On this episode of The Boulos Beat, host Greg Boulos sits down with George Matelich, co-founder of Rely, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the commercial real estate due diligence process. George asserts his platform significantly accelerates due diligence, reducing a process that traditionally takes 60–90 days to as little as one day Throughout the conversation, Greg and George discuss how AI can help mitigate transaction risk, improve efficiency, and uncover opportunities that might otherwise be overlooked.
Episode 76: Featuring George Matelich, Co-Founder of Rely
On this episode of The Boulos Beat, host Greg Boulos sits down with George Matelich, co-founder of Rely, to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping the commercial real estate due diligence process. George asserts his platform significantly accelerates due diligence, reducing a process that traditionally takes 60–90 days to as little as one day
Throughout the conversation, Greg and George discuss how AI can help mitigate transaction risk, improve efficiency, and uncover opportunities that might otherwise be overlooked.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
George Matelich, Rely software, real estate automation, due diligence, AI integration, multifamily property management, Nexus Maine, angel investing, startup ecosystem, property management industry, software engineering, networking, entrepreneurship, business growth, technology trends.
SPEAKERS
Greg Boulos, George Matelich
Greg Boulos00:01
I'd like to welcome our listeners to the Boulos Beat podcast. I'm your host, Greg Boulos. Boulos Company is Northern New England's largest commercial real estate services firm, with offices in Portland, Maine, as well as Manchester and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. We've been selling and leasing real estate in Maine and New Hampshire since 1975 This podcast is designed to provide insight into means leaders, it's movers and shakers. And speaking of business leaders, I'd like to welcome George Matelich, co-founder of Rely, a real estate software company, to the Boulos Beat. George, great to have you with us today.
George Matelich00:34
Great to be here,
Greg Boulos00:36
George. You're a young man of 29 years old, although in about a week that's going to change. Happy birthday.
George Matelich00:42
Thank you.
Greg Boulos00:42
What brought you and your wife, Ann, to Maine from San Francisco? How did you happen to choose Kennebunk to move to?
George Matelich00:48
So we came on a trip to Kennebunk, Maine, New Year's 21 to 22 After like 18 months of building up this idea of Maine in our heads, we really wanted to come on vacation here. We lived in San Francisco at the time, and we thought we're going to move back to the East Coast. We came on a trip in the middle of the winter, and we loved it, and we thought, and if we like it now, imagine how we'll feel when it's nice out. Nine months later, we saw our dream house on the market, and decided we'd take a look, and after spending a cumulative four days in the state of Maine, we bought a house and moved across the country.
Greg Boulos01:25
How long ago was that?
George Matelich01:26
Two and a half years ago, I guess. We bought the house just over three and a half years ago, moved two and a half years, almost
Greg Boulos01:31
four years.
George Matelich01:31
Yep.
Greg Boulos01:32
And you were in the software business in San Francisco.
George Matelich01:35
Yes, yeah, I moved, moved to the West Coast after college to start a software engineering role at a big software company, and have been in software and product roles since.
Greg Boulos01:44
And you grew up where,
George Matelich01:45
in New York, just north of the city.
Greg Boulos01:47
We've heard you describe yourself as a hyper extrovert. Tell us what that's all about.
George Matelich01:53
I like talking to people, I like talking, but generally I like people. I feel like I get a lot of enjoyment and fulfillment out of relationships in life, and yeah, I don't know. I think a self-defense mechanism of mine has been just aggressive networking, because I didn't want to feel lonely moving to a new place.
Greg Boulos02:15
Well, I know it's work, because you know a lot of people already. Who's been a key influencer or mentor in this journey of yours. Oh
George Matelich02:23
man, there's a, there's a bunch of them, but it's something that my family references all the time, is the book written by Peter J. Solomon, who started Salomon Brothers, who's my dad's first boss, and it's called Wasting Time Constructively, and that idea has been very influential in my life. Basically, it means building a lot of relationships and doing things with people you find interesting, with no agenda for where it may go, and I think that's a big part of how I choose to spend my time.
