EP 05 — How the Bad Elf ReFlex Is Changing the Game for Real Estate Agents and Their Clients (ft. John Cunningham)

[00:00:00] Welcome to "Real Estate: It's Not That Complicated". Broker Ryan Cook and Curious co-host Kent Thaler guide you through buying and selling minus the jargon. Here's today's episode. Take it 
away guys. 
Kent Thaler: I'm Ryan and I'm Kent. And together we're the real estate navigation team. Today we've got something really exciting in store or on film or whatever you wanna call it. Today's episode's great and it's a little departure for us because we're talking about technology and we're talking about how technology helps the real estate agent realtor, buying agent, listing agent, and by extension the client.
Ryan Cook: Yeah. I'll tell you, I got my license in 2008 and now this is 2025. I've been practicing for 17 years and I've seen a lot of technology get. Come into the [00:01:00] market. That has benefited because when I first started, I was still using paper maps or I was using MapQuest to figure out how we were gonna get around to our properties.
And then, bought my first GPS receiver for the car. I think it was a Tom Tom and I think it cost $500, but it was a lifesaver. And we've seen, applications go from a, I use an iPad regularly in my business to now pretty much just using solely my iPhone electronic signature technology.
All sorts of technologies come in that have shaped how we do our business and how we better serve. And I had been trialing full disclosure, who we're gonna have as a guest today, long-term friend of yours, Kent. And you introduced me to John. We actually, I think we all met through a fantasy football league probably prior to the year 2000.
Kent Thaler: Oh definitely. 1997. 
Ryan Cook: Yeah. John and I have known each other a little longer than that, but yeah, a little bit longer. Long-term friend of ours and they've been working in the GPS space, the global positioning [00:02:00] systems and GIS government information system space for quite a while.
Started off in the really the small pilot industry. And I remember talking to John about that originally and they had come out with a newer product and we saw, and you and I started talking and asked if we could get a a unit to play around with for a bit. And we started to see wow, I could really use this, working with my buy-side clients.
It gave me a level of insight and in combination with understanding zoning, bylaws and stuff that really
Kent Thaler: Lemme take a step back for a second. 
Ryan Cook: Okay. 
Kent Thaler: There's an adage in technology, right? And the adage is, are you building a solution to a problem or are you building a solution in search of a problem?
And they had a solution in search of a problem. And we were able to identify a huge problem that it solves. 
And [00:03:00] when you started taking it out and using it, you proved our hypothesis very quickly. I can't even begin to tell everybody how many times it's saved you money and made you money in just the last, what, eight, nine weeks alone.
Ryan Cook: The money thing that's all great and wonderful. We're in business to make money. It's what makes capitalism work, but it's the level of service that I was able to provide. 
Kent Thaler: Yeah, absolutely. 
Ryan Cook: It. But it was also, I think it, it's created a, an additional level of trust with my clients where, listen, the real estate industry is changing and changing very rapidly.
The National Association realtor settlement last year has changed relationships between buy side buyer agents or buy side agents and the buyers themselves. And you really need to if a buyer's gonna sign a contract with you as a professional for services. You need to be bringing more than just a smile and I can get you in the door and set up an [00:04:00] appointment for you.
Because that they could hire everybody. You don't need an expert for that. 
Kent Thaler: Or My favorite one, I'm a great negotiator. 
Ryan Cook: I can't tell you how many agents, great negotiators, and never take a negotiating class in their life, and they think just saying no is great negotiation. But that, that, that's a whole other episode for a future date.
Yeah. But what it did is it provided a, I was able to provide a level of service that I wasn't able to previously. Like we've said before, I'm a chair of my local zoning board. I really understand zoning bylaws. I'm not an attorney, but I understand the zoning bylaws. I understand density and dimensional regulations and all land use, use regulations.
To be able to have something where I could be at a property with a client who had an interest in, I really want a property with a garage. This one doesn't have a garage. Is it something I could add onto at a later date and be able to tell with a high degree of accuracy without having to go through the process of hiring a surveyor?
Not to, [00:05:00] it's not to replace a surveyor because when it comes down to that time, you're gonna need to hire a surveyor once you own the property to create an actual plot plan, show dimensions of your future garage, but be able to look at it, a high degree of accuracy and decide one if you're easily able to move forward with that property or if you're not able to move forward.
'cause it can't be what you want to be or you're so in love with the property. But we may need to add some terms to the offer that you'll add. A condition that conditioned upon being able to obtain a survey to be able to. Put in a two car garage or one car garage. So it increases your level of certainty as a buyer and as a buyer agent representing your buyer on what a property can and cannot be, where property lines are to a very high degree of accuracy that for most times it's all we really need.
We don't typically need the [00:06:00] accuracy of a surveyor at the time of just evaluating a property to decide if it's something they're interested in and wanna move forward. The most common question agents are asked is, where's the property line? And that's been over the course of my 17 year career and for most of the time we've only been able to wave our hands around and say it, it's somewhere around here to know for certain you'll need to hire a surveyor.
And I've taught all my agents to say that. But what this does is allows us to say, if you want a, an exact degree of certainty and have the line pinned, yes, you need to hire a survey. However, with this tool we can get you, accurate within about four inches which is changes everything for me, representing and advising my clients.
Kent Thaler: It seems to me that four inches in the field instantly, the sheer amount of time that it's gonna save you, you'll be able to rule out properties just as fast as you can rule them in. 
Ryan Cook: And that's what it comes down to, especially when you have awkwardly shaped properties and we [00:07:00] can't, it's really hard if there isn't a fence outlining exactly where a property boundary is.
And just because a fence is there doesn't mean that's a property boundary.
Kent Thaler: Even in a square one, right? It, there's something to be said for knowing exactly where that line is or
Ryan Cook: within four inches.
It changes everything when you can actually, and I've done this with clients, walk along, using this, we said the ReFlex device to be able to walk along and say, right now we're four or five inches with an accuracy of the property line. And okay. I get a really good sense of where this is.
I, I got a better sense of the property. 
Kent Thaler: You and I both know of a property. We won't say who's or where it is. Your backyard. 
Ryan Cook: Oh, I'm sorry. 
Kent Thaler: No. We know another one where we know for a fact that there is a garden that is 18 inches onto their neighbor's yard.
Ryan Cook: And this particular homeowner did everything right, wanted to put a garden in, hired a professional. And when we [00:08:00] walked that friend's property and showed them that about 40% of this garden they paid for is not actually on their property. They're a little flabbergasted.
Kent Thaler: I would say it was an understatement. 
Ryan Cook: Yeah. 
Kent Thaler: Oh. And the fact is that now they're not selling their house anytime soon. And neither is their neighbor. And the neighbor likes the garden. So that's, there's no contention. But, if they were selling the house and you were taking somebody out there to look at it, you could very quickly determine that there may be a problem.
Ryan Cook: And that's all we wanna be able to do. And the job of an agent is to. Help mitigate what help I, I say, tell my agents this. Listen, your job is, most buyers, they don't buy a lot of houses over the course of their lifetime. They may buy two or three, you do this all the time. The average consumer doesn't know what they don't know, and that's why they hire a professional. And this just gives you another layer to be able to help them make great decisions for [00:09:00] themselves. 
Kent Thaler: What's unique to me is common to you, and that's part of the reason why we started the podcast, right?
Is to talk about the things that seem complicated, aren't really that complicated. 
Ryan Cook: Yeah. 
Kent Thaler: And where the property line is with the bad el ReFlex. All of a sudden isn't that complicated? 
Ryan Cook: It's not that complicated. So I guess without further ado, why don't we bring our friend John on and get after it.
\Hello everybody. Welcome to today's episode of Real Estate. It's not that complicated, the podcast. And today we have an extraordinarily special guest that we're very excited about. John Cunningham is CEO and one of the founders of Bad Elf, a consumer electronics company that specializes in GIS and GPS devices for that enhance the iOS experience.
Kent Thaler: He'll also tell you that they do Android, but officially they only support iOS. So welcome to our podcast, John. 
[00:10:00] Good morning. How are you guys? 
Fantastic. Since this one, I like this part because this is right up my alley because for those who don't know, my undergrad degree was in electrical engineering with a specialty in signal processing.
