KGCI: Real Estate on Air - Real Estate Real World Jason Galaz

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Welcome to Real Estate Real World, where we talk to the movers, shakers, and leaders that are getting it done right now in the real estate industry and beyond. I'm your host, Marjorie Cressbillow, and I started this podcast simply dedicated to calling people about what's really happening in this crazy roller coaster ride of real estate. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes and stay up to date on the newest stuff by adding yourself to the list at www. Now let's dive into the world of real estate. Everybody today. Today is actually St. Patty's Day, the day we're recording, or not quite St. Patty's Day close. But so I'm wearing my green.

Make sure I don't get in trouble, get pinched. But welcome to real estate, real world. We're happy you are here. And today I was introduced to this young man by my business partner, Mitzie de la Cruz, Tennessee. She's, you have got to talk to this guy. He's got some cool stuff going on. So I'm really excited to welcome Jason Galaise.

is a multifaceted entrepreneur who wears many hats. As the visionary behind Find a Home, Inc. and the groundbreaking Busca to Casa app, he's transforming the real estate landscape, particularly for Spanish-speaking communities in Tennessee. Leading the Find a Home in Tennessee team under EXP Realty, Jason's innovative approach extends nationwide, evident in the recent launch of the Find a home and Busca to Casa apps in 13 states. These platforms complete with agent resource centers, empower agents, and promote listings, setting a new standard in the industry. With memberships in every MLS in Tennessee, Jason's ability to identify and market unique properties is

unparalleled. His latest endeavor, Busca to Casa, is the first Spanish home search app on the market, exemplifying his commitment to inclusivity and accessibility. Now, Jamesco, Jason and his team are poised for further expansion, ready to assist individuals across even more states and finding their perfect property. Welcome to the show, Jason. Have me? Did I butcher your name? No, actually, it was, you did it perfectly. Normally, I ask before we go live, how to pronounce your name, and all of a sudden it's like, oh, I forgot to ask.

I would say it's Spanish, so the A is off, but you just went right with the effort. Go las, lays. Perfect. You know, so my name is 19 letters long, so people hardly ever get my name right. So I try to be respectful of people's name, but don't always accomplish that goal. So welcome, welcome. We're happy you're here. Thank you. So you must have, are you bilingual? Okay. So I'm mixed. I'm mixed Irish and Spanish-Mexican as far as descent-wise. But I was not raised with my Spanish side of the family. So I've just been constantly learning since youth. Well, then help me understand how did you end up creating an app for Spanish-speaking people? What happened? How did that come about? The inspiration comes from seeing friends and family, like my grandmother or other friends' families struggling with buying a home or just in life, especially in the past where there's a lot of restrictions or redline, everything you would expect or that you heard about. But in recent years,

I sat on the board at NAREP for Nashville, the National Association Hispanic Real Estate Professionals. Yeah, great organization. Yeah, they're great. And they do a lot of like Hispanic home ownership and wealth projects and reports. And you would just learn how many people are taking advantage of and how it's like the number one defrauded demographic in real estate. And so I started just looking at that the mission for that organization is to basically expand. Hispanic homeownership. I'm just taking those principles and putting them into work myself or anybody's Spanish speaking, where the more I looked at it, the more I thought about it,

especially since I'm a realtor myself, I can see that they're just plainly are not the same access to the home buying process that English speaking people have. And other tools are there. You can go out in the street and ask anybody how to find a home. They're all going to pull billow, realtor, Trulia, any of these sites that are accessible to everything. everyone. But if you don't speak English or if it's not your first language, the best you can get is like a little Spain flag where you translate some stuff and it's kind of wonky. Yeah. But even if you click on that you want a realtor speak to you, what are the odds they speak Spanish or a lender or title? And so we just decided to solve that problem and create the

first Spanish language home search app. But more than that, to create communities and to pull, the dots so that anybody out there can find each other. So I find this really fascinating because you're right. It's definitely a problem. And not just Spanish. Obviously, lots of multiple languages have the challenge as well. But we have such a huge Spanish-speaking population, especially out here in California. I don't know how Tennessee looks, but California, we have a very large Hispanic population.