Greg Boulos02:53
So, wasting time constructively. So, in other words, I take that to mean if somebody invites you to coffee someday, you'll do it because you don't know where that relationship will, will go,
George Matelich03:02
correct? At least the first time, can't, can't promise the second time, but you know you find someone interesting, you think highly of them. There's no reason not to build and maintain that relationship. I think the most important relationships in my life have come from the most unexpected places, at least professionally,
Greg Boulos03:20
I always told my children, I said, you know, if you get an opportunity to do something after work, networking or go on a blind date or whatever, do it, because one thing leads to another, and they haven't always taken me on my advice, but it sometimes, sometimes works
George Matelich03:38
well. Moving here, you know, I went to run clubs, trivia, random happy hours for startup people. I went to things in Boston. You know, I tried a little bit of everything, because you have no idea where your people are going to be, and eventually you start to gravitate towards the things that you like a little bit more and a little more, until you've got a community and you look back a year or two, and you're amazed at how far you've come, but it just, it's through a bunch of trial and error.
Greg Boulos04:06
On a personal note, before we get into the business side of things, you, you told me you have a strong interest in Dairy Queens. Can you tell me what that's all about?
George Matelich04:13
Well, my first memory of ice cream is is a Dairy Queen dipped cone, like the chocolate hard shell on the vanilla ice cream, and I was probably four or something, and so that's always been my favorite ice cream thing, and everyone who knows me knows I really love ice cream. So I think I started to realize that at some point in my professional endeavors I would actually just like to be a Dairy Queen franchise owner, because I think it'd be fun,
Greg Boulos04:44
and you once said, quote, I wasn't put on this earth to build someone else's dream.
George Matelich04:50
Yeah, I started to appreciate that everybody I admired professionally had done. Something of their own, they'd created something in the world of varying scales, of varying complexities, but they'd done something that was their own, and I started to realize I got all of my professional energy from doing things that were for me, but they still weren't my full-time job, and how I spent most of my time, and I finally had had enough of pretending that I could get where I wanted to go on someone else's clock.
Greg Boulos05:25
Hawk Hill Ventures, Paul Klein is involved in that. What's that all about?
George Matelich05:32
Paul and I are friends. We met in San Francisco, and Hawk Hill Ventures was our sort of informal, formal way to kind of talk about our angel investing. We basically both were having fun writing small checks to startups we liked, founders we liked, and it gave us an opportunity to put a little brand around it, but really, for the most part, it's just the two of us writing small personal checks and having fun sort of forming perspectives in the startup world,
Greg Boulos06:02
and as you said, all angel investing type. Yep,
George Matelich06:04
yeah, it's all early stage, like pre seed and seed investing in startups.
Greg Boulos06:08
And next one I want to ask you about is Nexus main, which is pretty impressive, because you got like over 1000 members.
George Matelich06:14
Yeah, Nexus main was that's the aggressive networking hyper extrovert thing, you know, we, my, when my wife and I moved here, we literally did not know anyone other than each other, and I met a guy through a random connection in San Francisco that happened to live in Kennebunk, and the two of us both wanted to meet more people like us, he happened to work in tech and had lived on the well towards the West Coast, and we had a lot of like common experience, and so we decided we would try to set up an online community in Slack, and we helped, we with the help of Startup Maine and the Rue Institute, and a few other folks launched this thing, thinking, you know, if we got 100 people in, it'd be a success. And now it's over 1000 people. We've got, we host events, we publish a newsletter every two weeks. It's, it's been helpful for people getting jobs. I mean, it's been incredibly rewarding, because we've found that it's helped a lot of people locally. But then, personally, it's, it's exactly what I could have hoped for it to be. You know, it's been a way to meet a ton of people quickly in a place where I was entirely unknown two years ago.
Greg Boulos07:28
I believe it was in January 2025 You started Relie with your partner, David Lobosco. I understand it's a company focused on automating due diligence for large apartment buildings. I think this is really interesting, and would be for our audience. Can you tell us more about that?
