Editor’s Note: RealTalk is an ongoing video series featuring Joe Skousen, founder and CEO of Inside Real Estate, who interviews industry leaders regarding the outcome of the Burnett vs. NAR trial as well as NAR’s settlement, along with other pressing issues affecting residential real estate.
To learn more about Inside Real Estate’s productivity powerhouse, BoldTrail, which combines the company’s portfolio of solutions into one cohesive ecosystem, click here.
Episode #5
Ryan Young
Co-Founder/CEO
Fello
Overview
Inside Real Estate (IRE) continues its ‘RealTalk’ video series, this month, featuring Inside Real Estate’s Founder and CEO, Joe Skousen, with special guest Ryan Young, co-founder and CEO of Fello, a real estate technology company that uses data enrichment, automation and marketing intelligence to help agents generate more leads and listings.
In this interview, Skousen and Young sit down for a deep dive on Young’s success with his team in Cleveland, Ohio, and how with just 15 agents, his team became one of the nation’s top teams. They also discuss Young’s business, Fello, and how it’s expanding databases and improving lead generation for more than 20,000 real estate and mortgage professionals nationwide.
Here are some key topics to watch for:
1:10: Young shares some of his background in real estate, following in his parents footsteps as a real estate agent and forming The Young Team in Cleveland, one of the top teams in the country, and in 2023 launching Fello, an innovative lead generation platform.
3:45: What’s old is new: How to continue to fill the funnel with new business and drive transactions today? Have we “lost the plot” lead generation, has what it was intended to be escaped us?
5:20: Over the past decade, there’s been such a large investment strategy built around new lead acquisition that I think our industry has gotten so focused and dependent on new leads that incubation, cultivation, conversion has really been lost by the wayside.
5:54: “What I’m super passionate about is how do we start actually bringing profit, healthy margins back to the industry by focusing on the incubation, cultivation, conversion and not as much on new lead generation,” Young explains.
6:25: The formula for a healthy, scalable, foundationally strong business.
11:17: “The people that are running the best businesses right now are looking at this through the lens of the lead gen is more like the institutional side of their business, and their sphere database is more the retail side. And the goal is how do you scale both of them simultaneously and not get them imbalanced or lopsided.”
16:48: Young talks about Fello and the lead generation platform they offer. “Your database is your largest asset, and if you don’t have a strategy around it and you’re not monetizing it and it’s not a consistent revenue producer for you, you’re doing it the wrong way.”
17:07: Young talks about how Fello enriches agents’ databases with real-estate specific data and how it completely changes the database when information like public records, mortgage history, homeownership status and more. “We show you all the data and all the metrics of conversion that are happening in your database in real time. So you’re getting notified every day of anyone in your database that’s actually listing their home.”
30:26: The Young Team has sold about 500 homes a year for the past four or five years, but they have 15 agents. “The reason why we’re able to be so productive and have all of our agents get into production so quickly and we retain all of our agents, the average tenure of our agents six years, is because we’ve shown them and taught them the foundational principles of this business, and we hold them accountable to those foundational principles.”
Click here to learn more about BoldTrail.
Past episodes
Episode #1
https://www.rismedia.com/2023/12/19/real-talk-joe_skousen-episode-1-nick-bailey/
Episode #2
https://www.rismedia.com/2024/07/28/real-talk-joe-skousen-episode-2-james-dwiggins/
Episode #3
https://www.rismedia.com/2025/02/07/real-talk-joe-skousen-episode-3-david-childers-kcm/
Episode #4
https://www.rismedia.com/2025/05/30/real-talk-joe-skousen-episode-4-spring-bengtzen/
