Technology is the backbone of any real estate business that wants to scale, and this episode dives into one of the toughest areas to systemize: renovations. Jordan speaks with Bobby Triplett of Offerpad about how they built a nationwide operation capable of delivering consistent, high-quality results across multiple markets.

The conversation highlights how strong leadership, standardized processes, and local expertise come together to create a reliable renovation system. By focusing on speed, accountability, and buying power, Offerpad helps investors remove one of the biggest bottlenecks in scaling, executing projects efficiently even in unfamiliar markets.

With today’s tighter margins, execution is everything. This episode shows how having the right systems and partners in place can increase confidence, unlock new opportunities, and turn more deals into profitable outcomes.

About Bobby Triplett

Bobby Triplett is the Senior Vice President of Renovations at Offerpad, where he leads large-scale renovation operations across more than a dozen states and multiple markets nationwide. With nearly a decade at the company, he has played a key role in building and scaling one of the most efficient renovation platforms in the real estate industry, overseeing both Offerpad’s internal projects and services delivered to investors across the country.

Known for his operational focus, Bobby specializes in creating systems that drive speed, consistency, and accountability at scale. He has helped transform renovation from a traditionally unpredictable process into a structured, data-driven operation, managing hundreds of projects each month while maintaining quality and cost control through strong vendor relationships and strategic purchasing power.

Beyond operations, Bobby is deeply committed to leadership development and culture. He emphasizes shared knowledge, transparency, and high performance across his teams, fostering an environment where continuous improvement and accountability lead to long-term success. His approach has enabled investors of all sizes to access institutional-level renovation capabilities, making it easier to scale, expand into new markets, and execute with confidence.

Important Links

Watch & Listen

• Offerpad Renovations – Nationwide renovation services across 15 states
• Connect with Bobby Triplett – LinkedIn
• smrtPhone – The only phone system built for real estate investors (5,000 free minutes)
• ThatRealEstateTechGuy.com – All episodes and exclusive tech discounts

I can tell you one thing: technology is the single most important aspect of every business that has successfully scaled. It’s time for That Real Estate Tech Guy. It’s your weekly chance to explore how technology can help your real estate business explode. Each week, you’ll hear from real estate investors who have been there and done that and find out their favorite technology tips.

Listen in as Jordan speaks with tech companies and learns about new technologies and new ideas that will help you scale your business. And now, join your host, Jordan Samuel Fleming, CEO of smrtPhone, for this week’s episode.

Hello, and welcome to this week’s episode of That Real Estate Tech Guy. I’m your host, Jordan Samuel Fleming, and this week I’ve got Bobby Triplett from Offerpad. This is a fantastically fun episode. I think Bobby and I have a kindred spirit connection around whiskey, cigars, and guitars, as we talk about in the episode.

So you know it’s going to be a fun one. But Bobby’s got a great story, and this is one of those companies that I’m really looking forward to introducing to our community, because Offerpad is a company that basically does rehabs and construction work for people in about 18 markets across 15 states.

One of the things Bobby and I talk about is how people are having to change up some of their strategies as the market changes. The idea of buying in new locations is even more powerful now. Finding those locations that fit exactly what you want matters. But how do you do that? Buying a property remotely is easy. Selling it remotely is relatively easy. But as Bobby would say, swinging hammers remotely, getting the work done remotely, that’s hard. Because if you don’t have trusted people, how do you find the right contractor, and so on? Offerpad is exactly set up to give you a one-stop shop to be able to do that.

They’ve got the pedigree, and Bobby really dives into how he built the leadership structure inside his teams as they expanded, the process systems, and the way of building this business so they can do hundreds and hundreds of jobs a month across dozens of markets, while keeping that consistency and quality.

Better, faster, cheaper. I wouldn’t say all three, certainly faster and better, but also cheaper in the sense that they have leverage and buying power. So there are so many things that make this a really interesting opportunity for you if you’re doing flips and you’re not making as much money as you used to because you’re not very good at managing projects. Go speak to Bobby and Offerpad. If you’re looking at broadening out your markets and want to do more vertical integration, they are a perfect solution.