George Matelich07:46
Yeah, so I guess a little like background on myself. In 2021 I started at a company called Updator, and I was product lead there, focused on building software that really was geared towards resident experience, as well as ancillary revenue generation for large multifamily property managers. We helped people move in and out of large communities, and we directed them towards preferred. We directed them towards preferred service providers, so that was renters insurance programs, and cleaning services, moving services, TV, internet, that experience had me in front of Greystar and Bazooto, and a bunch of sort of blue chip property management firms. Got to know the industry really well, started to really like it, and now to tie in the wanted to do something of my own. Someone I met here, named David Engle, introduced me to his old head of product and engineering, who is David Lobosco, and the two of us started just working on ideas together for about a year before we started the business, and some of the ideas were ridiculous, but a lot of the energy that I spent pulled me back straight into property management, because it's an industry I liked. It's an industry I knew. My wife referenced my love for property management software, and our wedding vows. So, I guess I was like destined to do this, but as I spent more and more time with people I'd gotten to know via my time at Updater, we got pulled really hard into the problem of due diligence, and due diligence specifically in the context of lease file audits, utility audits, contract audits, and financial audits, and really in the world of multifamily, it's sort of a mad dash to go through 1000s or hundreds of 1000s of documents to figure out sort of what is happening at the property, what is true, what is not true, and determining one, if there's a bigger opportunity than you realize when you're buying something, or actually a way worse set of risks than you're comfortable assuming, and so that is the problem we set out to solve, basically trust and truth. Finding in this exercise, because at the end of the day, no one has the time or energy or honest ability to go through everything. We can do that now with AI.
Greg Boulos10:11
So, as an example, if somebody were to put a large apartment complex under contract, it's typical for them to have 60 to 90 days due diligence to look over all the paperwork, et cetera, and you told me that that 90 day period and doing all that due diligence can be compressed down to a day.
George Matelich10:32
Yep, yeah, because of your
Greg Boulos10:34
software,
George Matelich10:35
because of our software, notwithstanding unit walks, or like actually going to the site itself, lease file audits, utility audits, contract audits, and very soon financial audits could be complete the day you receive the data.
Greg Boulos10:46
I would think that'd be huge for the industry.
George Matelich10:48
That's that's the goal,
Greg Boulos10:50
and the advantages of that for a seller is that obviously shorten the window of the due diligence and you close quicker. What's the disadvantage of to a buyer on that?
George Matelich11:03
So, the disadvantage to a buyer is, let's say you don't have, like, if you're a syndicator, you don't have the time to line up your financing in that window, which is fairly common. The advantage to a well-capitalized middle market buyer is you become more attractive to the seller, so if it's a, it's a hot market, it's a competitive set of offers. If you say you know you can shorten my DD window to a few weeks or whatever, I mean, you're not concerned about lining up financing, then it's a competitive advantage. So, it's.. it really depends on the market dynamics and probably the maturity of the fund on the buy side.
Greg Boulos11:39
Yeah, because a lot of times somebody will, or a company will put a property under contract and not have their financing in place.
George Matelich11:45
Yep,
Greg Boulos11:46
and they may not disclose that,
George Matelich11:47
correct.
Greg Boulos11:48
So, for the buyer, they've really got to have their act together quicker,
George Matelich11:52
correct. But if you think about who is doing this work more than anyone else, it is third-party property managers on behalf of the buyer, and the buyer wants the manager to be done as fast as humanly possible, and the manager wants to be done as fast as possible, because if they aren't, it is a bottleneck to their growth and ability to assume more clients. So the real speed advantage is selling to a management company, because they are already sort of a low margin human labor intensive business.
Greg Boulos12:26
What was the moment when you said to yourself this needs to exist?