And so all the stuff on GPS, we were actually using Loran Sea when I was in the Coast Guard and we were transitioning to GPS. And one of my projects when I was an undergrad was working on that transition from LORAN Sea to GPS. So this is for me, I get to geek out a little bit. 
So you're an actual real engineer.
So I was a mechanical engineer. I don't actually understand all the underlying signal science behind this. Because I only took a couple engineering courses. 
What's really funny is that both of you have already put me to sleep. 
Good. That's fantastic. But we had [00:11:00] smiles on our faces and that's all I care about.
I know you're lighting up. Ooh, 
keep talking. Everybody's what the hell is loran c? All I know. I bet if I go into my Seabag, I still got a Loran C card. 
For those of you who don't know, Ryan was also in the Coast Guard, so he did a lot of navigable stuff on boats and things that, again, 
I did, we sailed across the Atlantic on a tall ship.
Much a much nicer day 'cause it's raining here. Okay. So John welcome to our podcast again. You all have a new product that we're really excited about. In full disclosure, Ryan and I are going to be working with John and his company, Bad Elf, to create some of the educational materials around this device.
But we'd really like to do a deep dive today and discuss [00:12:00] what the bad off ReFlex is, what it does, what problems it solves, and why it's going to change the way realtors and real estate agents. But we'd really like to do a deep dive today and discuss what the bad off ReFlex is, what it does, what problems it solves, and why it's going to change the way realtors and real estate agents.
Dealing with land. If you're anywhere in the United States and you're dealing with land this becomes a very viable product as a rather than having to hire a surveyor for everything.
And this isn't just, this doesn't replace surveyors. Sometimes you just need to be able to get a quick 90% answer. And that, that's really when we started talking about this device, you and I, Kent, were talking and we said, holy shit. Like I get asked all the time, like, where's the [00:13:00] property line?
And I'm left. Literally, like if I happen to have a property map with me walking over and waving into space saying it's somewhere around here, but if you really need to know we'll have to hire a surveyor. And, there aren't a lot of surveyors, there aren't a lot of people going into that industry.
So you could be weeks out and depending on upon demand, it could be anywhere from $600 to $1,600 at least in my area in Southeast Massachusetts. We saw it as a way to just make us better informed, one as the agent, and two for the consumer to help give them some sort of confidence of what they're looking at.
Not only is this a great tool for real estate agents, we also believe that there's a practical and fundamental use for it in construction in landscape architecture, fence building septic [00:14:00] systems all sorts of different fields where people need, again, that.
Close, not necessarily to the inch, but within four or five inches. They'd be pretty happy measurements. 
Yeah. So we should probably talk a little bit about one, what the device is to start with. So John, tell us like, what exactly is the ReFlex? And maybe if you have a device with you, for those who are watching us can actually get an idea of what it is 
at that. 
That's tiny. 
Yeah. I wanna distinguish between talking about the how and the what, perfect. So what it does is really I think at least in this context, something that you guys are much better at explaining and how it works is what I think I can contribute to the conversation.
We were talking about engineers earlier. One of the things that happens in business a lot is [00:15:00] engineers are very good at figuring out how something can be built and how it works. But you really need people who understand the market and the industry to decide what should be built in order to satisfy a need. 
John Cunningham: We were talking about engineers earlier. One of the things that happens in business a lot is engineers are very good at figuring out how something can be built and how it works. But you really need people who understand the market and the industry to decide what should be built in order to satisfy a need.
And I think that's where the collaboration between our two organizations is effective. Because you guys identified a what, and we happen to have something that provides an answer as to how you can get there. 
Ryan Cook: We 
John Cunningham: got started 15 years ago building a plugin, GPS because we were doing some research for the United States Army to do sensor integration.
And the iPhone had just come out and the iPad was in the works. [00:16:00] And my business partner, who's our CTO, Brett Hackleman. Is also private pilot. And he said, Hey, there's this great company that's putting charts, so your maps for flights on an iPad and an iPhone, but they don't know where they are.
Since we're figuring out how to get data into that platform, let's build a GPS receiver that we can plug in and it'll show the pilots where they're located on their charts. So they have some situational awareness. And he went off and did a skunkworks project for about nine months and figured out how to make that happen.
And we built it and people bought it. We put it on Amazon just as a fulfilled by Amazon product. And we sold out within 30 days of the first thousand. We realized that we had a completely different business there, but we really didn't know what we were getting into. We became very popular in the aviation industry.
We started expanding into boating and marine, and that was by 2016. But we noticed that we were getting a lot of people in [00:17:00] municipal, state, and federal governments starting to use our products, but they kept asking us for higher and higher accuracy. So it wasn't until 2019 that we designed our first product, the Flex which would give you survey grade accuracy at one centimeter.
But it was an expensive product. It's $3,000 to $6,000 depending on the configuration. And people were looking for something that was nearly as good, but a lot more affordable. And that's where our Flex mini product came from, which is the product that I just showed you, which out of the box will give you a meter and a half Accu accuracy, but there's also a correction service that gets delivered to it that can get you down to that hand width or four inch accuracy.
Sorry, yeah, about four inches. It's about 10 centimeters. And so we had the how, but we didn't know the what. So we had a solution looking for problems to solve. So when you guys approached us saying, Hey, we think we found something that we can do with this. The question was how do we get that to market?
[00:18:00] And. We don't wanna have to explain how everything's done to everybody because their eyes glaze over because no one cares about the engineering except for the geeks. And most of the market is not made up of nerds like me that, care about that stuff. So we need to make it much more straightforward.
So we've taken the ReFlex product and bundled it together with some other services that are available and put together a package working together with you that we think will deliver a solution to your customers that they can use out of the box without having to understand how to do all the configuration and connection.
Our goal is to do, close to zero configuration and give them hero results. 
Ryan Cook: And so I gotta ask, where did the name Bad Elf come from? 
John Cunningham: We get asked this a lot and I have to tell you over the years, i've been approached by at least a dozen marketing consultants who told me, you have to change the name of your company.
You can't have the name bad in it. It's just ter [00:19:00] it's a bad look.
Kent Thaler: And so it's, I might have resembled one of those marketing consultants Yeah. Over the years who point blank said stupid name. 
John Cunningham: Yeah. In marketing, the point is to have your customers remember you and see you standing out in a crowd.
When we go to the Ezra User Conference and there's 17 to 20,000 people every single day, we got multiple people that come up to our booth that say, we saw your logo across the hall and had to come over and find out what is it you guys do. It stuck in going back to our origins, we were doing this sensor integration stuff for the US Army.
Back in 2010. We had the idea to build a product to give us a little bit of leverage because we were doing basically time, materials based contracts. And so it was a grind, and we thought if we could make a little bit of money on the side selling these GPS units, that would be great.
And we wanted to have kind of a fun name because it was a side project. And we were in Germany at a software [00:20:00] conference, and we've always been enamored with the number 11 as a reference back to Spinal Tap and Nigel Tufnal's amplifier that goes to 11. So whenever we build new products, whether it's software or hardware, we turn all the knobs up to 11, let's put everything we can in it and then we'll dial it back slowly until we get to the sweet spot.
And because we were in Germany and we were enjoying some beers in a beer garden, my business partner Brett, who speaks German, said, the number for 11 in German is Elf. And so we started playing around with things around Elf and we decided that Bad Elf was the one that we were gonna run with.
And that's how we got the name. 
Kent Thaler: That story never gets old. It always gives me goosebumps. 
Ryan Cook: So you mentioned you initially the product you came out with, you were doing some work for the US government on sensors, and you basically found someone who was developing maps and stuff for [00:21:00] iPhone and the iPad for the aviation industry, but couldn't tell where you were.
How did that sort of morph into something more handheld device, land-based, et cetera? 
John Cunningham: It was really just responding to customers. For anybody who started a business from scratch, you know that what you think you're going to be doing going into it is not necessarily what you're gonna be doing.
I think I read a statistic that something like 80% of businesses fail within the first two years. So when we hit the two year mark, I was excited that we were still standing and then we hit the five year mark and we were being challenged by what Apple was doing with the iPad.