And so with that, I've seen it many times in my career where people have. have definitely been taken advantage of because they don't speak English well or an agent thinks, I can still represent them. They can have somebody translate for me. And then they have like their 12 year old son translating or their daughter or another relative. And you don't know if they're translating correctly, if they understand what you're saying. I just have not found it to be the best representation to try to represent somebody when I don't speak their language. So I know for me that anytime I get somebody who speaks an alternate language, I'm absolutely going to find them a lender and a realtor who all speak Spanish. And you mentioned it as well about title because a lot of

them, they'll go to the signing and all the paperwork is in English for their home loan. It's all in English. And what are the odds that the notary is going to be able to translate that for them as well in the signing part. So to me, there's definitely an opportunity there to be able to help that community that's long overdue. That's right. I've seen where people didn't even know that they were where they were supposed to pay taxes and they lose their property or sometimes it's their own realtor or lender,

forging stuff for them and getting them in trouble or there's just a lot. But how do you battle that? I think it's through access and education. It's basically if there's more people in the room that speak the language, then there's less chance of somebody trying to get one over on somebody. And two, there's just people looking for mistakes. Yeah. And also to start teaching, there should be classes available.

There are like one agent here or one lender there might do something on a local level. But if we organize to strengthen that, if you look at it, there's like, what, 330-something million Americans and roughly 65-nobes. and Americans are Hispanic. Wow. So why is there no access in the industry? I go to these conferences, all the real estate conferences and masterminds, everything I can go to.

I just love to absorb. But also, I just ask, and I don't go in there, like I'm protesting or something, like I'm trying to rather think up, I just curiously ask the owners of these companies or the CEOs, oh, what do you have in Spanish? And most of the time, they found enough demand, or we're not, we're working on it. So what we're doing with Wuska is, yes, there will be a home. search site. There already is an app we're about to launch the website. And on the website, it's currently already live in 13 states. And California is one of them, most of California.

There will be agent resource center. And it will list all the companies that we know of that have Spanish products or that are translating for us. So it's not just for our product. Originally, yes, I could have launched a website and made it just my lead gen. Just I could be the dominant company because we have an exclusivity on it. But that doesn't help the people. It helps me. So the goal is to give more access and to be the lighthouse. And just gather, if everyone knows where to look for Spanish-speaking products

in the home sale of my industry, then that helps. That's it. Just connect each other. Yeah, that makes a big difference because, like I said, so my husband is Spanish, but he's first generation American. and he came from Spain. His parents came from Spain. And he's bilingual, but he didn't pass it on to our kids. Their kids didn't seem to be too interested in learning Spanish, sadly. I wish they regret it now. I wish they had learned it. But it's always interesting when I meet

Spanish speaking clients, bilingual clients, and a lot of times they want someone like me, but I don't speak the language. So they want the experience and they trust me, but I don't speak the language. And even for home searches and things like that, I think that this is a huge opportunity for them and a great way to bridge that gap of what they know and what they don't know. There's different cultural buying patterns or home selling patterns. Everything is different in the Hispanic community. I keep using that term just because it's Spanish-speaking languages. There's different patterns. For example, there's more equity building in this community because when they do buy a property, it's not.

to flip it or to sell it or anything is to hold it and pass it down or to bring in a mother or a grandmother handed to your children. So you're starting to see people buy and hold and buy and hold. So this will be the largest home by demographic in the country in the next five years according to the NARIP reports because of also the population and who's becoming to the age. So more than ever, these tools are needed. 100%. Yeah, it's interesting that someone My husband was a big part of NAREP back in the day. He's retired now, but he was a big part of NAREP. And so I used to be able to hear a lot of the statistics and that kind of information with regards to the demographic and the community.