George Matelich12:30
We talked to the team at Bazooto about this in February of last year, and if that's not clear, we pivoted in April to doing this. When we started the company, we had a different, worse idea, but
Greg Boulos12:44
what was the worst idea? The
George Matelich12:45
worst idea was this universal search product. Basically, there's a lot of niche software systems people use to manage communities. Could we integrate with all of them and create a central place for them to search and retrieve information that was impossible to measure the ROI of like truly impossible, and it was quote interesting to everybody, which means nobody wants it. But the moment we realized we had to do this was because we talked to that team at Bazooto, learned that transition and diligence exercises are functionally the same, and then we tried to go find a few other firms with this problem, and we found 30 in a week, all of whom said, "If you had this right now, I would buy it. So we realized that was much better than what we were currently working on, and we went full steam ahead, starting April of last year on this.
Greg Boulos13:35
Are you a programmer?
George Matelich13:36
I originally was a software engineer, but I am by no means the technical brains of the operation, that is David,
Greg Boulos13:43
and are you, whatever, what is your role?
George Matelich13:46
I guess I would be more of like the sales persona of a CEO now. I, I fundraise, I sell the product, and then I do like customer success and support.
Greg Boulos13:55
You're certainly not an introvert.
George Matelich13:56
No, you know, it's funny, I kind of wish in hindsight that I had gotten a sales job out of college, I think I would have enjoyed it more, because I like talking to people, and I would have learned a lot about facing rejection earlier, because the entire job of starting your own business is getting rejected 99 times out of 100
Greg Boulos14:16
and bouncing back,
George Matelich14:17
yeah, and just being like, huh, well, their loss, right, and just continually saying, like, I know what I'm doing is right. Respond to some stimulus in the world and try to have it like shape your direction a bit more.
Greg Boulos14:28
So, let's talk about the competition. There must be other firms out there that do what you do or not.
George Matelich14:33
It's starting to pick up a little bit, though. We haven't run head to head into too many other competitors yet. We're primarily competing with third-party service firms, so think large teams of people or offshore teams that do this by hand,
Greg Boulos14:48
and what makes yours different or better than the few that are out there who you compete with
George Matelich14:53
today? A lot of the other sort of theoretically competitive software platforms are built to do. Do want a number of things, one of which is due diligence, which means the due diligence workflows are fairly narrow in scope. Our due diligence workflow for multifamily is supposed to be as all-encompassing as humanly possible. We really would like to cover every field you could possibly want to audit from any of these contracts, every financial value, every type of statement, every structure of rent roll. There's a lot of variance across how people decide to orchestrate their leasing operations, and really just run the building, which means there's a lot of variation in the docs and the statements you receive. If this is all we do, we can be the best at it, rather than this being one of many things we try to offer,
Greg Boulos15:44
and you recently told me that the property management industry generates about $100 billion annually, even with that enormous amount of money, it's a small, tight-knit community, you said, where competitors generally remain friendly. Do you think that's unusual?
George Matelich15:59
Yeah, so you know, I think it's, it does depend on the sub segment of the market. There's an example, is like the student housing world is a tight community, because it's not that big. There, people have done incredibly well in student housing. There's some people who have made, you know, absolute fortunes, but everybody has to know everybody and play nice with one another, because you have to figure out how to work with each other at some point in your journey. We, I've not found that everybody is, you know, buddy buddy in general conventional multifamily and across like other subtypes, but but it's more communal than any other industry I've ever worked in, and I would say by and large, people do tend to like each other,
Greg Boulos16:42
and is that forced because they are eventually going to have to work with each other.
George Matelich16:47
I wish I could, I could tell you what I thought the exact reason was. Again, not everybody is best friends, but this conference circuit in multifamily has become a way for people to like hang out with their best buddies that they've gotten to know in the industry over the years, and I kind of wonder how that formed. I don't exactly know what the impetus was. Someone who's been in it for longer than me probably does, but now there's, you know, a few events a month, and it seems like people are at all of them, and they're posting pictures, and they're having dinners, and all. I think that is a big part of the dynamic, but then yes, properties flip in and out of portfolios, manage portfolios on the order of like 30% a year, so you could have a, you could manage 500 buildings and you'd lose 150 a year if you did nothing, so you're going to have to continually add new business in, and that means when you're losing properties, you have to work with incoming management and figure out how to share the information back and forth.