They were starting to integrate a lot more smarts 'cause they had a lot more resources into their positioning systems within the iPad. And pilots didn't need our device. Certainly the general aviation pilots, they were connected to cell phone towers and so they were getting some augmented corrections from those signals that would help put them on the right path.
We partnered with a [00:22:00] factory out of Taipei to build the original handheld products. And they built really solid products so people weren't replacing them. We thought the useful life of the product was about three years. We're 12 years into the time since we produced the first ones and people are still using them.
So we needed to come up with something else to address other markets. And when the governmental agencies and the engineering firms started asking us for something that was higher accuracy, we realized we had to, if we were gonna grow, we had to move in that direction. 
Ryan Cook: Now what is, what is all this based on? 'cause I know, say for example, when I'm doing research on a property for a client they're, most of the municipalities in my area have moved to a GIS server. For gathering all that type of information. Can you tell us a little bit about what GIS is and then on top of that how, with the device, like why is the Apple Maps built into your iPhone?
Or if you're using Google Maps in your iPhone why [00:23:00] is that just not good enough? 
Kent Thaler: And John, one other thing, before you get into this discussion, can you explain the difference between GIS and GPS? 
Ryan Cook: Oh, 
John Cunningham: that's a great question. Yeah. 
Kent Thaler: Yeah.
John Cunningham: I could actually talk about this for too long, so you can tell me when to stop.
Kent Thaler: We will cut you off as soon as I fall asleep, I promise. 
John Cunningham: So GP S's global positioning system, it's a network of satellites based on geometry and physics of signals traveling through space and time. The more vectors you have between the satellites, knowing where they are and how long it takes those signals to get to you, you can do some pretty exhaustive calculations to determine where you are relative to those satellites.
When you put all that stuff together ev everybody's familiar with the notion of triangulation, this is sort of triangulation on steroids and it gets you your position with a certain degree of accuracy.
And it's really a question of how much information do you have available? In your [00:24:00] models and your signals, and that can give you much higher accuracy. There was a time where the global positioning system was run by the DOD and you couldn't get more than, 10 meter accuracy because it was a national security risk that was taken off years ago.
And in terms of GIS you're talking about people who have assets that are at locations and they need to manage them. So where are all the manhole covers? Where are all the storm drains that need to be vacuumed out every spring, where are or fall? Having time and place attached to things of value has become an effective way of not only managing and maintaining things, but also planning for, replace 
Kent Thaler: So to sum up and make it simple. GPS is the system of locating something. GIS is the system that tells you where something is, 
John Cunningham: or just recording the data so that you can [00:25:00] use it for your business purposes. So it's a, an information management system. And I think it stems from the work that Jack Dangermond did when he was at Harvard as a graduate student in the sixties, when computers were first becoming more commonly accessible.
He was trying to figure out, how do we get place. Attached to information in a computer. And that ended up it took a couple decades to get very far. And obviously the government was the biggest consumer of those services initially. 
Kent Thaler: Okay. So now, so we've got GIS, we've got gi IS mapping that our determined by, for lack of a better term, GPS location data.
How does that help real estate? I know what the problem was. The problem is I walk into my backyard and I say, Hey where's the property line? I look at the playhouse in the back of my yard. You've seen this, you've been at my house before. And we wonder, is it on my [00:26:00] property?
We, there's a PVC tube that sticks out of the ground between my neighbor's yard and mine. Is that the property line? 
John Cunningham: And. 
Kent Thaler: How the problem as we understood it before you came up with an ingenious solution was how do you solve that problem? 
John Cunningham: Someone else solved the problem.
We're just the conduit that got it to you.
Kent Thaler: Gotcha. 
John Cunningham: Having the device, receiving the satellite signals can give you a pretty good idea of where you are now. If that's a meter and a half to two meters, in most cases, that's fine. If you're driving your kids to their soccer practice and you've got two meter accuracy, you're gonna get to where you're gonna go.
And that's plenty good for that application. But when you start looking at zoning requirements and setbacks, for instance, so I wanna put. A pool in and I have to be some number of feet away from my property line. you need to have a good idea.
And you're ultimately probably gonna have to [00:27:00] hire a surveyor because you need to have these things documented. there's a time and a cost associated with that? You want better than two meters, and there are correction services that the way they work is you've got a known point on the ground and it's known to within one centimeter because it's been placed there by someone who's licensed as a surveyor to put it there.
And it's listening to the satellite signals. Now it knows what the right answer is and it's calculating and it's not getting the right answer. But it knows in each x, y, and Z dimension how much it's off by and it can send that information back to a server somewhere. And then when you are within some radius of that site, you can get those corrections so that when you're receiving the satellite signals, you can apply those corrections and you can bring that two meter accuracy down to the 10 centimeters.
Kent Thaler: Okay? So for those of you who speak in American, 10 centimeters is equivalent [00:28:00] to four inches or thereabouts. And John as an engineer, likes to talk in metrics and I will try and translate as often as I possibly can. The application for that in the real estate market is huge because all of a sudden, and again, we are not replacing surveyors can tell you exactly where something is. Our measurements are only as good as the overlay maps that we can get on our iPhone. And we believe that we've found currently a mapping solution that is pretty accurate based on tax maps that are supplied by municipalities all over the country.
And we believe we have demonstrated, and Ryan and I will show a video in a little bit showing this where. You can actually see where you are in real time within four inches of where the device is sitting. [00:29:00] It's a remarkable leap forward for real estate because you no longer have discussions of, Hey, where is that property line?
It might take, six weeks to get a surveyor out here, but we can find out. 
And Ryan's been using the device now in the field for about a month, 
Ryan Cook: A little bit longer than that. 
Kent Thaler: Yeah. Maybe six weeks, maybe eight weeks. And he probably has a dozen stories, examples where it has already saved him time and money and allowed him to have customers go forward with properties or walk away from properties and not waste any time.
Because they were able to answer simple questions that in the past would've taken him days of research to solve 
Ryan Cook: well, and I really would not have been able to solve them because I'd just be going off a tax map and I don't have any coordinates, like a latitude and longitude, minutes and seconds and a device to be able to do that.
I didn't carry around a [00:30:00] tripod with a GPS receiver and the whole deal. Where's the property line? I'm like, Which by the way, when you're in real estate, is a question you get asked a lot, especially when someone's really interested in a property and in a hot market where people have to make really quick decisions, you're really throwing your hands in the air and going, I don't know.
Somewhere around here. And you're hoping that in the end, like one of the forms you get as part of your closing process called a mortgage plot plan. I have never ever seen a surveyor driving around taking actual readings from mortgage plot plan. So I'm not sure exactly how those are being generated, but they are being generated by surveyors and the fact is people really don't know.
Exactly where their land is until they hire a surveyor and we'll call pin the corners. But I was able to, with a number of clients we have some pretty funky shaped lots around here. Not everything's a nice little perfect rectangle. And realizing that on one property we looked [00:31:00] at the property line actually went 50 feet beyond where the fence was.
So oh, there's actually more land here. And there was actually a chunk of land off to the side that was about 80 foot by 20 foot that was actually part of the property that we did not think it, it wasn't mowed, it wasn't anything. But was clearly after using the device in combination with the tax maps we have on the phone we were able to see this is part of the property too.
It was very helpful in that regard. Another client. We were trying to understand where the back of the property line was because there wasn't a lot of space and then there was a pretty steep hill back there and we were able to clearly, delineate exactly I shouldn't say exactly to a really high degree of accuracy where the property line stops so they could look and say, it's just not enough space back here for us.
I had a client where we were told there was a hill going up. They were on a hill property next door, and the listing agent was telling us the property line was a line of AEs at the top of the hill. [00:32:00] And there was a set of stairs on the hill that were made outta railroad ties that were falling apart.
It was definitely a hazard and my client's thinking like I'm gonna need to address those stairs, like that's a safety issue and I don't wanna get sued. And then we were able to, with this device, with the ReFlex, we were able to say the property line's actually at the bottom of this hill. It's not the top of the hill.
It's not that LA of AEs, that's the next door neighbors in this set of stairs. That's their problem. Not the problem associated with this. And the property owners didn't even know that. So we were able to tell that very quickly and he was like, oh, alright. I don't have to worry about that. And they ended up moving forward and securing that property.