And I'm really excited to see things change a bit and be able to give them more. Because anytime I meet a real estate agent who speaks more than one language, I'm like, you have to publicize that because that's such a huge asset to have. ability to speak another language. I have an agent in our group and she actually speaks five languages. Oh, wow. I'm like, that's crazy. Because honestly, if you think about it, many people who grew up in Europe, all the countries are like our states. Hop it around, they need to learn multiple languages just to be able to function in the different countries in those areas. I wish we had more of that here. I wish a lot of people had passed on the language that they speak. But back in the day, it was more of an embarrassment, sadly.

I know my husband, Joe, when he went to kindergarten, the teacher called his mom and said, hey, he's behind because Spanish was his first language. And she goes, so we need to hold him back. And his mom was like, no, we'll teach him English. So his dad stopped talking to him altogether because he couldn't speak English. And then his mom only spoke English to him. And because back then, it wasn't a benefit or a bonus to be able to speak Spanish. So the schools didn't support it at all.

So, yeah, five years old, his dad had to stop talking to him so he could learn how to speak English. That kid just takes my phone and starts doing my duolingo for me. Well, now all the translator apps and stuff are great. So you can actually try to talk to people. Yeah. My barber is one day. He doesn't speak English well. So he was typing out some words I couldn't understand.

My father is an example of that. Like my grandmother spoke English and Spanish. And he grew up in a time in an era in Los Angeles when you weren't allowed to speak Spanish in schools. If you wanted, he must say post-war War II. And living there, you were supposed to be American. And he even changed his name from a Spanish name. Didn't speak Spanish.

Then it passed it down to me. But on the other hand, the entire Southwest, was Mexico. And it was Southwest all the way up to like Oregon and then parts of Florida and Louisiana were Spain, New Spain. So it's a language that should be more accepted here. 100%. Yeah, it's funny that people always forget.

They were here first. Yeah, my family. I got to me exactly that. I have a grandfather in 1820, great, whatever grandfather, moved from Chihuahua, Mexico to what is now New Mexico. It wasn't the United States then. I'm married an indigenous woman from there. And so the border moved.

The border moved from us. Yeah. That's funny. So tell me about two, you have another program, Find a Home. Okay. So Find a Home Incorporated is the company. So I'm Jason, the realtor. I have a team within EXP.

And then I created a company called Find Home Incorporated. And that is at host Find a Home.com. and Wuskitswcasa.com. Both are home search apps. And they are brokerage agnostic so they're for any brokerages. They're both meant to be community centers. They're both home search apps, although each website is about to launch in the next three weeks. Okay.

And so those websites are designed for any agent to use? Are they consumer-friendly? They're both. So just if you go to Zillow, you can sign up to be an agent. or you could just find homes. And so it's just our own independent nationwide IDX fee that we're building that does generate leads. And it gives home buyers, home sellers, a place to shop and look at home values. Whereas if you're an agent, it's a lead source that any agent can sign up for as a referrals.

It's not like you buy zip code. You just show who you are, what brokerage you're at, what area, your coverage, and what your sales are for last year. so we understand your experience level. And that. What do you want to create that site? I guess it's because my strength is in social media. We manage about 100 Facebook groups and pages that are over 1.6 million followers right now.

Wow. And I'm going to go ahead and say, it started because such a huge demand came in to Tennessee in the last four years. Yeah, I know. And so I realized my strength, like I'm not from Tennessee. I've lived here 17 years. I'm from Southern California.

I don't look like a Tennessean, a different culture. I eat different food. I'm here. I'm Tennessee. I made a little Tennessee and daughter, but we did. But I'm not from here. So I don't have the hometown advantage of, I grew up here with the same people 50 years and they all come to me.

I don't have that advantage. What I do have is social media and how to use it, that strength. And so we started building a find a home in Tennessee, Facebook group, which is 250,000 people in that group now. Wow. Just to show homes that are for sale in the state. Anybody's brokerages, we just share them in there. And it's not like where people can go in there like for solicitation.