So this is a fun episode. Bobby’s a great guy to speak to anyway. I think you’re really going to like his approach to everything. I genuinely have enjoyed getting to know him, and I think this is one of those things that, if you’re flipping houses and you don’t know Bobby and Offerpad, go look him up. The links are here. I don’t think you’re going to regret it. Nobody I’ve talked to so far who has worked with him has said anything but amazing things.

Let’s dive into the show, live with Bobby Triplett from Offerpad.

Bobby, welcome to the podcast. Give everybody a little introduction to who you are and what you do.

Yeah, Jordan, thanks so much for having me. I’m Bobby Triplett, Senior Vice President of Renovations for Offerpad. We’re a publicly traded iBuyer and real estate tech solution. I oversee the renovation operations in 15 states and 20-something markets, both for the homes that we buy ourselves, renovate, and put back on the market, and then I also oversee all the homes that we renovate for dozens and dozens of investors all over the country as they utilize our renovation services.

It’s a fascinating story how you guys came to Offerpad and how you decided it was time to build that business model out as well. Give everybody a little insight into how Offerpad came to be.

Yeah. I’m going on my 10th year here. Brian Bair, who is our CEO and founder, broke all these real estate records all over the country back in the day, buying for a lot of the big hedge funds when this was first starting there in Phoenix, Arizona. They were trying to find a way to change how homes were bought and sold. I mean, you could buy a car off the internet, you could book a hotel room off the internet, so why couldn’t there be more efficiencies and synergies in the way homes are bought?

Fast forward seven years later, and we were flipping 1,200 houses a month. We were buying them, my teams were renovating them across the country, and we were putting them back on the market. Our goal was to try to leave everything better than we found it. Our approach was very value-forward: clean, safe, functional, and insurable. We wanted to make sure it wasn’t just, “Hey, put a little spit shine on it and stick a new sign in the yard.” We were trying to do something meaningful for that community.

It was wild. We employed and partnered with thousands of trades, agents, and more. Then all of a sudden, the rate hike happens in 2023, and it was time to pivot. Brian comes to me and says, “Hey, this machine that you built, we think it’s time for you to start offering it as a service.” And I was like, “What?” Because I was purely operational. All I was thinking about was how do we get better, save time, save money, and do it right. And now, suddenly, we’re taking that and offering it as a service.

So for the last four years, it’s been both. We’re renovating our own inventory, and I had to completely shift gears, put on a new set of lenses, and start developing relationships around the country. Man, it’s been wild.

And that must be… I mean, the rehab side of things has always struck me as a game that could go any way. Right now we’re building a new house for ourselves over there on that side of the property, and we renovated this little guest house too. Just that experience has made me realize you don’t know what’s there until you know what’s there. You think it’s going to be one thing, and then suddenly something else comes up to bite you.

So I imagine that in the rehab world, you’ve got people who do a good job, and then you’ve got cowboys. Because your roots were doing it for yourselves, that meant you kind of had to stand behind everything in a big way. It’s your company’s name, Brian’s name, your name. How did that inform the machine you built?

Yeah, well, first off, we learned a lot of ways not to do it. I can tell you how to lose money on a renovation just as much as I can tell you how to make money on one. It’s about taking those lessons and finding out what’s most important, what drives us, and what’s going to move the needle.

When I first started, I was just running Tampa. Over the years, I took over every market and helped open every market. One of the things I’m most proud of as a leader is that we would do these annual leadership summits with my renovation directors, and I required everybody to share their biggest struggle, their biggest victory, what they were working on, and their top three best practices of that year. I wanted shared knowledge. I wanted shared wisdom. If one person had learned something valuable, I wanted everybody to have it.

When we started doing that, we matured exponentially as a team. Being able to keep that nucleus of leaders together for years allowed the culture to demand excellence. There are some things in the investment space where you don’t need perfection, but there are major things you absolutely have to do if you’re going to put your name on it. We learned real quick, and we share our scars just as much as we share our trophies.