But that was a real big concern because that would've been a fairly significant cost in an insurance risk for him and his type of position. Like he, he doesn't want to deal with that type of risk. So it, it's been very helpful for me in that regard. 
Kent Thaler: It's already paid for itself. 
John Cunningham: Yeah.
Easily. I know [00:33:00] around here you're supposed to have a 24 inch setback from the fence, so the fence is always on somebody's property. It doesn't mark the property. And I think the conventional wisdom is always the fence is where the property line is, but it isn't. And so it's interesting to take the device and go out there and stand on one side of the fence and then stand on the other side of the fence and then you know exactly whose fence it is and whether or not you're responsible for it.
Ryan Cook: Yeah, A lot of times we'll look at, especially like a stock, a style fence and be like, oh, the ugly side is your side. But we really don't know. So what this has been able to do, at least, for me and doing field trials with my clients and then they're glued to me next to me staring at my phone as we walk around the property.
It's been very helpful in that regard. 
John Cunningham: We'll have a firmware update that will help you with that, so you can connect their phones to it as well, so that they can 
Ryan Cook: Oh maybe. I like that. Close time. John. I don't know. 
Kent Thaler: One of the cool things about the product is that it's, device ReFlex agnostic, meaning it's not tied [00:34:00] to a specific phone.
All of the technologies is tied into the ReFlex, and the ReFlex is serving a signal to the phone. It allows for, like John just said, they're doing an update where they're gonna allow multiple screens looking at the thing at the same time.
Yeah. you could conceivably bring an iPad and your iPhone running the same MAP program and be able to look at it that way. But the other really great use, because it's agnostic, is that you can share the device in an office, for example, multiple people can be using it over the course of a month
and in. Over time, I'm, we're guessing that most agents are gonna want their own, but it, when you're first learning about the device, it might be such, it might be something that, you might share with somebody because you're not out showing a house every day. 
It's just something to think about as part of the product.
It's a cool feature. So John [00:35:00] my, my question about the ReFlex is, excuse me,
so John, tell us a little about what comes with the ReFlex package that you're selling.
So the, there's the centerpiece of it is the Flex Mini, and it's configured in a special mode for this application, which gives you pre-configured real-time correction services to get you that high accuracy. We also recommend that you put it on a pole because that is a good practice or hygiene as we like to call it, that you keep the product high enough so that the antenna is not being blocked by your body.
It turns out that people make extremely good meat shields that prevent the signals from the satellites to getting to the antenna. With fewer satellites, you don't get the same level of accuracy. And it will come with a gift card that you can use to purchase the app [00:36:00] that we recommend to use.
For this application that has the parcel boundaries and also for those who don't wanna put it on a pole, there is an option to put it in a, attach it to a cell phone case, and then it becomes more of a handheld device. But I think the poll is a better mechanism for getting better results.
So is it true that we're calling the poll the wizard pole? so is it true that we're calling the poll the wizard pole? 
John Cunningham: I've heard you say that we're elves, not wizards. 
Kent Thaler: Yes. You're walking around with your little walking stick and your 
John Cunningham: customers can be Gandalf the white. 
Kent Thaler: We've talked a couple of times and mentioned that this doesn't replace surveying.
But we look at it as being a companion to it and a definite help in that. It will identify situations when you need a surveyor, and at the same time, it will also [00:37:00] identify ones where you might not necessarily need one, and talk a little about how you see the product interacting with surveying and what they do.
That's different than what we are doing and why you would necessarily want both of them to work in combination. 
John Cunningham: Surveyors are professionals, right? You don't do surgery on yourself or your family. You go to a surgeon to get that done. And you want to bring in people who are appropriately knowledgeable and skillful in areas where the stakes are higher.
So when you need a quick and dirty answer that is gonna be relatively accurate. It's appropriate to use our product if you need to submit drawings or make claims, whether it has to do with insurance or property valuations or 
Ryan Cook: encroachments, stuff like 
John Cunningham: that. Yeah. Compliance with zoning regulations and things like that.
You're going to want to work with a surveyor and that's [00:38:00] critically important. Nobody, no court right, is going to say, oh, you use the bad elf device for this. That's good enough. They want a stamp from a surveyor who is certifying that this information is true and accurate. 
Ryan Cook: So you mentioned zoning bylaws and stuff like that.
Zoning bylaws are critically important to understand, especially when you're looking at a property. I'll have clients that'll say, I really like a garage, but if a house doesn't have a garage I'd like to know that I have the ability to put in a garage.
And that's where zoning bylaws come in. They'll do things like, have setbacks, so you can't build right up to your property line. It may be a side setback of 15 or 20 foot. Would the device be good enough to give us a rough idea that if we're at the corner of a property in combination with the tax map, that whether or not, there's the chance of being able to add that garage that someone wants.
John Cunningham: Yeah I [00:39:00] think so. I've used it informally for my own property that I wanted to know would I be able to fit a generator on the north side of the house. And there's only 10 feet between the house and the property line. But I don't know exactly where the property line is, 'cause there's no fence there.
And there are setback requirements. And it gets complicated because yes you need, I can't remember what it is. Five feet for the generator is a setback from the property line. But if it's below a certain number of decibels, then it haves that distance. So it gets down to two and a half feet, but then it's gotta be a certain number of feet away from the house and from the windows.
And so you start doing all the geometry and it gets into, okay, how big is the generator now? Because if I get a smaller one. It still provide enough power, but now it's gonna be in compliance with the zoning requirement. And maybe it's because I'm an engineer that I actually try to do all that math, but it's, you can get a pretty close approximation because [00:40:00] the truth is when the inspector comes out to inspect it, if it's one or two inches off, it's probably not gonna be an issue unless you've done something egregious that they're looking for an excuse to, to call you out on.
Ryan Cook: Yeah. So that's something that comes up very regularly. Same thing with wellheads. You can't do certain things and then distance of a wellhead, you can't do for those who have subsurface disposal systems or a septic system, you can't build within so many feet of the septic tank or the septic field.
So trying to understand that stuff, especially. Folks wanna put in a pool, do you have the ability to do something like that? So all it's doing, it's not giving us a definitive answer. What it's doing is helping us to understand, to a certain degree of confidence, to allow someone to make that decision on whether or not they're gonna move forward.
And I think that's where I've been able to, with my clients, help them understand that 
Kent Thaler: as I see it, what it really is doing is it's allowing for a conversation to be had that in prior times, the answer was, I don't really know. [00:41:00] 
John Cunningham: And people put their hands and just say no.
Kent Thaler: Yeah. 
John Cunningham: Now all this is to getting to Yes. 
Kent Thaler: Yes. And in doing so, you're speeding up the process. So if I am out looking for a piece of property and I'm with an agent like Ryan who has the device. There's a negative and there's a positive, right? In the positive cases it's, oh, can I build a house here?
Can I build a garage here? 
Ryan Cook: Sorry. 
Kent Thaler: No. But here's the negative. The negative is I can't build the garage. I don't wanna look at this house anymore. Let's move on. Correct? Yeah. So it does two things.
It, one, is in properties that I'm interested in, it can very quickly determine whether I have interest that I want to actually place an offer on or not. It becomes very binary. 
Ryan Cook: And what's really interesting in Massachusetts there was a law passed last year affordable Homes Act.
And one of the things that the Affordable Homes Act that Governor Healy signed in has to deal with accessory [00:42:00] dwelling units. Now it used to be what we call, in-law Sweet or something like that. It used to be in Massachusetts that it had to be attached. It couldn't be detached. Now the updated laws are that if you're in a single family zoned area, every single family zoned property in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has the right by law to install an A DU.
But you still gotta conform to the setbacks. So if you have someone who's out looking for space, whether it be an accessory dwelling unit that they intend to use for a friendly member it does not restrict you from making it a rental property on your single friendly property, amazingly enough. It allows you to, pretty quickly determine is there even enough space to do it to conform with the zoning bylaws or with the right mapping solution that they'll have.
That is a GIS space. We'll go back to that, where the government information system that has information on wetlands, et cetera, you [00:43:00] just have to get a pretty good idea of do I have the space, do I not? It can help you eliminate a property super quick for one and save you time or let you know like it clearly we have no problems
boy, we're just not sure in this case, for us to be able to move forward on this, we would wanna put a contingency in our offer. Being able to do this, having a surveyor come out and show that it's something we can do. So it really is helping to clarify as certainly zoning bylaws are amended, especially for affordability issues, here in the Northeast.