It's just for home buyers to go look at cool homes. If anything, it's just entertainment to look at some really awesome farm or whatever, farmhouse. So that being said, then it expanded to this group and that group and then this state and just kept reaching. And so now we're just solving the problem of people come to us to find unique homes. Let's create an app for them to do it for home. That's awesome. It's interesting because like I mentioned how we connected through Micea Dela Cruz. She's my business partner. And so she bought a home out there. I think they bought a home like four years ago like right before things went nuts. And she originally wasn't going to move for a while. And then two years ago, she's okay, we're moving now.

And so now she's been living in Columbia the last couple years. And she says it's very different from you're coming from California. It's a whole different world out there. The basics are the same. But she says it's very different. But we are getting it in and out soon. That was just announced. There you go.

Now you're going to be in California. But don't people get frustrated with all the Californians moving out there? And, you know, people on the Internet do. How it doesn't get frustrated? People have built up a lot of equity in so their home. They love that. It's the renters that get upset. But here's the thing.

There's like a lot of animosity for anybody moving here sometimes of people on the internet, not in real life. About California is raising the prices. It's like I hope there's many people from Florida and Illinois and all the high tax states. But that's not even a big deal. It's like Wall Street hedge funds coming and buying a thousand homes to use for rentals, people refinancing. That's the inventory problem. So my big problem is the Mexican food here is not just no way no.

I started a Facebook. Well, maybe you need to open a Mexican restaurant is what you might need. I have plans. I started a Facebook group called Tennessee Taco Support Group. When we find a good plate somewhere, we share in there. So it helps mom and pop shops, but it also helps us because just culturally speaking, I found it offensive that people, because food is love, food is family, food is like cultures, who you are. Everyone here has these, like, false plates and ingredients. Like, we don't eat, nobody eats these foods except for people that lived here that they're selling to.

Or if you catch a plan. So people need to know the real food, the real us. Yeah. What's funny is it's interesting because several years ago I went to, so I'm half Italian. So I went to Italy for the first time. And I couldn't wait for the food. I thought it's going to be amazing. And the interesting thing is they don't eat a lot of pasta in Italy.

and which you would think that they do. And they literally eat a lot of vegetables and salad and meats and fish. They eat a lot of fish. And I'll never forget. My sister arranged a cooking lesson with this world-renowned chef named Anna Tescalasca. And I'll never forget we're in there having this cooking lesson. She's making all this stuff. And she puts out these little fresh sardines on a little crouton.

I go, oh no. I'm not eating those. And she goes, you don't insult the chef by not eating their food. And I was like, oh, what am I going to do now? And the interesting thing was it was fresh sardines, like not the kind you get in a can that are all greasy, oily, and salty. And it was delicious. It was delicious. And I was like, okay.

So then I asked about tomatoes because they were making sauce. And I said, what do you do when the tomatoes aren't in season? She goes, we don't eat food. it's not in season. I was like, all right. So you don't need preservatives. They don't put, and you know what's funny is I thought for sure I was going to gain a ton of weight while I was there and I actually lost weight because the food was all

clean and healthy and organic and good quality food, right? It wasn't like all the crap we eat here in the U.S. So I own another company in Belgium, the music company that puts on a small music festival over there and I would go over there for a week or two at a time. And I remember coming back, for one, you come back and you have to like detox from healthy for it and like fresh food. So true. I was at the airport and some ladies talking about some farm to table, fancy restaurant.

And I was like, man, I just went to a whole country where it's farmed to table. Everything's farmed. Exactly. So we're going to totally go off topic here because I have to ask you about the music stuff because both of my sons are DJ. Oh, really? Yeah. They're both. My one son, John, is in San Diego and he goes by Johnny Boy and he's at EDM DJ.

And then my son Jake, the one who came in here a few minutes ago, he has an entertainment business. So he does weddings, karaoke parties, stuff like that. But he also, he goes by Hakobo, H-A-W-K. And he does the EDAM music too. So they go to music festivals. So what kind of music is your festival? So I have two, one in Belgium and one in Tennessee, which is a totally different world than my real estate one. And honestly, I don't even tell most of the real estate world just because the real estate one has to be like so.

neutral. Yeah. And if I have like crazy punk rock or metal bands or something, in defense of people. So both are like as if you mixed, if you grew up listening to punk rock, metal, broad rock, but now you also like roots music,

like bluegrass country and blues, you go there, it's a mix. Well, I'm going to have you send me the link because my boys love to go to music festivals. They just went to Lostlands out in Ohio or something. And then my nephew, Dylan, who's 17.

