NOW
"Now" is a captivating podcast hosted by two dynamic women in the real estate industry who have achieved remarkable success through their unwavering dedication, disciplined approach, and the fearless courage to take bold actions right now. Join us as we explore the world of real estate through their expert insights, inspiring stories, and practical advice. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting your journey in the real estate world, "Now" offers a wealth of knowledge, motivation, and strategies to help you make your own big moves and thrive in the ever-evolving real estate market. Tune in and discover the secrets to success in the world of real estate, right here, right now.
NOW
Ariana Pareja: Elevating Real Estate Tech and Empowering Communities Through Philanthropy
Prepare to be inspired by the incredible journey of Ariana Pareja, a trailblazing entrepreneur who reshaped the real estate tech landscape and is now empowering women and minorities through her philanthropic efforts. Discover how Ariana, at just 21 years old, founded Modney Event Management, her first entrepreneurial venture, and later co-founded Remine, a real estate tech company that had a $150 million valuation. She also cofounded a Keller Williams-Leo Pareja team. You'll gain valuable insights into her strategic approach, from winning a pivotal Zillow-owned Restly hackathon to making Remind an indispensable tool for over a million realtors.
But Ariana's journey doesn't stop at business success. Learn about her passion for social impact through the Pareja Family Foundation, which she established to address economic disparities via tech education and financial literacy programs. Hear her discuss life-changing initiatives supporting survivors of human trafficking and domestic violence, helping them secure high-paying tech jobs and achieve financial independence. This episode is a treasure trove of wisdom on entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and the transformative power of mentorship.
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However, this is the first time I've been in California and I'm experiencing humidity. It's been like a heat wave here, like my hair is like, oh my gosh, so hot. Well, I'm probably a few hours north of you on the coast and it's cold here. It's in the 60s. Oh really, jen, I know where we live has been over 100. So I've been escaping the heat as well.
Speaker 1:Okay, so welcome to the NOW Podcast. We are so thrilled to have Ariana Pereja here, who is an entrepreneur, investor board member and influential businesswoman with a dynamic 20-year career characterized by innovation and leadership in the small to medium business size sector. She's been recognized by Success Magazine as a woman of influence and named one of Brickle's top 40 under 40 professionals. Her business acumen has been showcased on CWTV and various media outlets. Her business journey is marked by the inception, growth and exit of three SMB ventures, most notably the most recent exit at the real estate tech company Remind, co-founded with her husband and Leo Pereja, who achieved $150 million valuation after securing $48 million in funding, today reminds an innovative platform and powers over 1 million realtors with cutting-edge technology. Ariana is also the president of the Pringhoff Family Foundation and under her leadership, the foundation is at the forefront of addressing economic disparities by offering programs that substantially elevate women's earning potential and collaborating with the Miami Miami, that is, at Dade College the foundation provides a financial literacy program aiming to give women the tools they need to thrive financially In South Florida. Her mentorship through the Venture Mentoring Team and Scoreorg reflects her dedication to nurturing the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Mentoring over hundreds of startups, preparing them for Series A funding we could honestly go on and on Her background is so impressive. We are so thrilled to have you here. We can't wait to dive in. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks, courtney and Michelle Ple, to have you here. We can't wait to dive in. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks, courtney and Michelle, Pleasure to be here. Thank you. So tell us more about your foundation. It's so impressive with all that you guys have done.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the foundation it was a passion project of mine that actually was inspired through our last company. So when we raised Series A funding, we, at any given time, had about 150 to 200 job openings, mostly in the engineering space, and back then in 2015, 2016, there weren't as many women and minorities that were interested in getting into tech, so we had a young lady who was on the administrative side of the house. Her background was actually in real estate and had never written a line of code in her entire life. So we paired her up with the VP of engineering because we were that desperate to have a female on the engineering team and within six months she became a lead and then within 18 months became head of our entire mobile division. She now works for a big company out in Silicon Valley making bazooka dollars, and she went from essentially making less than I think it was about 60K at that time to now she's probably making 300K, plus stock and bonuses and whatnot. So she was actually the inspiration, because when I saw her just transform with just the right mentorship, my thought process was when I have the time, energy, money and resources after we get acquired, I want to have a program dedicated to helping women, specifically women and minorities, get jobs into tech.