Yeah, I can imagine. Two things strike me from what you’ve just said. Number one, even just that story of getting the leadership teams together, I suspect a lot of rehab organizations don’t do that kind of leadership work. That alone sets you apart because it brings buy-in and accountability in a way you can’t really match any other way.

But also, scaling something across multiple regions, multiple teams, and multiple leadership layers is hard. Almost anybody can not mess up one office or a small team, unless they really don’t know what they’re doing. But scaling well, that’s super hard. So the leadership elements must have been there. But let me ask you: from a process structure and even technology point of view, you must have had to get really tight with all of that very early on. It couldn’t be something you figured out at the end. It had to be there almost at the beginning so you could grow.

Yes. Some of it was that we’re a real estate tech firm, and nobody was putting tech dollars into renovation. Acquisition is always the sexiest thing. Disposition is the sexiest thing. Renovation had to figure it out. So our mindset was, okay, we’re not going to wait.

I hired and demanded ownership and genuine care from my people. Let’s call it stewardship. If those qualities existed in a human being, from a PM all the way down to someone swinging a hammer, we were going to go far.

From there, we started creating systems and processes. But the biggest game changer for me was realizing that I’m a Florida boy, born and raised here. I know what to expect. We get hurricanes, I sweat like crazy in the summertime, and we’re wimps about the cold. I’m still in a hoodie right now and it’s 60 degrees.

But I found out that a home in Florida is not the same as a home in Texas, Arizona, Minneapolis, Denver, or anywhere else. Every region is different. So every time we opened a market, it was a big deal to find a director who understood that market and had renovated in that market. Then we built a team around him or her. I’ll never forget when we first started. Our headquarters is in Phoenix, Arizona, and my boss at the time had renovated a million houses there and thought you could do the same thing in Florida that you could do in Phoenix. I said, “Man, we’ve got this thing called rain. We’ve got a subtropical climate. It’s completely different.”

We butted heads for a while, but once we got on the same page, we were able to crank. So it’s never one size fits all. There are things that are standardized, but there’s also a unique approach for every market. There are weird local hangups. In the Carolinas and Georgia, they’ve got crawl spaces. You don’t have those in Texas or Florida, and they can be a big problem because that’s where moisture and runoff go. Out west, in places like Denver, they deal with radon gas, which becomes a big issue in basements. Here in Florida, we’ve got hurricanes, so we have to do hurricane mitigation on roofs.

So not only did we want to develop leaders and share knowledge, but finding people who were already experts in their markets was a game changer, instead of trying to run everything out of some corporate headquarters.

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Back to the show.

And in terms of future-proofing that, what you’re talking about sounds very much like the ability to bring in an expert who knows the local market, understands the regulations and specific details, and then build a playbook. So worst case, if that person leaves or something happens, the playbook can stand on its own and be passed to someone else. It can be improved and updated as things change.

If I think about a renovation, I’d bet it’s almost an 80/20 split, where 80% is standard stuff and 20% is local fit.

Yeah, that’s probably fair. For each issue, there’s a lot that is standardized. By having a standard process for the 80%, plus ways of dealing with reporting, managing waste, and everything else, and then having playbooks for the 20%, you’ve got an end-to-end structure that you can keep rolling out again and again.

Yeah, and that’s how we did it. We wanted to share those best practices and failure points so we could refine what that standard looked like. I’m also a big fan of healthy competition. We would put the wins and the warts out there together. Let’s put our numbers on the table. I don’t know if HR appreciated that in the beginning, but I wanted the guys to know if they were dead last, and I wanted to see if it mattered to them. I wanted everyone to feel, “I don’t want to be red. I want to be green.”

One of the first markets I took over after Florida was Atlanta, which is still one of our biggest markets. We do about 100 homes a month there. At the time, I had a team that just could not catch a break. We couldn’t figure out what was happening. We made some leadership changes and territory realignment, but I also brought in all my trades to one big meeting in the conference room.

I printed everybody’s stats on a huge spreadsheet and said, “How many of you think you’re winning? How many of you think you’re hitting standards?” Everybody’s hand went up. I said, “Out of this whole room, only one of you is. The rest of you are going to be disappointed.”