Greg Boulos17:47
Tell me, how AI figures into everything that you do with the software. I mean, I'm assuming it would not be possible to do the due diligence so quickly without AI,
George Matelich17:57
correct? Without us, it's human labor, and you could surge offshore resources to try to be faster, but at the end of the day, you're that would mean you're beholden to people's ability to process information that is not a bottleneck anymore. Our bottleneck is compute capacity, our ability to get GPUs to run through this information, but the AI is sort of at the core of everything that we do. AI for document processing, to read and scan the information, to organize the information, and then search the information to run the audits. This would not have been possible, even really, a year ago.
Greg Boulos18:39
And where do you see it going a year from now, or which is a long time with AI, or five years from now?
George Matelich18:45
A year from now, I think our platform will be exponentially better than it is today, and better can mean more accurate, better can mean faster, better can mean friendlier user experience, and I think it will mean all of those things. I think, in five years this will just be a solved problem. I think we will have solved it for not just multifamily, but other real estate subtypes. I think we can do this very well for industrial, for office. We're starting with multifamily, one, because that's where my relationships are strongest. Two, it is a very quantifiable end product that we can produce for somebody, and it gets a little fuzzier as you step into, let's say, you're auditing a 10 lease office building, you know, we're basically just legal technology at that point, helping you read bespoke legal contracts as compared to financial technology,
Greg Boulos19:41
and do you sell the software, or do you lease it?
George Matelich19:43
We sell the software. Well, I mean, I guess technically, I guess technically we lease it like it's web-based software, and it's primarily transactional in how we price it today, so people use it when they need to, and they pay us accordingly.
Greg Boulos19:56
And do you see Rely expanding within the real. State industry, you mentioned office, but you've got office, you've got retail, you've got warehouse. I would think it would be a natural to expand into those other segments.
George Matelich20:08
I do, but I don't think we earn the right to do that until we've proven that we've gotten it right for multifamily and we have work to do to get the rest of the diligence sort of service area covered. And then I think we will earn the right to go do this in other other asset classes.
Greg Boulos20:24
What criteria do you use to know that you're on the right path, that you're doing okay?
George Matelich20:29
I would like 100% of our customers to be referenceable and happy and excited, and I also would like to have more customers, right? But we launched the platform in January, we've already got dozens of folks on January this year, January 2026 Yes, we actually launched in January. We've got dozens of firms now, and we are, we're growing quickly, but we have a ton of work to do to get people really excited about not just the core function we've delivered today, but all of the things we add and make sure as we add to the platform we're very in sync with all of those customers. I would say it'll be at least a year before I feel really confident that we are doing everything right for everyone, and in the meantime, our job is to be as close to our customers as humanly possible, because if we're not, someone else will figure out how to make them happier than we can,
Greg Boulos21:21
so you started the company January 2025 I think. Yep, January 2026 you launch it, the software that's pretty quick.
George Matelich21:31
Yeah, the we really started building functionally this product in May of last year. We got a partner in a company called The Cardinal Group out in Colorado, that was very important, sort of in our evolution. They gave us the time and energy to really build an institutional scale, institutional grade diligence platform, and so they gave us more insight into the amount of data we should expect to see, the ways we needed to support their workflow to actually be a replacement to the human heavy process, and it took us, I mean, it took us probably five months of building quietly in partnership with them, getting their feedback periodically. We went to their office in Colorado a few times, and then we finally launched the platform with them and got the right kind of feedback to say, okay, this is in a good place. We're ready to go.