Speaker 1:So we partner with several different nonprofits. We've helped women that are human trafficking survivors get the skill sets to make six figures. We've helped women that were escaping domestic violence, that were living in transitional housing, to get the skill sets to be able to be financially independent from their abusers, and so that project is near and dear to my heart. And, of course, we've worked with Miami Dade College now for our financial literacy program, because oftentimes what we would see is these people that, let's say, they were making 50K a year. Now all of a sudden they're making 100K and they now have stock options, a Roth ROA, a 401K plan, and they don't know how to reinvest that money. So we created the Foundations of Financial Freedom program, which is a financial literacy program offered for free for anybody in our community. It's offered via Zoom, so those that are listening they can register for our next upcoming fall class and this is going to teach you the basics of how to build your credit, how to maximize resources, tax benefits, how to create a budget for investing in the future.
Speaker 1:Wow, you have a passion for a lot of things, ariana. I am very impressed with so many things I read about you. I think it's great that you're giving back in that capacity. I'd like to just go back to your first company that you founded at 20 years of age and sold for over $250,000. What company was that? Yeah, so that was Modney Events. That was an event management company. So I quick backstory on myself.
Speaker 1:I got into the real estate industry when I was 18 years old. Um, this was back in the height of the market. So we're talking 2003, 2004. And during the financial crisis of 2008, there was obviously lots of loss in commissions, loss of everything, right. So there was a period of time that it was, I want to say, 2006 2007 I started doing event planning on the side to supplement my income, just to have more steady income, and, quite frankly, I was young and I had lots of energy, so I was doing real estate during the day, event planning nights and weekends, and so when the financial crisis hit, I decided, okay, maybe I should go back to school, and so I went to GW, I got my event management certificate through their event management certificate program and I started Modney Events.
Speaker 1:So we were a full scale event management production company. I worked with the Department of Defense Office of Small Business Programs and I did that. I was managing it day to day for the first three years and then my number two person managed the rest of it until we sold. I actually sold to my number two person. She was threatening to leave me and I said how about you just buy my book of business, buy all my inventory and then pay me out for a three-year referral fee, and so she did that and I was able to help my husband's business as well, which was the Leo Pereja team at the time, or the number one Keller Williams team nationwide. So I was juggling that the real estate team. We also had a hard money lending shop and on top of all of that, my husband and I were principal investors in over 102 fix and flips. So that was between 2000,.
Speaker 1:All the good deals hit the market between 2009, 2010 and 2018. So we were purchasing properties around 260, 280k. We put 100K into it and then put it back on the market with a turnaround time of six to eight months, with a 30% spread. So those types of deals don't really exist anymore, but back then they were, and so, because we were doing this over and over again and we were principal investors in this, we had a lot of cashflow coming through, which gave us the opportunity to be able to hire out a team to manage all these different companies simultaneously, because we had several different companies going between 2008 and 2018, you know there's I can't even count how many companies we invest in. We would find operators that were good. We'd say, ok, here's 100K, let's run with it. Some of those businesses did great, like Washington Capital Partners, modney Events, leo Pereja, team Remind, some facility that failed miserably, miserably. But you know, we did that for a couple of years and did the property management companies. We had so many companies that I can't even I can't even recall all of them, to be honest, but some of them failed, some of them did great. The lesson learned was just get up and try again, get up and try again, and no matter how much money we lost or time or energy, we just did it again, did it again over and over again until something stuck. Consistency is keep trying. Yeah, out of Taurasi.
Speaker 1:When you're doing all your flips, what market were you in? Or were those in all different areas? No, so it was primarily the DC metro area and our concentrated focus was Capitol Heights, which was a very so. It was right on the outskirts of DC, in PG County, and it was the area that nobody wanted to be in. It was the scary part of town, but we saw the potential in that and that's where we focused majority of our fix and flips in that, and that's where we focus majority of our fix and flips now do you guys? You're? You've obviously relocated to miami. Are you doing any investing or any of that now and in miami area, or have you kind of slowed down on it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so there's several reasons why we haven't invested in Miami yet. One we haven't come across the right deal. Two, stick build is what we're used to. Okay, because we're from the DC metro area, building in Miami because of Hurricane Andrew. Building to code in Miami is extremely expensive and the cost per square foot is so expensive. So any deals that we continue to do is typically in the DC metro area for several factors One, cost to build per square foot. Two, the crew that we know and trust. And then three, the time sitting on market. So in Miami, because it takes longer to build, the permit process is longer. So let's say, a house that you would flip in the DC metro area, it could take I don't know six to eight months to flip that same property. The same deal scope in Miami-Dade County could take a year to two years. So it's just not a good use of capital. So we just haven't found the right deal in Miami yet. But when their time and place comes, sure, we just haven't found it yet Well, we get it.