I know this doesn't have nothing to do with real estate, but that's okay. Dylan is 17. He's an extraordinary guitarist, and he and his buddies formed a band called Parabellum. Now they're heavy metal rock, and that's, I'm not a huge fan. So I'm like, okay, guys, when you get big and I can have like VIP seats, I'll come watch you. But until then, I need, like, earplice. But they're starting to take off and they're doing really well, too. They're called Parabellum.

That's cool. So not my kind of music. they're doing it's probably probably I'll have to send you links to their Instagram page or something like that I can make like a dorky DJ thing for myself instead of EDM it's EMD for earnest money deposit well that's what I get mixed up all the time

so I always have to ask my son again I'm like wait is it EDM or EMD he goes mom EMD is for your line of work EDM is our kind of music I was a DJ like in the late 90s but now I just play records yeah they don't play records actual record records? Real records. Yes.

So my husband was a DJ back in the day, too, when he had all the albums. And he laughed. He goes, because when my husband was a DJ, probably like you, he would carry these crates and have four or five hundred records. He'd have to carry in. And he goes, I'd always have to find the long song, the 12-minute song, the Queen's song or whatever. So he could go do a bathroom break, right? Yeah, get a beer or something. And now my son literally walks in with an iPhone and an iPad and an Apple notebook, right?

And he's got his speakers and stuff. But for my son, John in San Diego, he walks in with a, what is it, a zip drive. Yeah. USB drive. I go, where's your equipment? He goes, Mom, we don't need equipment. They have it all set up. You just bring your USB drive.

I'm like, what? I know I'm going to sound like a crotchy old man, but the beauty of it is finding the tangible record. I found this. I'm going to play it for you. I'll still be at a local every like few months, one of my favorite local bars. I'm like, hey, you want to come play records? And I'm like, yeah, sure. So now I like to play, like, old 60s soul and stuff.

That's what I prefer now. Yeah. Well, that's because you're getting old. It is. How old are you? 44. Oh, my gosh, you're not even old. I just turned 60.

So I got a few years on you. We're just babies. Just babies. Well, as we wrap up today, because we went all over the place, help me understand. Like, how is the app? Is it something you can download on your iPhone? It's there now. Yeah.

And on the app store and on Google Play, Find a Home Inc for Buscatsoucasa. They're both in there. Okay. And then you'll see the website in the next few weeks. Both of the websites go live. And there'll be another thing I didn't even mention since we have one and a half million Facebook followers. I share that with all the rich agents. Any realtor can go to another site we set up called share this listing.com.

We'll just put in their listing. And my admin will post it all across social media for them for free just to give them exposure. Oh, wow, that's amazing. Yeah, there'll be a link on Find out once we relaunch it. It also just gives me permission to share your listing. Well, probably by the time this episode airs, it will be live. We'll be live, you're right. Yeah.

Thank you so much for joining us today, Jason. This was really fascinating. And I think you're really on to something. And I'm really glad you're doing this because there's definitely a need, right? We definitely need to make sure that everybody has equal. access and understands what they're doing, how they can get help, you know, what the process is. They all need to understand that. I don't want anyone ever to buy a home and feel like they didn't understand it because then people too, they feel stupid, right? They think that they're stupid.

You're not stupid. It's just we speak a different language. And so it's so important, I believe, what you're doing. So I'm really impressed with what you're doing and excited to see what the future holds for you. Thank you. awesome. Thank you everybody for joining us today on real estate real world where we get to talk to all the cool people. We get to talk to the up and coming people like Jason and the movers and shakers who are making real estate much more accessible to everybody out there. So make sure to follow us on all your social media channels and subscribe and give us a rating that helps boost us in the rankings out there. So thank you again for joining us on real estate real world and we'll see you next time.

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