Greg Boulos22:24
In your career in business, was there a mistake that you made that was a learning experience, or do they call it a learning moment, or something like that? I
George Matelich22:35
honestly think the biggest mistake that I made in my professional journey that informs a lot of how I behave today was in my first job, when I switched from a software engineering role to a product management role. There was a person on my team that was supposed to be sort of my mentor. I don't exactly know what led to that relationship devolving as it did, but it got to sort of the point of, of no return, like it was irreparable, and we did not face the conflict head on, early and in person, and just like figure out how to work through any sticking points, and instead it just festered and became a mess. I have become incredibly communicative, perhaps overly communicative, but I'd way rather that than the opposite, because of that experience, and yeah, I don't know, I think the biggest mistake professionally that I can think of is just not figuring out how to fix that situation, because it led to 18 months of discomfort before I finally left, and was like, I can't do this,
Greg Boulos23:45
but think about this: if you had not had that experience, you would not be where you are right now.
George Matelich23:50
Yeah, probably not. It is probably the most informative experience of my professional life, and informs how I treat people all the time now, because I would never just let something. I literally will not let something fester. I need to talk about it the second it happens.
Greg Boulos24:07
Yeah, as uncomfortable as that might be, it's even more uncomfortable to deal with the aftermath if you don't address the issue.
George Matelich24:13
My own anxiety doesn't let me hold on to issues anyways, so like I get so physically uncomfortable letting something languish, so I actually don't mind being confrontational and quick about stuff, but I also think you know how I'm getting better and better at figuring out how to deliver that in a way that is like received and learning the person who's going to be on the other side of that, that for what it's worth feels like one of the most important exercises for me, always, you know, it's the, the cross between, like, how do you hit something head on while also, say, delivering it in a way that is, you know, nonviolent, and basically, like, can be heard by the person on the other side,
Greg Boulos24:55
and do you carry this on, or through to your personal relationship with your wife, Ann?
George Matelich25:00
Have to, that's honestly one of the most, one of the most important ways for me to learn some of this as well. I am very direct, I can be impulsive to things that sometimes can be great at work and sometimes not productive in a personal relationship, so I also need to switch my brain more effectively between settings. Sometimes
Greg Boulos25:28
I tell the people at Boulos, people on my team, communication is half the battle in life. The older I get it, the more I realize that,
George Matelich25:37
yeah, no one cares what your intention was, because if you delivered it poorly, all they remember is how you delivered,
Greg Boulos25:42
you know, you're obviously a pure entrepreneur, but entrepreneurship comes with its highs and lows. How do you stay steady through it? Because I don't know you real well, George, but you seem to be pretty steady.
George Matelich25:55
My wife would be a more candid look at, like, my personal ups and downs. I like volatility. I think it keeps things like exciting in life. What I'm realizing I struggle with more is to the previous point, dull uncertainty for a long period of time. So that's the thing that affects me a little more, but I really like the excitement, the day of an entrepreneur can truly be nine ups and downs, where you feel like you're going to make all of your investors really wealthy, really fast, and then you're going to lose everyone's money at the same time, like you can have that fear within an hour of that high, and learning how to bring those reactions closer together and respond a little less to the stimulus in the world is sort of the exercise that I'm finding most important. The things that rattled me a year ago don't affect me at all, but I'm sure if I'm doing my job right, the things that rattle me today won't rattle me in a year. Hopefully, they don't rattle me in a month. So I think it's just figuring out how to actually internalize the idea that nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems,
Greg Boulos27:10
so true,
George Matelich27:11
even if it feels like it.
Greg Boulos27:13
Would you have daily habits or routines that keep you grounded and focused?
George Matelich27:17
If I don't exercise in the morning, I am a.. I am very hard to be around. I feel like I'm like one of those high-energy dogs that needs to get run or something. I wake up fairly early every day. Time to
Greg Boulos27:30
get up.
George Matelich27:31
I used to get up around five every day. Now we have six month olds, so I get up at like 440 so I can get to the gym at five, and I always work out, and then kind of start my day at work. My best hours are in the morning. In the afternoon, I feel like my brain slowly deteriorates. I'd way rather wake up at three in the morning to get to work than I would stay up until one or two doing work at night.