Speaker 1:So over 100 residential rehab and you were the co-founder of the largest producing KW team and sold that for over $650,000. And then, if that wasn't enough, you went on to be the co-founder of the Remind software platform for real estate agents. So tell us about that. Yeah, so Remind was built out of frustration. So my husband and I and our co-founding team were not technologists by trade. We were all practitioners, we all had a real estate background and we just wanted to access more public record data in a more efficient way. Think I mentioned to you, michelle, but we did start and co-founded, which was Washington Capital Partners. It is the largest private lender in the mid-Atlantic region. They've done $1.7 billion in loans and census exception, our best friend, danny and his wife Giselle they run the day-to-day of that and they've been running the day-to-day of washington capital partners since 2016.
Speaker 1:But prior, to, that, company started in around 2011. Um, we were just basically trying to find a way to better underwrite the deals that we were lending hard money on right. So we called or logic Black Knight, the two largest data providers in the country, and said how much is it going to cost to get this public record data for the DC metro area? And they told us a number that was extremely out of reach. We were like, okay, that's crazy, we're not going to spend that much money. And then we found out that Restly, which is owned by Zillow, was having a 24-hour hackathon. Now, this 24-hour hackathon the winners of this hackathon would gain all the open API to all the public record data through Zillow in the United States. And we were like, okay, that sounds like a pretty cool hackathon. Hired, two programmers went to this hackathon, didn't sleep all night, competed against 200 teams and we actually won the hackathon. That was like the start of something new.
Speaker 1:So, from that hackathon, this was November 2015. Come back from that, we put in $650,000 of our own money into building out an MVP of this software, which was V1 of Remind. Once we do that, we go and show Gary Keller, founder of Keller Williams, and he said I want to buy it. Alex Prulow, former CEO of Realogy, which is now known as Anywhere Real Estate, said I want to buy it. And we said, oh crap, this is huge. This is bigger than just something to underwrite hard money loans. This could be the next big thing for practitioners.
Speaker 1:So, okay, then we're sitting there and we're like, okay, should we sell the KW, should we sell like the Berkshire Hathaway family companies? Like what should we do? We said, well, if this could really truly improve the daily quality life of a realtor, why not just find a distribution channel that can sell to every realtor, regardless of what brand or affiliate? And so that's where the idea of becoming an MLS vendor came into play. So my husband and I and our co-founder, jonathan Spanato out on planes, trains and automobiles literally planes, trains and automobiles and we went all across the country and we pitched this to different MLSs and I will never forget the first letter of intent that we got that said okay, I want to do this.
Speaker 1:And from there we were like, okay, well, in order to fulfill this contract, we're going to need to raise some capital to hire some serious engineers to be able to build this out million between friends and family, and then another 5 million from family office out in Canada. And then we went on to raise our Series A 13 million through Stripes out of New York, which is a VC that has funded a couple of different companies that you may have heard of, like mondaycom. And then we went on to our Series B with a total of 48 million dollars raised at 150 million valuation super regretful. Thank you, um, I still have ptsd from that journey. It was a lot. It was a lot. It was a lot in a short period of time. Well, we crave that, todd pretty.
Speaker 1:So obviously your investors see the value in the platform. What can you tell us in part, to our audience of real estate agents, what it's all about? Right? So what we were doing is we were providing different data sets all into one sleek UI UX. So Matrix as you know if you've used Matrix, paragon or Flex very old, outdated, I mean, it was created in the late 80s and hasn't really been updated since. So our idea was let's get all the data that you would get in Matrix and several other platforms and put it all into one sleek UI UX. So it's a very clear map-based search so that you can look up properties, very similar to way that a consumer would look on Zillow right Map-based search. You can go back 20 years on title. You could see what their current mortgage rate is. You can see all this information Very easy to see, and so that was the original layout of Remind. It was also a lead generation tool. We had a predictive analytics data set where you can see the propensity of when someone would sell, and so that's how we started.
