Condo Weekly buy and sell condominiums in San Francisco
Please introduce yourself and your startup Condo Weekly to our readers!
I’m Tim McMullen, a creative and entrepreneur in the real estate space. Being only a handful of years removed from an American Football career at Oregon State University, I’ve always lived with the mindset that playing at an elite level was the only option for me. I’ve taken this mentality into business, for good or for worse, winning or being the best at something is what truly drives me. In the entrepreneurial space, the best way to win in any market is to provide an insatiable amount of value to the consumer.
Real Estate is an ancient industry of smoke and mirrors moving at a snail’s pace compared to other fields, creating opportunity for simple ideas and a founder with basically no coding ability (like myself!) to create change, bring transparency and value. Condo Weekly is a simple premise; creating hyper-local, building-specific marketplaces for people to Buy & Sell real estate as efficiently as possible. Using an authentic content platform as the lead generation engine, Condo Weekly’s entire goal is to remove the smoke and mirrors from the industry, one building at a time and allow real estate transactions to happen in days, rather than months.
How did you get the idea of Condo Weekly?
I came into the real estate industry from the Fitness industry with a Bachelor of Science in Exercise Science, another industry plagued with misinformation and hype. Upon entering real estate, I realized pretty quickly that the most transparent, honest and authentic realtors got the most clients. With scalability in mind, I had always wanted to bring that level of transparency to an entire city, and eventually reach multiple cities and countries, thus Condo Weekly was born.
Why did you decide to start with Condo Weekly?
Being born in Melbourne, Australia, yet working in San Francisco, California, I had always dreamt of living in both countries at the same time to be close to my family. The challenging part of travel for me (the ADHD entrepreneur that needs to move at a certain speed otherwise I’m easily bored) is having something to do in both cities. I needed to create a job for myself that had exponential growth opportunity, industry-wide impact, as well as fund a multi-city lifestyle. After spending a year teaching myself the real estate industry, then learning marketing & branding, I began Condo Weekly in 2018. It wasn’t until my business savvy increased in 2019 and I realized I needed a team around me to actualize CW’s potential. The CW team was the best thing that ever happened to this platform.
What is the vision behind Condo Weekly?
Multi-city, building-specific marketplaces allowing condominiums to be traded similarly to commodities. A streamlined, simple way to buy & sell condos for people who want simplicity, transparency, know what type of condo they want to live in and want a stress-free transactional process.
How difficult was the start and which challenges you had to overcome?
The start was extremely difficult. Not only was I trying to learn the internal market of 15-20 different buildings, I was also learning how to build a website, insert basic coding, tweak and test marketing material to gain some minimal traction, on top of trying to fund the platform by working 12 hour days in an industry I had yet to build a client base in. After running in circles for the first 9-12 months, I’ve ultimately learned that perseverance above all else is what separates even moderate success from failure. If you never accept ‘No,’ you can never actually fail.
Who is your target audience?
Condo Weekly’s target audience is homeowners in high-rise buildings in San Francisco (for now), as well as home buyers looking for a transparent, simplified condominium purchasing process.
What is the USP of your startup?
Our USP is streamlining the real estate transaction process through off-market (private) sales. Instead of owners needing to put multiple weeks to a month into preparing a home for sale; cleaning, repairs, staging, photography, videography, open houses, etc. Condo Weekly pools building and neighborhood-specific buyers waiting for a similar condo to come to market, then pairs the buyers with homeowners without having to go through the traditional listing process.
Can you describe your typical workday?
As both Director at CW and a real estate agent, I spend my days in a hybrid space of selling a top-of-the-market building in San Francisco, the Four Seasons Private Residences, and growth-hacking Condo Weekly. Selling the top-end building in town allows me to keep an uncanny finger on the pulse of what the market looks like from a birds-eye view while staying plugged with my feet on the ground at the median price-point level.
I wake up around 6 am and spend the first 30 minutes of my day reading and drinking coffee; anything from sales-based books to digital marketing, to consumer and start-up psychology.
I head to the gym for 60-90 minutes before beginning my workday. Without exercise, I tend to lose interest and can’t focus on anything later in the day. It is my spiritually grounding time I spend with myself.
I spend 9 am onwards, usually till bed-time, meeting buyers & sellers in the real estate market, working on content production and distribution, developing and assisting my team, sharpening sales funnels and digital marketing techniques, and studying what is coming next in the industry so we can position ourselves to be amongst the first to market with new technology and innovation.
Where do you see yourself and your startup Condo Weekly in five years?
Condo Weekly has lofty goals to be in 4-5 cities in 2 different countries by 2024. San Francisco will be our beta testing city, perfecting the model and messaging, with plans to expand to New York, Miami and Melbourne within the next 3 years.
What 3 tips would you give other Start-up founders on the way?
Be Bold and Bullish on your ideas – If you truly believe your idea will benefit the market, you HAVE to see it through.
There is no such thing as Failure – Trying to build a company or an idea for 2-5 years and getting little to nowhere is still a far better life experience than never trying. You are 1,000,000% better for it. The skills you learn, the tenacity you develop, the people you meet will only help you in the long run.
Say Yes – To every meeting (at first), to every networking event, to every potential vertical and parallel. While it is true that you can spread yourself too thin, without saying yes as often as humanly possible, you will never grasp alternate ways of thinking; humans perceive the exact same situation, scenario, idea differently – it is unequivocally beneficial to see something from as many different angles as possible. A mentor I learned from in my early days was in his mid 60’s and still attended 1-2 events 6x nights a week. He shook the right hands, he met everyone he needed to, then he left. That level of ‘yes-man’ opens more doors than you could possibly imagine. I still haven’t been able to replicate that energy and I’m only 29, but trying to has gotten me a long way.
More information you will find here
Thank you Tim McMullen for the Interview
Statements of the author and the interviewee do not necessarily represent the editors and the publisher opinion again.
