If you want to find answers and succeed in the real estate industry, particularly regarding home ownership, you have to be willing to research and talk to people. How can you close deals and get consumers to feel confident about their home purchases? Join your host Bill Risser as he dives deep into a conversation with Jeff Dinter about driving that entrepreneurial spirit in the real estate space. Jeff is the CEO of Gravy and a serial entrepreneur with a thing for product design who spends most of his career solving problems in the real estate tech and fintech spaces. In this episode, he shares his knowledge on how to work with agents and lenders to build great connections. He also discusses mistakes he has seen throughout his career and explains the new bridge he has created that hasn’t existed before.
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Thank you so much for having me.
I was very excited to have you on. I get a lot of requests from podcast bookers, and generally, they are from motivational speakers or real estate investors who, somewhere in their life, were poor. I love it when I find people starting up companies doing things a little bit different. We are going to talk a lot about Gravy, your company, but I always like to start in the same place. You grew up in the Midwest, but it doesn’t get more Midwest than St. Louis, right?
That’s right. It’s the spot in the middle of the Midwest.
Do you still live there? Is your company there? Tell me why it’s so special for you. Why St. Louis?
I was born and raised in St. Louis. I had a brief stint in Orlando, Florida, with my fiancée at that time but my wife now. For a few years, we ended up moving back, and it’s still here. Gravy is very remote-friendly, but our flag in the sand is here. We have got a handful. Our team is in St. Louis. It has always drawn me back for sure.
There are probably two reasons that I’m still here. One, it’s family. I have got mine and my wife’s immediate family. They both live within ten minutes of our house. That was a plus and a big part of why we moved back from Orlando before we had a toddler. Now that we have a child, it’s free babysitting plus family time, so that’s an easy one. Two is the tech scene in St. Louis. It’s been growing more and more over the past decade or so. There are lots of great people, great minds thinking differently, and engineers. I love the environment here.
I hear that a lot from a lot of different places around the country. I don’t know if it’s the time we are in, and with tech being so powerful. These little areas before were not considered Silicon Valley. You’ve got them all popping up all over the country.
It’s a great point to your comment. It started on the coasts, and slowly but surely, the density came in and may not have the density of East or West Coast in St. Louis or Kansas City. The good news is that even if it’s smaller, the overall concept of thinking differently, getting folks that either want to build software or reimagine different things, the density, appetite to take...
