platform, next five to 10 years and beyond is platform plus AI in this space, just AI. Like if you just have generative AI, for example, you have one of the big LLMs you can have at the property market level. It's decent at understanding the market, but it doesn't understand your specific property because and doesn't have that data. So because we are technically licensed, we have all the property information about that unit, about comparable listings, active listings, sold listings, all the best information. And we've created this proprietary AI with all of that in mind. So leveraging the best LLMs blended with our platform, blended with the best data to produce your specific property insights. And that is this homeowner dashboard that we have live in beta today. Uh, but that is the thrust of our strategy going forward. For as you mentioned earlier, anybody, whether you're a new home buyer, you're a builder that is trying to maximize the value of this new build. You're a property investor, you don't live in the property, but you're making all these decisions around how do I time the sale at the right time, or charge for rent, or make upgrades that make sense to the value of the property, or refinance or change my utility provider, all of Those dimensions are then taken care of and then now you're ready to sell. Typically that's every seven years for North Americans.

Paul Davenport: Mhm.

Robert Price: Now you've got all that information, all that understanding, all that regular um, value with the property and you're a button click away from selling it. And to me the elevation of the industry should be all of those decisions I'm discussing should also be documented and go with the asset. So the buyer knows this guy maintain the furnace every six months. Or this, nobody does that. Um, or this upgrade was made with these materials. Great. If I need to make any adjustments I know what was paid for there, what was done there and so on and so forth. So now you have a total picture of the property versus today it's an inspection and you know a two uh, hour walkthrough and you hope that there aren't too many skeletons in the closet. Yep. So it's really driving transparency and integrity to the home. And ultimately when you do decide to sell now the market has full, is functioning the right way because it's got transparency on the key things. Yeah.

Paul Davenport: And it's a single source of truth that really can't be contested because again you're keeping all the receipts. Uh, thinking about the home inspection like you're saying that might miss something and then you find out not going to say lead paint, God forbid, but like there were skeletons in the closet. Literally know where those are. And I just think to your point that's going to change fundamentally how the industry works. And I think it's exciting, it's high time for it. I didn't realize I'd be talking to so many founders who are building solutions that immediately need to come to the states because we need to improve these processes and we need to transform this industry from the top down. And I won't get into the, the cross border politics of it all of the market in Boston versus Calgary. But yes, uh, we need this simplified.

Robert Price: Well it's always been a vision of a part of our business plan is to expand to the United States because same problems in uh fact commissions are actually higher there which is interesting because it's a much more competitive market in general like in the broad economy. But on this particular topic it's been ibuyers and these hybrid guys I talked about that have gone away and there's big litigations happening against the associations and realtors and big brokerages, big settlements, multibillion dollar settlements have happened in the US Those same litigations are happening in Canada. So it's basically customers saying come on this is, we gotta move. This is 2026 and we're living in 1970 right now.

Paul Davenport: Yeah, yeah and that's not even taking into account just the past five years and like how that has changed everything. Six years. God it's 2026. Well Robert, this has been incredible. I'm really excited about the solution. Um, again we've stumbled on a theme here uh, that I wasn't expecting on my visit to the Tech Thursday studio more or less. Um, it's all about making sure that again you can level the playing field for people. You can drive efficiencies with the processes but you're also talking to many different stakeholders to just get that holistic industry changing new uh, solution out into the market. So this has been fantastic. I can't thank you enough for joining me Robert.

Robert Price: Thank you. Awes Sam.