I wasn’t doing it to be a jerk. I wanted to be transparent. I told them, “If we’re going to win together, and we’re spending millions and millions of dollars a month here in Atlanta, and you want a piece of that, then I need you to understand what winning looks like for me. And I don’t just mean doing it cheaper. I mean how we communicate, whether you show up, whether you’re a man or woman of your word.”

It was wild. I had people calling me and apologizing. I had people telling me they’d never be in the red again. I had some people get mad and say they weren’t working for me anymore. Fine, that made my decision easy. It was amazing what happened when accountability showed up.

As we help private investors and midsize investors, on both the flip side and rental side, there often isn’t much reporting or many KPIs in place. They don’t even know what the right KPIs are to judge whether a job is going the way it should. That part has been fun, getting to share some of that and help leave them better than I found them, without them having to spend millions of dollars learning the hard way like I did.

Well, I love that approach too. A-players want to win. They’re never not going to want to win, and they’re never going to be satisfied. You may have a loss occasionally, but that’s usually going to make you angry and want to fix it. And anybody who says, “Well, I’m not going to swing a hammer for you again,” it’s like, great, because you’re not suitable to do that anyway.

I’ve always been a proponent of that kind of transparency. If you don’t want to win, and if you’re not hungry, then you and I can’t do anything together. I’m hungry. If you’re not hungry, then I’m feeding you, and that’s not how we’re going to get anywhere.

Exactly. We’ve all spent energy dragging people along just because they’re nice. I’ve even had friends I’ve had to part ways with in this race. Not in a mean way, but just saying, “Hey man, I don’t know if you’ve got this, or maybe you just don’t want it.” Those are two different things. They might have it, but not want it, and that’s okay. They can try someplace else.

For me, there’s what I call the burden of belief, where Brian, our CEO, and our board believe that if there’s an audacious goal, Bobby can do it. Well, that’s a lot of weight. So as we build our teams and grow, and team sizes change, trades change, regulations change, that’s the thing I’m constantly keeping my finger on the pulse of. Are my people in the right mindset to help me win?

You know, offline after this, I’m going to introduce you to someone. He’s a CEO of a very large and very good company, and he does a lot of leadership work. I think you’d really connect with him.

That would be great.

Now, before we dive into exactly what Offerpad does and the different facets of it, I’ve got to say I always do my research, but your website blocks international visitors. So every time I try to look, I’m usually on a call and if I use a VPN it cuts out. But before we dive into that, what you’re saying tells me you must be operating very differently in the rehab and construction world. Because I’ve dealt with contractors, and until right now, I’ve never had a good experience. It’s always, “Yeah, the job’s delayed,” or “We’ll show up Monday,” and then they don’t show up Monday. So do you feel like you’ve built something really unique in the way you’ve approached that mindset?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing is level-setting expectations and then holding people accountable. One of the biggest metrics I can control is time or speed. They say in renovations you’ve got speed, quality, and cost, and you only get two out of three. I put all my eggs in the speed basket because if I’m prepared, organized, detailed, have the right relationships, and play the game correctly, I can reduce the amount of time a project is in renovation. That takes a lot of work and a lot of manpower, especially at scale.

I learned early on that if my litmus test is just budget, I can come in under budget, but the only thing that suffers is the project. But if I focus on doing it quickly, then those levers I can pull affect everything else. What I found is that it makes the contractors and trades better too. They’re more organized, not tripping over themselves, not double-booking, and there’s a lot more communication.

Then I made a promise: if I’m going to hold you to this standard, I’m going to pay fast. When I was at Invitation Homes, our payment terms were something like net 60, and for a small contractor, that hurts. That eats your cash flow. We brought ours down to net 14, and that was a game changer. If I can pay them fast, that feels good. They’re not worried about when payment is coming, and it makes them want to do my jobs first.

Exactly. Especially for a smaller contractor, one or two late invoices could crush the company.