Greg Boulos27:57
You also bike, don't you?
George Matelich27:58
Yes, yeah, I like to road bike and endurance sports in general. I ran my first marathon last year. I've done a bunch of like endurance cycling events.
Greg Boulos28:07
Is that more of a difficult exercise now with a baby?
George Matelich28:10
Yes, I am solving for efficiency in my exercise now. So, my I always have like a fitness goal for the year this year. My goal is to do 52 Murphs, a Murph a week. Do you know what a Murph is? No,
Greg Boulos28:22
tell
George Matelich28:23
me a Murph created by.. I actually should know the history of this, if I'm doing somebody's guy in the military, I don't even know his first name, but it is a an exercise where you do, you run a mile, you do 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, and 300 body weight squats, and then you run a mile, and you do it for time, and there's all these variations. You can wear a weighted vest, you can not. You can group the exercises differently. Now that I've done 23 this year so far, I try to spice it up a little bit with I'll add an exercise, I'll run two miles instead of one, I'll do the rowing machine instead of run. I try to keep it interesting,
Greg Boulos29:00
and how long do you work out for
George Matelich29:02
45 to an hour?
Greg Boulos29:05
What, going back to the business side of things, what trends are you seeing in AI that others in the real estate business might be missing?
George Matelich29:14
You know, I think every organization is fairly different. We are seeing some organizations. Honestly, I give a huge shout out to the team at Cardinal. Alex, their CEO, always says AI is not taking your job. People who know how to use it will, and I think that type of culture will win today. And so I think what some firms are doing, which is reasonable, is placing a moratorium on any new software until they better understand the landscape, but waiting a month is like waiting a year plus in today's world, and I think figuring out how to encourage your teams to use AI in some way, shape, or form is probably the most important thing you can do today. Yeah, so I really think there's just a giant divide between, hey, we're only going to deploy Microsoft Copilot as a company, and you're not allowed to use Claude or OpenAI, and you can't give me a real reason why that is. People just feel like that's important, or I want you to use AI everything, and we're going to figure out in a year what's what we should keep and what we should cut. Personally, as someone who's in this world all the time, I far prefer the experimentation and keep what works and cut what doesn't, more than I favor the do nothing and wait,
Greg Boulos30:35
because a year with AI is a lifetime.
George Matelich30:37
Literally, I mean, if you think about the fact that was it late 2023 ChatGPT came out. It hasn't even been three years. The world has changed dramatically, and now you know the actual business impacts yet to be seen on a lot of companies. A lot of people are enjoying the opportunity to blame AI for over hiring over the last five years, but there will be very dramatic impacts on the world of work in a way that I can't even imagine what it'll look like for our son.
Greg Boulos31:10
What do you think are the biggest tech opportunities right now? Right now, if you had to name a couple,
George Matelich31:17
I think there depends on who you talk to, but I think there's a lot of value in being really focused. So, to talk my own book for a second, the reason we are just doing this for multifamily and focused on very specific workflows is because if we said we do a little bit of everything, we wouldn't actually solve the last mile problem. The last mile problem, getting from 99 to 100% of sort of the workflow someone expects is 100% of the value you can provide as a software business today, because otherwise you can use OpenAI, you can use anthropics products to deliver 95 99% of the value anyways on your own, so I think if you can find a very niche workflow in a large market that's not large enough for OpenAI to care about, that is where all the opportunity sits. I can't remember which firm just published something, was Sapphire Ventures, just published something that basically said there's like a Goldilocks TAM that is sort of between a few billion and a few, like 10s of billions, where it's large enough to build a giant business, but it is small enough that OpenAI is not going to care about it, because OpenAI needs to look at things with trillions of dollars of opportunity.
Greg Boulos32:37
What's next for Rely? What should we be watching for
George Matelich32:42
I think you should continually watch us grow our presence in multifamily and start to tie parties together. Our goal is to create truth in these transactions, and ideally that means we are starting to certify more of the work that we're doing and get people to say I trust the work that they touch. I don't want to see it if it was just done by a team of people.
