Real Estate Became Music to My Ears
How a Career in the Music Industry Pivoted to Real Estate
By Michael Jansta
When I was in 7th grade, I had a history teacher named Mrs. Van Ornam. At the start of the year, she announced a perfect attendance challenge to the class; any student who had perfect attendance ALL YEAR could choose an album or cassette of their choice and she would pay for it.
At the end of the year, I did have perfect attendance and the album I chose? Ozzy Osbourne – Blizzard of Oz. On the last day of school, she called me into her office with the LP in hand and asked me if I was sure my mother would be ok if she gave me this album. With a straight face I said, “Of course, my mom LOVES Ozzy!” That day was the beginning of a music addiction that continues to this day, though not quite as passionately as it once was.
Fast forward to my college years at University of California, Santa Barbara. I was very active with the Associated Students Program Board booking over 150 concerts and comedy shows in three years while also working at the local Wherehouse Music record store.
This experience led to my first post-college job. I landed a two-week “temp” gig in the radio promotion department at Epic Records as an assistant before getting the full-time job in 1992. In six months I was promoted to Manager, National Rock Promotion and then to Director. My dream of working in the music business became a reality, working with bands like Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, Korn, The Allman Brothers, Oasis, and Ozzy Osbourne.
In 1997, I accepted a position as the Asian Head of Marketing for the Tower Records retail chain based out of their Tokyo office, working with all the Asian operations and franchisees in Asia. I spent my days traveling from Japan to Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines opening stores, creating marketing campaigns and managing the marketing teams in each country.
It was an amazing two-year gig before I relocated to Sacramento in a similar role as VP of International Marketing for Tower’s international stores.
The year 2000 was a big one for me. In February I got married and we purchased our first home, a new construction 3 bed, 2 bath home for $204,000. When Tower Records went under in 2006, we were in a tight spot but that house we bought? It doubled in value to over $400,000. The home ended up being our savior!
Unemployed and with my wife on bedrest with a high-risk twin pregnancy I miraculously got recruited by NRPI, Inc. (National Recreational Properties, Inc) in Irvine, CA to be the VP of Marketing…right as the economy was slipping into the Great Recession.
NRPI sold vacation properties and my job was to drive leads with infomercials featuring Erik Estrada and Chuck Woolery. I was also marketing another business for the same company called LandAuction.com, a nationwide ballroom auction company that sold land to various type of investors.
Our first of three sets of twins (you read that right) were born in February 2007 and I was about to jump on the biggest rollercoaster of my career.
The owners of NRPI and LandAuction.com wanted to re-launch a bank REO auction firm they put into hibernation after the early 1990s crash. That company was Real Estate Disposition Corporation or REDC, a company we launched with a 3-day auction of 305 homes in Southern California. We sold 290 of those homes for over $100 million at live ballroom auctions to both investors and homebuyers.
We then added an online component for remote proxy bidding and started testing online-only auctions which led to a promotion to CMO. We launched REDC Commercial as an online-only commercial real estate marketplace and experimented with aviation auctions and UK residential home auctions. I rebranded REDC to Auction.com and Auction.com Commercial after we successfully acquired the Auction.com domain name for $1.7 million in an online auction in 2008. We had also expanded into builder auctions of unsold inventory and launched a reinvention of trustee/foreclosure sales. It was a wild ride finding new ways to auction real estate while layering technology and digital media into the process.
The next decade, however, brought some normalcy. And by normalcy, I mean a multitude of new management, the move to 100% online auctions for REO and Commercial, a large expansion of the trustee/foreclosure auction business, the launch of Ten-X Commercial, Ten-X Residential, and then another sale, this time to T.H. Lee. During this period, I started investing in real estate so I could “walk the walk” to what I was promoting to investors across the country. I got hooked!
By the start of 2020, my role at Auction.com wasn’t as clearly defined as it once was and an opportunity to join Altisource as the GM for Hubzu presented itself. Hubzu, already very well established, was my top competitor in the residential real estate auction business. I agreed to start in April 2020 just as the world was shutting down.
Luckily, Altisource had a solid Business Continuity Plan to carry us through the first year of the pandemic.
This gave us the opportunity to double-down on technology efforts creating a foreclosure sale app allowing investors to proxy-bid remotely (a game changer in foreclosure sales), revamping the Hubzu and Equator.com site with increased due-diligence for SFR investors and even launching a way for homebuyers and investors to buy real estate using cryptocurrency!
With less default inventory, I was continually looking for ways to create revenue by selling all the inventory we did have and focusing on new initiatives with our Signature Seller™ program on the Hubzu.com marketplace and a sister-initiative, Signature Buyer™, on the Equator.com marketplace. The latter initiative assists hold and rent real estate investors to expand into other markets across the country with better prospects for SFR investment.
Now, with an expanded role as the CMO of Altisource, I am eager to apply data-driven marketing solutions to the other business units in the company and forecasting a return to some sense of normalcy in the real estate market in 2022.
Only time will tell!