Yeah. And the other thing is, we can do this without being jerks. I’m all about accountability conversations, and I’ve had plenty of them, but you don’t have to yell and scream. That only escalates the situation.

Any time we opened a market, we’d advertise on LinkedIn, Craigslist, Thumbtack, or wherever, then I’d rent out a ballroom at a hotel. Me and our team would do “Offerpad Renovations 101: How to Be a Contractor for Us.” We’d walk through everything honestly. Here’s how you invoice. Here’s how you get paid. Here’s what a change order is. Here’s what it isn’t. Here’s how you help us win.

We’d get 50 to 80 trades in a room before we even started, and begin building relationships right there. It didn’t always work out. Some people looked great on paper and turned out to be full of hot air. But when you find the real ones, they stick with you forever. I’ve got guys who’ve been swinging hammers for me for 10-plus years. I know I’ve helped put their kids through college. I know I’ve helped pay for a daughter’s wedding. I know I helped them get to that second truck.

So there’s a real sense of loyalty that goes both ways. And I love that. At the end of the day, we’re not just leaving the house better than we found it. We’re leaving a whole community better than we found it. That makes me proud.

That’s fantastic, and a very different approach than you often see in that game, where cowboys are everywhere. It’s refreshing.

Now let’s dive into Offerpad, because you did make that transition. I love the backstory, how you developed the leadership, the structure, the playbooks, and the process. But then you turned it into a service other people could benefit from.

So who are the people that engage with Offerpad? What makes someone a good fit for you guys, and what are the key services you provide?

Yeah. In my neck of the woods, we want to be the renovation solution you can confidently count on. Because I know that if you have confidence in getting the job done right, that’ll make you more confident to go get more deals, source more deals, and expand your empire.

We don’t typically work with the huge hedge-fund-backed REITs. It’s usually the mid- to small-sized operators in single-family rental, some multifamily, fix-and-flip, and private SFR. Those are our bread and butter. We do REO work and some institutional work too, but honestly, what I tell people is we help private and midsized shops get institutional-level renovation services without the overhead. It’s kind of like having a sports car you can rent, but you don’t have to change the oil or the tires.

We help in three main ways. One is as a pressure relief valve. You and I both know that if you’re walking a project waiting on the painter or landscaper, you’re not sourcing another deal. Some of our clients still like to stay involved, but they can only do so much. We touch 300 to 500 houses a month, so we’ve got capacity.

The second is market expansion. If we’re renovating for you in Tampa, but you’ve got a house in Denver, Minneapolis, Vegas, or Dallas, we can do it all. You don’t have to worry about finding boots on the ground. Maybe your buddy brought you a great deal in Indianapolis, but you don’t know a contractor there. Now you can say yes, especially if we’ve already built value and relationship equity together.

I’ve got a client in St. Louis who was doing Section 8 voucher-based rentals. We were doing five to seven flips a month for him there. He went and raised money on Wall Street based in part on our relationship, so he could build a scattered-site portfolio. Now we swing hammers for him in 11 states, and he didn’t have to hire a single extra employee to do that.

The tough part is that you might be buying five to ten houses a month for one quarter, which means you need an employee doing that work. But then maybe for the next two quarters, you don’t buy anything. How do you justify having that employee? That becomes a stewardship issue because now you’re talking about someone’s livelihood and family. We help bridge that gap.

But the most important thing we provide is consistency. Pricing is pre-negotiated. We spend between $60 and $70 million a year on labor, materials, and supplies, so we’re getting wholesale-based discounts. We work directly with manufacturers like Mohawk Flooring and PPG Paint, and we can bring those discounts to our clients.

We’re also consistent in product. We’re not the custom flipper. We’re probably not going to want to do my wife’s dream house. But we are great at creating something that is clean, safe, functional, and looks good enough to be proud of. There aren’t going to be 43 shades of paint on the wall. People get emotional. If you want custom, that’s a different thing. If you’re making a business out of flipping houses, you want someone to walk in and say, “I’m going to buy that house,” not “That’s the exact house I’ve dreamed of my whole life.”

