Robbie Leer | From Months to Minutes

Today's guest built an AI that pre checks your plans in 30 seconds, and his clients are cutting that timeline in half.

Here's why this matters to me.

I talk to builders every week who've systematized their estimates, tightened up their subs, dialed in their project management, and yet they're still bleeding cash waiting on permits they have zero visibility into.

It's the one bottleneck most builders have completely given up trying to fix.

Robbie Leer didn't give up.

He spent a decade at, Airbnb and Cloud Kitchens watching permits kill project timelines.

So he decided to solve it.

But here's what really surprised me about our conversation.

The AI PreCheck is impressive.

It flags compliance issues before the city ever sees your plans.

But Robbie's building something bigger.

He's working toward a, future where permits happen in real time, not weeks, not days, minutes.

And he drops exactly how they're standing up.

New jurisdictions in 48 hours, anywhere in the country.

That part alone blew my mind.

So if you're tired of permits being the black box that kills your project timelines, this one's for you.

And if you're new here, hit subscribe.

We break down systems like this every week.

Let's get into it with Robbie.

Welcome to beyond the Bid.

You're listening to Beyond the Bid, the show by GO First, where we share the systems, strategies and practical AI for builders.

Keep listening to learn how to win more of the right projects, boost profitability and scale.

Beyond the Bid.

so welcome to beyond the Bid.

Thanks so much for being here, Robbie.

Really appreciate you, spending some time with us.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

I'm excited.

Yeah, it's going to be a fun one.

this, the concept of just permitting and construction with just adus and the onset of AI.

It's really just a fascinating topic.

but for those who haven't met you yet, can you just kind of give a quick 30 second spiel of who you are and what you've been up to?

Yeah.

I'm Robbie Leer.

I'm the founder and CEO of TurboPermit.

We're getting housing permits faster and we'll get into the detail of how we're doing that.

But, I guess started my career with Accenture.

focus on enterprise systems primarily, really getting retailers, caught up to Amazon.

Thought it'd be more fun to work with those that were innovating and went back to school and got a Kellogg MBA.

And then I've spent the last 10 years, with real estate startups.

So you might know Airbnb.

I moved to LA with CL Kitchens, which is where I saw this permitting pain point.

and you know, kind of realized that technology needed to be introduced and so have been, building a solution for the pain that is permitting, really the last year and a half here.

That's amazing.

So, on that note, like your, your background is pretty extensive.

Just you know, with, with real estate tech as a whole.

What made you kind of like identify the pain with permitting and you know, just that side of the house.

Yeah.

When I was at Cloud Kitchens, we had very ambitious, goals to expand the business.

And I was responsible for our west coast operations, which was really the only Operational part of, part of the business at that time.

And when I would get questions from our CEO about why we weren't hitting timelines to open new units, as I started to double click, you know, I figured out that people were telling us that we were going to get these permits, but we weren't getting the permits.

And no one really knew when we were going to get the permits.

And as we started to try to like build out visibility, I realize what a difficult thing it was to do and what a black box permitting could be.

so that's kind of like where it all started from.

And I just haven't stopped thinking about it since you got permits on the brain.

Yeah, everyone loves thinking about permits.

It's absolutely true though.

It is.

That's a good definition of it.

It's kind of like this black box that, you know, I guess it's too bureaucratic, you know, to a certain degree where you don't really know what is actually being done.

And it's so hard to forecast off of.

It's so hard to build, you know, timelines, let alone Gantt charts off of.

Yeah.

In la, where we're based, you know, particularly acute, the most simple housing projects on average about 12 months.

and so it's really like something that I've been thinking a lot about the last decade is how do we grow the supply of housing.

When I grew up in Minneapolis, the homeless problem wasn't as in your face as it's been in California the last 10 years.

And so it's been something that, you know, is hard to not think about, when you see people going through that.

And anyway, bringing those two things together where permitting needed technology and we were ability to influence the amount of homes, that get built seemed like a really interesting challenge to take on.

I mean, I was even talking to, a client of ours who's a builder in the Palisades, and just the, you know, the fire that happened last year and what he's swamped.

I mean, he's building like 10 plus houses at any given time.

And so I'm, I don't know, it's like, how does, you know, the permitting process right now affect his workflow?

You know, given that, we're in a, even more of a housing shortage, even more of a, a housing epidemic, if you want to think of it that way.

Yeah.

And I can tell you that, you know, the black box that is permitting introduced a, ton of risk.

It, creates frustration among homeowners and you know, essentially puts revenue at risk for builders.

So you know, that's what we're trying to do is we're, we're trying to reduce that risk and draw a straight line from drafted building plans to approval, and getting that first construction underway.

So.

That's awesome.

Yeah, we, so how, how's it, how's it been going in terms of, you know, adoption with, I mean I can only imagine that builders specifically are stoked to find you know, a solution like this because it is, it's an issue that is really commonplace regardless if you're building, you know, multimillion dollar custom homes or an ADU in your backyard.

Yeah.

So they, they are loving it.

we started with ADUs because here in Los Angeles one in three projects is an ADU project and gave us a lot of reps.