Kent Thaler: Ryan and I have filmed some videos at this point in time showing exactly how the Bad Elf can be used in the field, and we'd like to show them to you right now.
[00:44:00] 
Kent Thaler: So as you can see, the applications for the device are incredible and it looks simple to use. John, how easy is it to set up and use it? For somebody like me, for example, 
John Cunningham: I watched you take it out of the box and get it up and running in no time. Our goal is to make it a zero operation startup.
So it will come pre-configured with your RTK correction services enabled. 
Ryan Cook: Hold on. What's, you said RTK correction services. What is that? 
John Cunningham: That's the thing that gets you from a meter and a half down to the 10 centimeters.
Ryan Cook: I'm sorry, did you wanna translate that into [00:45:00] Imperial for us non metric people?
Kent Thaler: I was about to, but I stopped. 
Ryan Cook: Roughly four inches of accuracy? 
Kent Thaler: Yes. 
Ryan Cook: Okay. From 
Kent Thaler: about from about six feet. 
John Cunningham: Yeah. So we really want you to be able to just take the device out of the box, scan a couple QR codes and be up and running, so the first QR code will basically just make sure that your device is enabled and the second one would bring you to the app download so that you'd be able to download the parcel map.
Kent Thaler: Now within the purchasing of it is there a monthly subscription fee that has to go with the purchase? 
John Cunningham: The purchasing model is you would, make a one-time purchase of $500 for the device, and then there would be a $100 a month for 24 month subscription.
Kent Thaler: What happens after 24 months? 
John Cunningham: It can roll over month to month or you can cancel it and you still keep the device 
right. 
But you, the device would still give you that meter [00:46:00] and a half to two meter accuracy, but without the subscription, you wouldn't be getting the high accuracy. 
Kent Thaler: So the important part of this is that in order to get the high accuracy, we need the subscription, but that's what separates this device from like the GPS on your phone, for example.
John Cunningham: The GPS on your phone can't reliably give you more than five meter accuracy. 
Kent Thaler: Five meters in layman's talk is about 17 feet. 
John Cunningham: And that's because it's got a very small antenna and it has to rely on cellular network and triangulation and wifi networks.
Ryan Cook: Hold on. Are we gonna pass on the cheap joke? It's a size matters. 
Come on. It's got a small antenna. 
So the challenge, and it's funny what is that end doing? So someone breaks out there. iPhone or their droid, and they bring up their maps app and they happen to say they're using the other app that has the tax map, the [00:47:00] boundaries, the property boundaries on it.
What are they gonna see if they're not using your device? 
John Cunningham: They'll see one of two things. Either they'll see a blue dot with a ring around it that says, you're someplace in the outer ring. And our best guess is where the blue.is, but you could be any place in that sort of lighter blue circle, or you're gonna see your position bouncing around.
So you could be standing directly on the property line and you could be floating to the west and then floating to the east and not being in a particular spot because your accuracy is. The error associated with that accuracy is too large. Whereas with the ReFlex device, we should give you pinpoint accuracy and as you zoom in on the picture, you should remain stationary and it should be giving you a pretty good representation of where you are.
Ryan Cook: Yeah. So you're not gonna see it bouncing around and stuff like that. It is pretty much, you shouldn't see the dot moving around at all. 
John Cunningham: Exactly. But you're not playing the floors lava.[00:48:00] 
Kent Thaler: You're as bad as he is 
John Cunningham: my grandson like that.
Kent Thaler: So with getting back to this from Ryan, from your perspective what the costs are as John says, it's 4 99, 99 or $500 a month excuse me, a as a onetime charge to get the device and then it's a hundred dollars a month. How many sales do you think that you need to do extra as a real estate agent or realtor or broker a year to be able to afford the device?
Ryan Cook: I think the larger question is we have to take into account the NAR settlement that happened in the summer of 2024, and one of the outcomes of that settlement is that by our representatives.
Kent Thaler: We've talked a little about NAR settlement on past podcasts. 
Ryan Cook: Yeah.
Kent Thaler: I just as a refresher, what was NAR again? 
Ryan Cook: The National [00:49:00] Association of Realtors. 
Kent Thaler: Okay, 
Ryan Cook: so not every licensed agent is a member. So the National Association is really, it's a trade organization that licensees can be a member of and the trade organization lobbies on behalf of its members and property owners across the country.
Okay? And I'm very active in my state association now. Part of that settlement was that a buyer representative needs to get a contract with a buyer. So if a buyer's going out to look at a property, I think the larger question here is how do you separate yourself from everybody else? If you are just like, I am a great guy or a great gal, I'm an expert negotiator, which every agent's gonna tell you they're an expert negotiator.
How do you start to separate yourself? What additional services and value are you providing to a home buyer? Now, a home buyer isn't themselves, doesn't make sense for a home buyer to go out and do this [00:50:00] themselves and not hire an agent. Honestly, it'd be foolish, and I have plenty of stories for that.
And it's not just a biased story because, I am a broker and I have agents, that I serve serving other buyers and sellers. But as an individual purchaser of property, if I'm only purchasing a home for myself and my family, having that subscription for two years doesn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense.
But you really should have someone who is able to provide you additional information above and beyond which you can potentially look up yourself. There are always a situation of. You don't know what you don't know, right? So you don't even know the list of things you should be looking for as a consumer.
'cause you don't do this all the time. But in this case, how is that agent helping that buyer better understand the properties they're evaluating? Will it pay for itself? Honestly, what you sell one house, at least in my area, I mean it's a portion of one commission.
'cause the average sale price in my town at this point in [00:51:00] time is around $725,000. One commission, a portion of one commission pays, pays for the device and the service for the two years. That's a non-issue. In other parts of the country where the prices are much lower, it might take a little bit longer to recoup that cost, but you're now providing a service that one has never been available before you.
So you're providing a level of expertise and professionalism that hasn't been available. You are now also able to help a person understand that property at a much higher level than I think has ever been available. Listen I keep multiple tape measures in my car and I typically grab one, throw it on my belt when I head out with my buy-side clients when we're going out and look at properties.
So when they start to have those types of questions, I'm breaking out my tape measure and stretching it out along corners to see how far we are. But man, like with the app we've been using, you can swing arcs. So I can say I'm [00:52:00] here and I can swing an arc and say I'm standing at a wellhead.
So a septic system can't be within a hundred foot of a wellhead, or you can't build within 15 foot of a septic tank. I can stand, I can understand if I have a a map of the septic system and I can figure out. With a tape measure where the septic tank is, and I can swing an arc with, or have it swing an arc for me, and I can walk to where that spot is and go.
You can't build anywhere, roughly from about this point, this way. You know what you wanted to do with this property. It doesn't look like it's gonna be able to do that. 
Kent Thaler: Wait a minute, or the positive, it looks like you can, you have to look at 
Ryan Cook: It's, helping a person understand on a much higher level what they can and can't do with their property, the potential, and to be able to have a pretty high degree of certainty in a matter of secondsin the past you'd have to guess and you're telling them you have to hire a surveyor
the survey, a degree of accuracy is absolutely necessary for certain [00:53:00] things, but when we're evaluating property quickly, we can determine very rapidly, probably within a 90, 95% degree of accuracy or a hundred percent degree of accuracy. If I'm, my setbacks are, or I got a giant piece of land we can tell pretty quickly whether they can or can't do something.
You as the agent are providing a level of service that agents not using the device are unable to provide at all. There was a time where multiple listing services were all printed, right? And if you didn't have access, there was a day.
I think it was every other week the MLS book was printed, and that's why there were so many different multiple listing services. You'd go down to your multiple listing service, they would have your copy of your book for your office, and whoever had that book had all the information on the property that was available.
Outside of that, it just wasn't available to the public. And then MLSs went online and then in [00:54:00] services like Zillow understood the value of that and made it more public. And now that information was now available to the public as a whole and more people were informed. I think my own personal opinion is that this starts to become something that will become a required tool for a buyer representative agent to successfully execute their job and provide a service to the buyer.