Exactly. You want it neutral enough that they can picture their furniture and family moving in, maybe with a couple upgrades of their own, without worrying if it’s safe, insurable, or functional.

Exactly. We’ve got a gray scheme and a white scheme. That’s it. If they want pink later, they can paint it pink. But don’t paint it pink out of the gate because you’re going to turn off a whole bunch of buyers.

And then there’s timing. That’s what I’m probably most proud of. We’ve spent so much time figuring out how to control what we can control. I can’t control interest rates. I can’t control what Home Depot charges for sheetrock this week. But I can control whether I pre-scheduled with the contractor, gave them all the details, and answered every question.

What we’ve been able to do on speed is something I’m really proud of. I’ve got 10 years of data to prove how consistent we are. I call it DPT, or days per thousand spend. For every $1,000 in approved budget, I’ve got a day or less to get it done. So a $30,000 job gets done in 30 days or less. A $45,000 job gets done in 45 days or less.

The only caveats are if you bought a house that’s code-violated or red-tagged, because then you’ve got a whole different mess, or if you’re in a very municipality-heavy city that requires tons of inspections. That can skew things a bit. But for 90% of the properties we touch, we stand by that DPT consistency, and we’re proud of it.

Think about it. If holding costs are, for round numbers, maybe $100 a day between debt, HOA, utilities, and so on, and then you add in the uncalculated risks like storms, squatters, or vandalism, then reducing renovation time matters a lot. If I can reduce the amount of time it’s sitting there, I can take a mediocre win and turn it into something worth talking about, or I can take a loser and maybe make it break even.

That’s why I’m excited to introduce you to the smrtPhone community. The market we had for years was very forgiving. If you were doing fix-and-flips and got your numbers wrong, or had some mistakes, the market forgave almost everything. You might not make as much, but it would wash out.

That’s not true anymore. So people have to broaden their viewpoint. They have to change exit strategies, maybe move from short-term rentals to something else, or from wholesaling into fix-and-flips, or whatever it may be. The internet and modern tools have opened up virtual investing. There’s no reason you can’t invest in markets that fit your strategy. But if you’re fixing and flipping, it brings the challenge of execution at a distance.

Buying remotely is easy. Selling remotely is easy. Rehabbing remotely? Ouch. That’s why I love being able to bring you guys into our community. I think people are looking for new ways to operate, and you offer an opportunity for them to broaden where they can work because they know they can have a consistent partner who can execute.

Once you do one deal with you, I imagine the appetite becomes, “Oh, now I can buy those next three properties because I can just call Bobby and say, you guys handle it and let’s make some money.”

Yeah, and that’s my goal. One hundred percent. I want you to be confident in me, because if you are, then you’re going to go do exactly that. We just finished a project for one of our other clients, and he was singing our praises to someone else. Man, I was so grateful for that recommendation. That’s the win for me. If I can get you to feel confident, and the proof is in the pudding, then the sky’s the limit for us.

Fantastic. Well, listen, man, it was an absolute joy to have you on the podcast. I’m grateful for the family connection we both have, because it’s widened my circle of really good people who can stand behind what they do. I’ve yet to meet a cowboy in that circle. They’re pretty solid. That means it’s an immediate yes for me when it comes to introducing someone to my community, because I know I can trust it. And I can’t wait to introduce you.

Man, thank you so much for having me. I was honored when that family connection brought us together. I don’t know why we hadn’t met before, but I’m super glad we did. From one fellow guitar player, cigar smoker, and scotch appreciator to another, I’ll be excited to break bread or have a great time in person soon.

Yeah, I was going to say, that’s a podcast in itself. Whiskey, cigars, and guitars on the internet.

There you go. Cigars and guitars with Jordan and Bobby. Let’s do it.

All right, brother, thanks so much. Everybody, please do make sure you hit up Offerpad and Bobby. I’m going to put all the links in the podcast details. And of course, if you are part of the smrtPhone community, we’re going to be bringing Offerpad into the community very soon so you can hear a lot more and get direct access.

Thanks everybody for listening, and Bobby, have a great day.

Thanks, brother. Appreciate it, man.

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