It's also the project type that has the most digestible requirements, ingest and then be able to check against.

So it gave us an opportunity to really start to prove out our solution.

it started as a spreadsheet, kind of evolved into a technology enabled service where we were driving the solution and then being that expediter.

And today it is a seat license that internal project teams are using to get through the process more quickly.

and yeah, the adoption curve for any technology in construction seems to be a bit slow.

But I think we're turning some of those builders into believers here.

I like that.

Yeah, that's good.

That can be a tagline.

Sure.

All right.

well, yeah, maybe we can just double click on, you know, what the process actually looks like.

You know, like you said, now that you guys have built out a fully fledged, like platform, maybe you can just kind of walk us through what that, what the steps are.

Yeah.

and I think it's probably best to talk a little bit about kind of like what the benefits are.

Right.

So on average our customers are getting through the process about 50%, faster on average to approval.

their project teams are collaborating seamlessly.

and when we get into the demo, I can talk a little bit how we help to facilitate that.

And then we're actually giving our customers an opportunity to build trust with their homeowners in a process where often those homeowners are losing faith.

you know, so early in the project life cycle.

I think it's really important that we can help build that trust for them.

and then ultimately these you know, customers are seeing their revenues faster and so it's allowing them to take on that next project and continue to grow their businesses.

And that's really what we get excited about, helping people do.

Absolutely.

So kind of knowing all that.

Yeah.

Should we, should we maybe like take, take a, take a quick.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Okay, sure.

Let me turn this.

Go ahead and.

All right, so everything's behind a secure sign in.

I'll get us logged in here.

most of our projects are doing multiple you know, different builds.

And so what this does is it gives them an opportunity to see across different jurisdictions what the status of their permits are.

we use projects in a given jurisdiction to predict when an approval will be obtained.

and I'll go ahead and create a new project here.

I'm just going to do an ADU because that'll allow us to take a look at our AI pre check as quickly as possible.

So I'm going to go ahead and put an address in here.

and what our solution does is it's going to understand what jurisdiction this address is in so that it can then begin to predict what the process needs to be and then also will kind of like get the requirements that it's going to be checking against.

kind of queued up.

So on the right here, I've exposed kind of like what's happening in the background here.

it's a pretty basic process to get your initial submission in for the City of la.

all you need are plans and calculations.

Those tasks have been created.

but what it's done here is it's basically like understood exactly what APN we're talking about so that it can understand what are the requirements that are going to apply.

Right.

and so some teams are using our platform for pre construction, kind of going back and forth with the homeowner on layouts and designs.

But I mentioned that most of our projects are going from drafted building plans to approval.

so what happens here is we will upload a plan set and what it's doing right now is it's essentially reading the building plan and checking against those local requirements.

as it's doing that I can show you here.

You know we've made it easy so that people can access their building plans at any time.

So sometimes it's difficult to keep track of what version you're on.

We have version control up here.

and basically it's going to come back with an output of, how many requirements that either our designer might want to look at and make revisions to, or, give us a printout that we could submit with this building plan to the jurisdiction and say, you know, we've already done these, things compliant and maybe, you know, across the counter.

You should be focusing your energy elsewhere.

That would be the best case scenario.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I do think, I do know that this building plan has as one or two things that we'll find.

just as it's doing the kind of the last stages here, I'll call out that it identified the zone that this project is in.

the other thing, while it's doing that here too, I guess it's going to be complete here.

this is a slimmed down example of what this looks like.

all happens relatively quickly here.

we've got, you know, maybe the easiest way to see here, the square footage in the plan.

It read 863 square feet.

It saw it on the COVID sheet.

and in the city of LA, the maximum ADU is 1200 square feet.

So this is compliant from a square footage standpoint.

There are other things here where you know, it didn't give us the information that it expected to be compliant.

So an example here, the egress store, it doesn't look like there were measurements there.

so it's specifically calling that one out.

and.

go.

Yeah, I've been talking a lot.

No, this is great.

Absolutely.

I mean I, I think the clarification is, I mean, how much time is wasted sending, you know, documents for approval and then getting pushback, you know, and then this like, game of charades right between the, the permitting officer office and then, the builder.

So at least being able to, you know, streamline that and identify where the risks are before you even send it in in the first place.

It's huge.

Yep.

And then, what we've generated here for ladbs, which is, you know, the jurisdiction and the team that would be taking a look at this, we've basically kind of like given them a, summary of what we found and all of the detail that's in the app is here.

and so, you know, we're getting pretty good feedback from these jurisdictions.

some people will ask why we didn't build a solution for the government.

And honestly the reason is because the sales cycle is such that, we can help the builders a lot more before one of these jurisdictions is going to decide to use our solution to adopt.

so that's really kind of like an overview of what this pre check is.

then as the process moves along, is this okay that I just keep going.

I know I'm talking.

Yeah, no, no, this is solid.

Yeah.

Great.

As we move along in the process here, we get asked to, upload other things here.

The City of LA gives you one, like a document that basically lists out all the departments that you need to work with.

it's your list of clearances.