I think the buyers are gonna start demanding, Hey, I heard such and such agent has this, do you, and it will become a differentiator that. If you don't have this, if you don't have a cell phone and I can't get ahold of you and you just have a landline and I gotta call your physical office to get ahold of you, those folks don't exist anymore because they provided a barrier to the client getting the services they want.
I get the feeling that this product is going to be very similar. This type of service is gonna be very similar. And for agents looking for a way to [00:55:00] differentiate themselves because now if buyers need to sign a representation contract they wanna know they have someone who's out there able to provide them information that they can't get themselves. 
Kent Thaler: Following up on that back to the ease of setup and how it works. The data gets fed into the mapping program, correct? Once you have the mapping program up and running, I won't have to do anything with the bad elf other than turn it on and turn it off. 
John Cunningham: Keep it charged before you go out.
The other important thing is, when you first unbox it, you wanna take it outside and get that first lock, that will be the longest time to lock that you should experience. 
Once that's in the system, then it knows what to look for when it goes back outside. And the other thing that's important is the number of satellites that this device can listen to is very high because it listens to the US Satellite Network, the Russian satellite network, the European Satellite Network, and the Chinese satellite network.
And [00:56:00] when those satellites are overhead, it just gives it much more data to get to that solution fix faster. 
Kent Thaler: You mentioned that there's a there can be a lag at least in the first time that you are using it. That's to be expected. And that's so that it, because it's in a new location, so it has to do all the math again, and find all the satellites. So it's not because of something inherent in the product, it's just setting itself up to know where to look in the sky because the satellites move. 
John Cunningham: The engine inside the device will cache some information. So there's a notion of a hot start and a cold start, right?
And in the cold start, you assume that it knows nothing about where it is in the world and it's getting satellite information and it's trying to figure all that stuff out. And so it primes the pump. And once that's done, you'll have, hot start times. If you keep the device on and you go from one property to another property, you're gonna get a lock super fast.
But if you get on an airplane and you fly from [00:57:00] California to Massachusetts it's gonna take a couple of minutes before it says, oh, okay. I realize I'm not anywhere near where I was last time. 
Kent Thaler: Got it. I also wanna pick up something you said about the battery. Ryan, correct me if I'm wrong, you have not recharged yours yet.
Ryan Cook: I had to recharge it for the first time this past weekend. I've been using it for longer than eight weeks. So this is the first time I had to charge it, and realistically, that's because I was indoors so much. And of course it's trying to find lock on satellites while I'm indoors.
So it's expending a lot of power trying to find satellites. So I did actually have to charge it for the first time, but I've been using it for weeks and weeks. And it was still showed a full battery. 
John Cunningham: Our goal has always been to make sure that our products will run all day without a recharge so that people don't get stuck out in the field trying to do something and realize that they need to be recharging their device.
You can recharge it through a standard car charger with a USB [00:58:00] cable or from any wall charger or computer 
Kent Thaler: it's A-U-S-B-C connection. Correct? Yeah. So that makes it easy. And it's compatible. It's the same cord that you use to charge your iPhone? 
John Cunningham: That is correct. Some members of my family are still on lightning connectors. 
Kent Thaler: That sounds like a you problem. 
John Cunningham: I'm not fan of the lightning connector because back when we created our first GPS device, it was with a, 30 pin wide connector on the iPhone. Apple didn't tell any of their vendors that they were changing to the lightning connector until they did it.
We had just purchased many thousands of 30 pin connectors in August of 2012, and they announced the new connector in September of 2012. It took us five years to sell off that inventory because sales dropped 90% month to month. And we were sitting on an awful lot of inventory.
That was not fun.
Kent Thaler: The good news is we're not gonna do that again. 
Ryan Cook: Yeah. So I guess one of the things I wanna ask is how [00:59:00] difficult is this to use for a brand new agent? Even someone who's not very tech forward? If Kent can use it, anybody can use it, right? 
Kent Thaler: There there's a little smirk on everybody's face about that, but there's a lot of truth to that.
All joking aside, I set my original one up in less than five minutes. I did it in front of John on the off chance that something wasn't gonna work. And it all worked very quickly and easily. Two weeks ago, I think maybe three weeks ago, Ryan and I set up one, just to see the process and see if anything would change.
I was able to do it again on your 
Ryan Cook: wife's phone? 
Kent Thaler: On my wife's phone. No less. I don't think it took us more than 10 minutes to have a lock. From the time of, from the time of when we started downloading the 
Ryan Cook: affiliate, the device with the phone, install the software and have a lock and show position on a map.[01:00:00] 
Kent Thaler: I don't think it was 10 minutes. 
Ryan Cook: Yeah. 
Kent Thaler: Yeah. And when we talk about ease of use, John, and so full disclosure, I've known John for 25, maybe 30 years. Yeah. At least. And he and I have discussed this in the past at great lengths. The concept of it just working and. One of the things that I love about the device, and I like, I like a lot about Bat Elf is that they understand the consumer interface.
They understand that we as a consumer don't really care about the things that they care about. 
John Cunningham: You care about the how you care about the what, and also you, I, I get accused all the time of not having any patience for anything. And I finally met somebody who has less patience for things than I do.
And so if we can make you happy then that's an yeah. 
Kent Thaler: And patience is an interesting concept, but in this particular case, it's this time equals money, right? And [01:01:00] so to be able to use the device and to be able to not have any questions and for it to be intuitive and all it does once it hooks up into your iPhone, it just is replacing location services.
John Cunningham: We trademarked the phrase engineering magic which hearkens back to Arthur C. Clark, science fiction author who said anything sufficiently advanced beyond the understanding of its audience is considered to be magic. And it's something that we can do using the science in the physics underlying this is to deliver a magical solution to people.
You don't need to know how it works. You want to get your position as accurate as possible, as quickly as possible. And that's what we're trying to engineer the delivery of. 
Kent Thaler: I mentioned the fact that Ryan hadn't had to charge his ReFlex in eight weeks or thereabouts.
And the reason why I brought that up is that the use case that real estate agents have for. The ReFlex is very different than say somebody who's working for a municipal government who [01:02:00] is charting a state park, right? Whereas that person might be using the device all day and be having a series of maybe a thousand points that they're gonna use to generate a digital map.
Whereas the real estate agent all we're looking for not that I'm a real estate agent I'm using the royal we, not the actual we all that they're looking for is a moment in time usage, 10, 15, 20 seconds. And to be able to turn the device on and to be able to walk from maybe one end of the property to another end of the property and follow a line on a map, that's it.
And to have that power and to be that accuracy in their hands is revolutionary. Ryan's mentioned it a couple of times. I know it sounds like we're doing a sell job, but it's not, you saw the video, you saw us being able to walk straight down the line and know exactly where one [01:03:00] property ended and the other one started.
Ryan Cook: Yeah. For me, I typically will turn the device on when I hop in my car and I'm on my way over. And then I just, leave it on the whole time. And when it comes time we're there looking for more information, all I do is bring up the app on my phone and away we go.
It's already locked in. 
Kent Thaler: How many of your pot clients have said, oh my God, what's that? 
Ryan Cook: Not just clients, but like even at open houses where I'm walking around with my clients and other agents are asking, what are you doing? And I was like, oh, hold on. Lemme finish my clients.
I'll come back and show you. And there's been like, oh, wait a second. You can do that. 
Kent Thaler: What I was gonna say is we spoke to two agents offline who were very interested in hearing about the product because they had never not heard of that type of solution being available to them.
And they immediately understood what it was, and how it would change how they present properties to potential clients or actual clients. 
Ryan Cook: Our job as agents is to stay on top of the market, stay on top of [01:04:00] trends find services to bring higher levels of service information to our clients.
It used to be, for example, that for everything we wanted to find out about a property, you had take a trip to town hall or City Hall and depending on what information you needed, you had to go to that department and you had to get a paper copy and they charged you a dollar per page. And that quickly changed to a lot of information being available online,
the physical time of driving a town hall or city hall and spending an hour or more going to different departments to get information now through GIS, government information systems, all that stuff is now available online. And it's not something that the consumer or buyer will typically knows anything about, nor should they, that they don't need to know, nor do they want to know.