Speaker 1:And we started with direct to consumer, meaning our distribution channel was the MLSs, and then we could. Then they had the freemium version and then we could upsell the agent to wanting to do the you know, the $39.99 a month or $9.99 a month platform. We decided to pivot to enterprise only, which meant that the MLS would cover all the dues. So the pro plan, which would be $1.99 a month, the MLS would cover that on behalf of their ages per their MLS dues. And then we went into a full transactional suite of products got acquired by a conglomerate of four of our largest customers in October of 21. And so, depending on what market you're in, some of them I mean, this was 2021. I know you guys are in CRMLS, right, yeah for acting Fresno, yeah. So CRMLS was a big customer of ours. I think once we got acquired, they didn't renew the contract with Remind but, yeah, at the height, over 1 million realtors had access to our platform throughout the United States and Canada.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah. I just hearing your journey like just to think of all that you had to go through, like I listened to a podcast called All In. I don't know if you like, do you listen to that one with the tech as the tech background? I don't know. So I like aspire to be like you. Oh really, it talks a lot about startups and getting your seed money and it's all in the tech industry and I just think how, what a jump to go from running a real estate team and being in, you know, being a realtor in the real estate world to that, to raising that kind of money and building a tech company. I mean that is amazing what you guys have done. Thank you, yeah, I mean, look, the fact of the matter is it was a really cool experience. It was amazing. I learned a lot. I feel like I got an MBA in fund capital raising.
Speaker 1:But for those of you that are listening out there, if you're doing what you're doing and you're loving it and you're doing a great job and you're servicing your homeowners and buyers and sellers, don't lose sight of that. Your homeowners and buyers and sellers don't lose sight of that. Don't get caught up with the glitchy lammer of what's the grass is greener on the other side, because the fact of the matter is there are times that we were going through that journey and my husband and I would look at each other and say, do you remember when we used to just service sellers and buyers? And it was just, we had our team of 10, 12 people and it was like a family and we honestly missed it. Like it was very, very like.
Speaker 1:Because it's different. Right, when you raise capital, you're no longer a small business owner. Right, you're essentially an employee for your investors. There's no longer a dictatorship, it's a democracy. And I don't know about you guys and all the listeners there, but bootstrapping a business and being the dictator of your own company, that's how I prefer to do business.
Speaker 1:Not to say that I regret the journey, because I learned a lot, but there was definitely parts of the journey that I missed. Just running a team, right, and the fulfillment of that family environment, because you're not going to get that with 200 employees. It's very hard to pull that off. It's not the same. It's not the same. Yeah, that's a definitely a good reminder, um, but you obviously caught the attention of nobody um specific to a television show. So I did um participate in a reality tv show called billing dollar showdown, and so the premise of this show is basically a remake of the participate in a reality TV show called Billing Dollar Showdown, and so the premise of this show is basically a remake of the Apprentice and there is a product that will be announced on the show that is a direct-to-consumer product. I can't talk about specifics, but, yes, it was a very interesting experience and I would definitely do it again given the opportunity.
Speaker 1:Oh, my goodness, I can't wait. I didn't realize that that was like right now. I saw that all a lot on your social and I was thinking that was like I didn't realize it. So good to know. Have to tune in, check it out for sure, see how it ends. Yeah, the season finale will be around September 3rd, so keep your eyes and ears open. The show is on live broadcast CBS channel, cbs or NBC, depending on what market you're on. Wow, wow, we got a TV star. Wow, wow, we got a TV star, entrepreneur, philosopher, mother, wife Amazing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know how do you stay grounded, ariana, with all that you have going on? Oh man, I don't. I don't understand the question. Are you like, how do I like keep saying lots of meditation, um, lots of attention setting lots, um, uh, I mean, I, I do and I and I want to talk about this openly because I feel like enough people don't talk about it.
Speaker 1:Mental health, mental health, mental wellness is it's a real thing and you need to take care of it, just like you take care of anything else in your business. So I do have someone that I talk to a counselor once a month. I have my peer support group of females that were in the same bucket that I am. They're working moms, they have candidates, they have husbands, they have things that they have to manage, so they're my support group. I think it's really important as women, that we have that tribe that you can count on, because behind every successful woman is a tribe of women that are rooting her on, and it's really important. I like that you bring that up. I don't think that that's touched upon enough. Um, you see things on social media and all the successes and um, so it's a good reminder of just taking care of your mental health and reaching out to professionals if you need to. I think that's definitely a good thing to touch on.
Speaker 1:Well, ariana, we really appreciate you taking the time to come on here with us. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about your foundation and the show, all the amazing things that you are doing. What's the best way people can find you? Yeah, I would like to say that probably Instagram would be the easiest way to find me. If you just look up at ariannaparejacom, that'd be the best way to get in touch with me. If you have any questions, feel free to send me a DM. I always respond to everyone and I'm all about collaborating and discussing topics with cool females like yourselves. All right, thank you. I know you got her back to me when I messaged her on Instagram, so I appreciate it. Yeah, you're welcome. I'm actually glad you reached out, michelle. Thank you so much. Thanks, lydia, thank you, ariana, and we appreciate your time and information. Thank you, bye-bye.