There's 13 different departments in the city of LA.

and essentially what we do is we read that and then we import that into our system, very quickly here so that you can then to collaborate with your project team.

Right.

So, if, someone is our grading expert, these are just really basic activities, but, we can assign those to Tom.

maybe, I'll just highlight what this looks like here.

I'll assign the plan to myself.

we have notifications in the app, email, text, all of these things, and we're basically just helping to push the project team along.

Right.

so as these activities kind of pile up, you get quite a few across your different, you know, portfolio of projects.

And so someone can understand, when did this get assigned to me?

What exactly do I need to do?

And I can take action, you know, right here.

I'll put it, well, let's mark it complete so that you can see what that looks like.

it also gives dates that these projects, Deadline.

Yeah, exactly.

when I go back into this project, we're in real time keeping track of who's doing what, when, where all of this activity is being tracked so we can report on all of that and, over time drive those times down even further with the team.

That is awesome.

That's really cool.

Yeah.

That you can bring in those clearances.

And really, I think the, the task management is key too.

Just being able to see, not only, you know, making sure that you've identified the risks from the first initial, like assessment, but then being able to go back and say, okay, where internally, where are we identifying gaps with, say, like managing the sewer connection or the zoning or grading or any of those.

Yeah.

And one other thing I should highlight here is if there's some dialogue that needs to take place.

with any of these.

Maybe Tom has information.

do you know how we decided to do this?

all of that can happen in the app in a way that really kind of like has the whole team moving in the same direction.

It's you know, I think people have their ways of doing things.

but when I have conversations with builders that are considering using the platform, you know there just hasn't been a lot of evolution since phone calls and post it notes into how to get these things done.

and some people that are using spreadsheets know that you know that's kind of a version one of how this can evolve.

and so when you give them a purpose built application like this, things are really just moving quickly.

Absolutely.

So I know you guys are, you've got like LA nailed in California which I know is a hotbed of permitting issues.

But what other areas are you tackling?

Yeah, so we've been able to really get a system around how we stand up new jurisdictions, which I think is maybe the most exciting part of our solution.

So we're now serving all jurisdictions across the country and we can stand up new ones in about 48 hours.

the way that we do it, we basically go out to these jurisdictions, websites, find whether it's the building code, ordinances, specific direction on different project types that gets pulled into our tool.

and then we have a human that goes through and makes sure that any new customer that goes through that flow in the jurisdiction for the first time is going to experience that right process.

but yeah the, the way that we've evolved the tool.

Right.

Like we're, we're at a place where this thing is incredibly powerful at this point.

and gets me pretty excited about all the people that, that we can help.

So talking about all of those people, I know we're both going to be at IBS a little bit.

but are you going to be doing any, any demos or anything like that at the, at the conference?

Yeah.

so we're going to be part of the Startup Zone pitch competition I think they call it session.

Everybody gets a trophy now.

But anyway there's a, there's a pitch competition that we're going to be presenting at.

we'd love to meet people.

and that's on Wednesday from 3 to 4 and I believe that's in room W232.

that's in that west hall.

so, yeah, we'd love to meet folks there.

We're also in the startup zone, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, with a kiosk, and happy to chat with people, learn about the projects that they're focused on and then talk about how our solution could support those folks.

Absolutely.

And, I'll make sure that in the show notes just for this episode, that we have all of those, those details of where you guys are going to be so people can come, find you.

Amazing.

Amazing.

Well, thanks so much for, for kind of giving us a walkthrough of that.

I mean, it's a really remarkable tool.

Absolutely.

I think, you know, permitting by itself is such a pain point.

It's such a headache for so many builders.

And so I can only imagine just the you know, the, the positivity, the type of feedback that you guys are getting, people are really finding it easy.

That's.

We're doing our best to make this process something that has never been and delight the homeowners and kind of get people, I don't know if they're ever going to love, maybe when they get to real time permits, then people will love permits.

Right?

Yeah, but I mean, making that process, you know, improving that process, I think will, will definitely, like you said, delight.

and then just the rollout is pretty remarkable too.

Like being able to, what did you say?

48 hours and you can cover any jurisdiction.

that is.

That's pretty impressive.

Yeah, I, you know, I think it gets us really excited about, where this will continue to go.

you know, we've given.

Right now we're very focused on making the residential, you know, permitting process as simple as possible and delighting both, you know, the builder and the homeowner.

if you look a couple years into the future, we'd love to be supporting other project types, and you know, making it easy for any number of, use cases, really.

Yeah.

that makes sense.

So apart from, ibs, if, if anybody's not going to that, how else can they get connected and find you guys?

Yeah, I'd be happy to give you a link to book a demo directly.

and yeah, would love to chat with folks.

I'm on LinkedIn, and always willing to meet new folks.

So, would love to connect.

Cool.

Yeah, absolutely.

We'll definitely drop all of those in the, in the episode recording too.

But, thanks so much for your time today, Robbie.

I really enjoyed getting to know a little bit more about the problem that you guys are solving.

Yeah.

Thanks so much, Grant.

I'll see you in a few weeks here.

Yeah, absolutely.

absolutely.

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