Just while I'm interested in the technology or the product, John has that's my engineering background and inquisitiveness, but for the average person, all they wanna [01:05:00] know is it turns on and it just works. John, can you explain to folks just a little bit how that technology really works?
They're at one property in. Ton Rhode Island, and then they do a neck showing in North Attleborough, Massachusetts. How is it's able to stay locked that whole time? Or they turn the device off and turn it back on and it picks up that lock so quickly. How is it able to do that?
John Cunningham: It's,
Kent Thaler: it, you can say magic if you want to. 
John Cunningham: It's a little bit outside my actual expertise. But if you think about it's really, there's a dictionary of satellites, right? Every satellite has a name and when the antenna picks up, the signal encoded in that signal is this, is, this is what satellite you're hearing.
This is a signal strength you're getting from it. And this is its position and all that stuff gets put into the computational engine that's inside the device to do the math on it. And so when. The satellites are rotating around the Earth, or the Earth is rotating under the satellites depending on how you wanna look at it.
So you're seeing [01:06:00] different satellites at different times of the day. And so it's gotta do updates to that. So the satellites that remain in view between observation A and observation B, 
Ryan Cook: you're 
John Cunningham: gonna have an entry in the dictionary for those, and then some are gonna fall out and new ones are gonna come in and then you have to do the recalculations on that.
Ryan Cook: And just happens instantly. 
John Cunningham: It's an algorithmic process, and yet it happens instantly. 
Ryan Cook: Yeah. So for the consumer, for the agent, turn it on, it just works. And you get a nice solid dot that isn't floating all over the place. 
What other professions do you see where this would benefit their business? 
John Cunningham: Anybody that has to deal with property lines? Adjacent to real estate professionals, anybody that's doing landscaping, right? Because they may want to plant things or water things and have restrictions on that.
I would think that municipal officials whether zoning officials or building officials they would benefit from having better quality information available to them at a glance and then [01:07:00] only need to deal with, surveyors when they need to actually document things or they need to find out whether or not something's legal in a questionable situation where there's a confrontation between different parties.
And it's interesting. There are all kinds of unusual cases. We've got people that are arborists, and they go and they take tree inventories and so they can use our device, 
Kent Thaler: from our perspective, I would think that it would be more we touched on construction.
You mentioned landscape architecture fence installers, driveway pavers pool installer pool, 
Ryan Cook: I see anybody touching land. 
Kent Thaler: Yeah. All of that 
John Cunningham: Yep. 
Kent Thaler: People who know, people who have to make sure that what they're doing is on the property.
We've all heard the horror stories where a piece of real estate gets sold or they're at the closing and the final survey comes in and they find out that, a fence that they built wasn't on their property. A brick wall that they built wasn't on their property or a swimming pool that they built [01:08:00] doesn't meet the variant and they never got it.
And so now they have to take it down or take it out, we've, or an adu or an easement 
Ryan Cook: that prevents the, they can build what they want on the easement, but it also gives the other person the right to tear it down. 
Kent Thaler: Yeah. Or an a DU is built, but it's built, it just happened to have been built in the wrong part of the property.
you looked out in the backyard and you thought, oh, that's, mine all the way back to 
Ryan Cook: Yeah. 
Kent Thaler: the hill, 
or a place 
structure or a shed. 
Yeah. Imagine you think is on your, imagine that, 
yeah. Imagine somebody doing 
that 
on your property 
yeah. And or somebody builds a garden and they put it, 18 inches onto their neighbor's property. You hear about these things and then you hear about neighbors not speaking to each other for 20 years because they're fighting over a piece of land because they think that, that fence is on my property.
No, that fence is on your 
property. And there's [01:09:00] also the whole open and notorious, if there is an incursion and it's open and notorious for 15 years, then it, yep. That becomes the definition of where the property line is. 
Yeah. Or another one, I'll take, another one would be, there's an insurance use to this, right?
Was that tree, the tree that fell? Was it on my property? Was it on his property? 
Customers in the insurance industry very high value projects where they have to figure out how much to charge for insurance for manufacturing facilities, and it might be based on elevation in a flood zone and are they above or below a certain elevation?
Our top of the line products are capable of delivering those answers. A factory gets flooded and they make an insurance claim and the insurance company has to go out there and say, okay is this properly insured? 
John Cunningham: our top of [01:10:00] the line products are capable of delivering those answers. A factory gets flooded and they make an insurance claim and the insurance company has to go out there and say, okay is this properly insured?
Kent Thaler: The ReFlex for full disclosure, the ReFlex does not determine elevation. It only determines your XY coordinate, 
Ryan Cook: basically your XY coordinate 
Kent Thaler: Yes. It does not have a Z but there are an awful lot of applications for the device as we have worked with John to configure it with the mapping solutions that are available that allow for more than just real estate application.
And, I think Ryan asks a really good question when he is looking at what other markets can benefit from the solution, because there are a lot of them. 
So John, tell me where can somebody buy the ReFlex package? 
John Cunningham: You can buy it on our web store, which is at bed elf.com/ReFlex. And I believe there should be a link below. 
Kent Thaler: That's awesome. We look [01:11:00] forward to being your partner in and helping produce the materials for the training and to the how to.
Ryan and I are very excited about that. We've got some great ideas on what we're gonna do for those videos. They'll be available. And we've set up a page on our website, which is at the re nav team.com, where you'll be able to see those videos that'll help you in case with any troubleshooting and anything that you need to do to get up and running .
We really appreciate your time. Do you have any final thoughts about what people should be doing or the product or, bad elf in general and what you might be doing next?
John Cunningham: And I'm excited about this because it's as I said earlier, a lot of times as engineers, we build things looking for problems to solve. And you guys have identified a problem that needed solving and an opportunity to provide service to people to get them better information, to make better decisions.
And really that at the end of the day [01:12:00] that's what we like to see our products used for, is to, improve what people are trying to do professionally.
Kent Thaler: Thank you again for giving us your time today. We really appreciate it and hopefully if we have any more questions in the future, we can come back to you or somebody else from Bad Elf and 
Ryan Cook: Sure. 
Kent Thaler: We're always 
Ryan Cook: available.
Kent Thaler: That'd be great. Awesome. So thanks again. 
Ryan Cook: Thank you. Thank you. 
Kent Thaler: Yep, bye bye.
Ryan Cook: That was so cool. It's amazing 
I just thought the story John had, where was they?
They really came up with the product and they didn't have a solution for it. And having been a former engineer, like engineers like to work on things that are fun and you like to push the boundaries and you come for these great solutions. To problems that you're not even sure. You thought it was something, but there's no market for it.
And it almost seemed like this device fit that mold. And we were able to just through our, you and I, our conversations and me [01:13:00] doing this, as a profession, see a space where this made sense and not just for the purpose of, helping a company sell units, that's beyond that.
This is helping people make better decisions to themselves in a very useful manner. 
Kent Thaler: Yeah. To me, it, revolutionizes how you do your job, right?
I it's a tool for me as the, potential home buyer. I say to my agent, Hey, where's the line? Now all of a sudden you break out the tool and you show me the line.
Ryan Cook: Yeah. 
Kent Thaler: And that becomes common to you. But that's really unique in that, last time I bought a house was in 1996, right?
We didn't know where the property line was. And prior to that, I bought a condominium in 1990. I didn't have to, I didn't have to know about where a property was. It was a condo. 
But when you're out in the field and you're able to say to a client with four inch certainty, the line is here.
It's within that, that's a game changer. The sheer amount of time of being saved by being able to rule a property [01:14:00] out or being able to say, oh my God, we can absolutely add this garage. We know, let's go write the offer up right now. 
Ryan Cook: Yeah, and I'll actually, I just thought of this while you were explaining that, is that, a very common feature of property in New England are Stonewall.
Yeah. People don't realize that there are more miles of stone walls in New England separating properties or as property boundaries than anywhere else in the world. Hadrian's wall on in the UK was always considered the longest Stonewall, but when they actually took all the stonewall in New England, ours, all our Stonewall comprise much more space.
And a lot of folks think that Stonewall is the boundary. I found more times than not, it's not, and 
Kent Thaler: we, it was convenient to dump the stones. 
Ryan Cook: And the same thing with fences. People think the fence is the property boundaries. People always assume that shed back there is either theirs or the neighbor's.