Greg Boulos33:06
If we had your back on the Boulos beat in a couple of years, what would you have hoped to have accomplished?
George Matelich33:13
I would love to be the obvious choice in multifamily across stakeholders, that means buyers, sellers, managers, folks in the financing world, servicers, I think we would like to be well distributed across multifamily, and I would love to be talking to you about the other verticals that we're growing our footprint in,
Greg Boulos33:34
and your customer base is pretty much out of the state of Maine, I would imagine.
George Matelich33:38
Correct? Yeah, we, we have one customer in New Hampshire, we don't have any in Maine currently.
Greg Boulos33:44
I'm sure that will change, but the reason for that is we just don't have
George Matelich33:48
there are no institutional management companies here, and I don't even know if there are any with even like a single property presence
Greg Boulos33:57
personally five years from now. Where do you want to be? 10 kids,
George Matelich34:02
10 kids
Greg Boulos34:03
living in Kennebunk,
George Matelich34:04
living in Kennebunk. I would tell you, my goal is that we have, we have our second, our first is five and a half. Family life is going well, we're making progress on our 200 year old home, and then you know, I think Nexus is still running, that you know, the community is hopefully bigger and more valuable for this startup ecosystem. Rely can stand on its own two feet and is a, is a healthy business with a stable trajectory ahead of it, and you know, I'm just like enjoying all of this and appreciative for the opportunity.
Greg Boulos34:40
Is your end goal with rely to be bought out by a much bigger company, or or to keep it, or you don't know?
George Matelich34:48
I don't know, sort of eyes wide open to what that could be. I'm sort of of two minds: one, I think we can build a really large business here, and two, I think people incinerate a lot. Of value, just listening to their ego on how big they think they can make their business when the world tells them something else. So, our goal will be to build the largest business humanly possible, and to balance the time spent on it with the opportunity we have to make all of our investors whole, plus some.
Greg Boulos35:18
George, we'll end on this question. What's one bold prediction you have for the industry?
George Matelich35:25
I'll talk specifically in the context of Rely, because that's how I spend most of my time thinking. I believe we have the opportunity to clean up everybody's data around the operations of their asset, and if we're successful in connecting parties in these deals, so that means the lenders, the servicers, the operators. We might have the opportunity to help people reduce the service, reduce the servicing burden, and in turn drop the rate that they're actually lending at. That is a future we would like to try to achieve and use our product to do that.
Greg Boulos36:05
Thank you, George, for being on the Boulos beat.
George Matelich36:08
Thank you. Great to be here. If
Greg Boulos36:10
you'd like to learn more about George, you can Google him at George Reli, and I'm sure he'll come up on there. And if you'd like to learn more about the Boulos company, please be sure to visit us@Boulos.com You can also find us at The Boulos Company on Facebook and LinkedIn, and at The Boulos Co on Instagram. And lastly, if you want to know the secret to owning real estate, it's pretty simple: just be sure to outlive your debt.
Bio for Host – Greg Boulos
Greg Boulos joined The Boulos Company in 1983. He is a Senior Partner and involved in the sale and leasing of commercial property in the Greater Portland area. He is also a co-developer of over 1M square feet of commercial real estate. Greg has consistent commercial real estate brokerage sales and leasing transactions in excess of $50M per year. His area of specialization is the brokerage of investment properties and tenant representation.
Prior to joining The Boulos Company, Greg was the New England office leasing representative for the Boston-based NET Properties Management Company (now Heritage Realty Management, Inc.) from 1979 to 1980. He was Director of Office and Retail Leasing for Dickinson Development Corporation of Quincy, Massachusetts from 1980 to 1982.
Greg is the father of two children, Nick and Drew. While not working Greg can be found most winter weekends in North Conway, NH skiing, summer boating on Casco Bay in Portland, or sport fishing in Costa Rica and, on occasion, trekking to Kilimanjaro and Everest Base Camp.
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