Like they don't know. They wanna be able to put in a [01:15:00] pool, can they do it? It just, there's so many great uses of this and a product that's, so you turn it on, you open up the app and it just works. 
Kent Thaler: We're really excited that we're gonna be the team that's gonna bring all of the teaching and set up instructional videos 
People we'll be able to explain things. Simple, uncomplicated. 
Ryan Cook: Yep. Ways, this is the kind of theme of our show. 
Kent Thaler: Yeah. Because, it's one thing to have a tool, but if you can't use it because you don't understand the instruction manual doesn't do you any good. 
Ryan Cook: So this is right outta the box.
Very simple. Turn it on and acquire satellites. One, I think buyers are gonna get to the point where they're gonna demand that they work with a buyer's agent who has this, because it's additional information, but two on the agent side.
Where you can share this among agents, they don't, each agent doesn't need to have their own individual device. It's not tied to their phone. The app will connect to the device [01:16:00] and you can pass it from team member to team. So you can buy it for a team or you can buy one or a few for your brokerage and make it available to agents who are then gonna be able to go out and provide a higher level of service to their clients.
Kent Thaler: And Ryan will attest. So he's got two in his office right now, they're already starting to ask, Hey, can I use it? Hey, can I use it? 
Ryan Cook: Yeah. 
Kent Thaler: Yeah. 
Ryan Cook: I have one other spare and they can use that one, but they're not getting mine. 
Kent Thaler: And the point is that because of the battery life and because of the way in which the device works, it's
very easy to use. And it's a very good solution for teams, as Ryan said, and offices, because there's nothing else like it on the market. You can't do this at this price with anything else on the market. 
Ryan Cook: And like I said, I think it's gonna become an in demand piece of technology. If you worked with an agent in I started using e-signature in [01:17:00] 2009 and people didn't know what it was, they were unsure, they were uncomfortable using it. But now if you working with an agent in 2025 and they don't have e-signature, you're very likely moving on to somebody who can provide those services.
I think this is gonna be very similar. 
Kent Thaler: Yeah. I hope so, because from my perspective, it makes the process much less complicated, and that's what the name of the game is. Why would you waste time on something that you don't have to? 'cause you can get an answer.
I walk out of stores. If somebody can't answer a question for me in 30 seconds, that's 'cause you're 
Ryan Cook: impatient. 
Kent Thaler: I might be impatient, in this day and age where information's available to you, on your phone or on your watch, right? The idea that I have to wait six weeks for somebody to come out and drop a pin, or a flag in the corner of a property, it's just crazy.
Ryan Cook: It's crazy. It's unreasonable. No seller is gonna wait around for a buyer to do that. So be able to take this and have a very high degree of certainty that what you're able to understand the [01:18:00] lines and understand what you can and can't do with a property. I just can't see how this, it doesn't make sense for.
Everybody to be using this. Our job is to take technology and make it useful as agents to the consumer to make the process of purchasing a home as easy as possible. We're seeing consolidation across the industry in services in order to make things even easier for the buyer.
I think this is one of those game changing technologies and the use of an existing technology. It's not creating technology out of whole cloth. This is an existing technology and finding a way to make it affordable and rapidly usable at a very low barrier to entry and a very low level of complication.
As you said before, it's not complicated. 
Kent Thaler: Before we sign off I wanna talk about the affordability for a minute. Yeah. We got into it a little bit with John. It's just you and me right now. 
Ryan Cook: Yep. 
Kent Thaler: It's $500 for the device. And then it's a hundred dollars a month.
If you're [01:19:00] sharing the device with, in a team, let's say there's three of you on the team, you're talking about, $33 a month, $167, and then $33 a month for four inch accuracy. 
Ryan Cook: Yeah. 
Kent Thaler: That's it's a very 
Ryan Cook: low barred entry for agents if they want to try and, partner up with some other agents.
'cause they don't want that extra cost. But I'll tell you what it's made it easier for me to help clients understand this property won't work or this property will work. And it's allow them to make more confident decisions more quickly. For me, it paid for itself within the first 30 days.
Kent Thaler: Yeah. I mean we've talked a couple of times and it's definitely led to offers. Oh, a hundred 
Ryan Cook: percent. It's 
Kent Thaler: definitely led to offers and at the same time it's led to you not having to spend time chasing down. 
Ryan Cook: Oh, for agents where we used to have to go to town hall to do everything. Yeah. And now didn't have a lot of it is the government information systems platforms that the towns or the [01:20:00] municipalities are using.
You can look this stuff up online, the one thing that hasn't changed is we can download a plot plan off the town websites and we can even print it. But what does that mean? We go in the field, it's not useful. Those plot plans printed out are not useful to ourselves or our clients when we're in the field.
And this makes, it takes those same tax maps you can get from the town. They're available through the app we're utilizing on this. And now that same data has been digitized in combination with the ReFlex device. Now that information that was once not useful is now useful. 
Kent Thaler: Yeah, we could do an entire podcast on the mapping app that we're using.
But I will say this, that the accuracy that we've seen on it is incredible. We've been able to match it up with real world fixed locations, and they're in the right spot, which tells us that everything else is in the right spot. And the ease of use with that application [01:21:00] has also given us and your clients a certain amount of comfort in knowing that everything's gonna work.
Ryan Cook: Sure. And I think another thing that John covered pretty well was the skeptic who says why can't I just use the GPS device on my phone? What if I use the same app you guys are using but without the ReFlex device? And the challenge is the accuracy of your GPS on your phone.
We've sampled it and you saw it in one of the clips in the video, you'll see either a dot with a giant circle around it saying, we think you're in this circle somewhere. We don't know where. That's, that is not helpful. That's fine for driving directions, not fine for looking at a property or we literally watch the dot just meander around the screen.
Because your accuracy with the GPS device built into your phone is only about five or six feet. And again, fine for following the blue line to get, drive where you want to go. Not so great when you walk in a property line. 
Kent Thaler: Yeah. It's revolutionary. It [01:22:00] truly is revolutionary.
It's going to change the way in which people evaluate properties. There's much greater speed. One last thing. It's also gonna change the way in which companies who are doing improvements to properties, how they're able to do their work.
There'll be no excuses that somebody built a fence on the wrong side of a property line anymore. 
Ryan Cook: Yeah. 
Kent Thaler: There'll be no excuses about, somebody putting a swimming pool too close to a septic system or somebody putting a shed, on their neighbor's yard or whatever.
All of those things go away because of this device. And it, the people who are doing the installing should have one. Are they gonna use it every day? No. Are they gonna use it several times a week, probably. And that alone makes it worth, having, it's the same thing with the real estate agents.
You gonna use it every day? No. You're gonna use it every time you take somebody out to show. I don't know. My bet is more than 50% of the time. 
Ryan Cook: Yeah. I, for me, I just, like I [01:23:00] said, I turned mine on when I was heading out with clients and it was ready to go. And if they were curious about the property and we wanted to understand a little bit better we actually just go to my car and grab, it was already on, it was already locked.
I'd bring up the app and away we would go. 
Kent Thaler: Yeah. it's absolutely great technology. 
Ryan Cook: Yeah.
Kent Thaler: Everybody, that was an exciting episode.
Ryan Cook: Kent has an odd, 
Kent Thaler: I'm exhausted. 
Ryan Cook: I'm on definition of exciting. We were talking about technology, so that always exhausts you.
Kent Thaler: On the, coming after, mortgages, this was a really exciting episode.
Ryan Cook: Yeah. See, they didn't get to take part in the barbecue discussion we had before we started recording. See, you were much more into that. 
Kent Thaler: I would like to point out that Ryan threw cold water on our barbecue discussion. 
Ryan Cook: I was ready to go. I got things to do. 
Kent Thaler: Whether you have things to do or not, there's never enough good barbecue talk.
We'll have to do an entire episode on the perfect post-sale, post move in barbecue. Sure. Because I have very strong ideas [01:24:00] as to what should be included in that and who should be invited to that party. 
John Cunningham: But until then. 
Kent Thaler: Until then, we're the real estate navigation team, and this was the real estate. It's not that complicated podcast.
Thank you so much for joining us. 
Ryan Cook: We'll see you next time.