Revolutionizing Homeownership: Transparency, Tech, and Transformation with Katie Shahan

Brent Peterson (00:02.515)
Welcome to this episode of Uncharted Entrepreneur, sponsored by EO Minnesota. Today I have Katie Shahan and she is the founder of Yarlow. Katie, do an introduction for yourself. Tell us your day to day role and what's exciting in your business right now.

Katie Shahan (00:17.752)
Thanks for having me on, Brent. I am definitely a fan of EO, especially in Minnesota, and entrepreneurs rally every May, so definitely attend those. I'm Katie Shahan. I am the CEO of Yarlow. Yarlow is a free home ownership app. I believe that home ownership is key to wealth building, generational wealth building, as well as security, and it builds communities.

So what better way when you have realtors and lenders, everyone trying to get you into a house, but what happens when you get in that house where that free app that tells you, Hey, this is how to take care of your fireplace or this is how to, you know, how often you seal coat your driveway. So, um, uh, that's kind of what I've been building. I'm, uh, you know, when you're a CEO of a startup, one day you're doing bookkeeping the next year, doing marketing and sales and, and, um, program management. So it's a.

I enjoy being an entrepreneur and I can't imagine a different life at this point.

Katie Shahan (01:25.369)
no, I can't hear you.

Brent Peterson (01:26.099)
There we go. And you had some exciting news in your green. Tell us the excitement you have coming up.

Katie Shahan (01:30.732)
Yes.

So I've been working with a PR team for a little bit and we've been on quite a few podcasts, but we just got featured in a blog with Better Homes and Garden. Should totally check it out. Better Homes and Garden and just search for Yarlow and we talk about rain gauges. Something if you are a gardener or you're just wondering how you can help conserve water. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the LA wildfires, who isn't, but conserving water

and using our resources efficiently is definitely a great thing. So check it out, learn a little bit more about how we can help our water, keep our gardens beautiful, as well as learn more about Yarlow and how to help with your house.

Brent Peterson (02:17.097)
Perfect. All right, so Katie, before we get started, you have been voluntold to be part of the Free Joke Project. And I'm just going to tell you a joke. You just tell me a rating, eight through 13. So here we go. In Athens, no one wakes before noon. Dawn is tough on Greece.

Katie Shahan (02:30.36)
Deal.

Katie Shahan (02:43.662)
I am actually Greek and I love dad jokes. I would give that a 13.

Brent Peterson (02:51.333)
Alright, yeah, you know, I laughed when I read that one this morning too. I thought that was hilarious. But that's just my sense of humor.

Katie Shahan (03:00.354)
That was amazing. That made me weak.

Brent Peterson (03:03.963)
All right, good. Yeah, we'll have the extended one on that one. So that made your week. I'm going to maybe put that in the show notes. All right, so let's talk a little bit about Yarlow and tell us how it's disrupting things and how it's making a difference.

Katie Shahan (03:24.578)
Definitely.

I started this app, I got the idea for it. I bought a house in 2015, so back then it was kind of a buyer's market. I had the house inspected. I thought it was a good inspector. I had my realtor. Previously I had owned a townhouse, so this was my first home purchase, and I was super excited about it. Second day of owning the house, my neighbor comes out, nicest neighbor in the world, hey Carl, if you're listening, and Carl tells me,

yeah, I'm like, Hey, I this house. I'm going to go mow my lawn. It's my first lawn mowing. And he comes over and he says, you see that beautiful garden bed in the front of your house? it just like, like picture, frames that picture window window beautifully. yeah. Isn't it great? Let's buy you up at the house. He's like, yeah, you have to dig all of that up and PS it's September. And the previous homeowner put, dirt against.

plywood siding and all of that's rotted. So sure enough, I dig it up. There's insulation everywhere. There's pipes exposed. It's September in Minnesota. Well, now we're talking, I'm like frozen pipes and this is my first time owning a house. I don't know what I'm doing. And so I was just devastated. They also had the deck. They tried to cover it up with fake Trex paint.

So it gave a lot of texture, but the deck was 100 % rotted and it, the, one of the railings fell over when I was touching it. So between the deck and the siding of the house, I spent about $25,000 fixing it. And I was just like, man, if homeownership and

Katie Shahan (05:08.226)
and buying and selling houses could be more transparent. Like, I would have just wanted to know that those are things that existed, so I didn't have my pipes freeze the first winter I lived in this house in Minnesota. I just thought that, you know...

Yeah, that's cool that you set your floor on fire five years ago and you just put a rug on top of it and sold the house and then you took the rug away with you and now the new homeowner is like, what the hell is this? So I just, I was, I'm on a mission to make home ownership more transparent. And it's not like we're trying to call out sellers. Sellers do so much amazing things to their house. They replace appliances. They have warranties that you never knew existed. Like I had a lifetime warranty on my water softener.

And so when I sold that house, I was like, hey, here's all my warranties. Here's all of the maintenance I've done to the house. And the new homeowners actually, I think, gave me a higher asking price because I was able to show them all of the stuff I did to the house. So that's really what we're going after is transparency. How do we make it better for sellers? Because homeownership is tough and you'd put so much money into it and effort. You should really be rewarded for it. And buyers are like, hey, you

why I can buy a used car and get every time the tires were rotated, but I just spent you know $300,000 on a house and I don't even know what type of furnace filter it takes. So that's what we want to do. We want to make homeownership more attainable. We want to make homeownership easier and we want to make it more transparent so that way buyers and sellers are rewarded for all the work they put into it. So that's kind of

why started Yarlow and our mission with it. And of course we don't want to, we want to make it inclusive. We don't want to put a barrier to entry by charging money for our advice and, you know, maintenance tips and tricks and tasks. And we just want it to be available for anybody. So that's kind of our mission. Make home ownership more attainable, make it more transparent and kind of take that burden off of your shoulders about

Katie Shahan (07:17.836)
home owning a house, if that makes sense.

Brent Peterson (07:21.085)
Yeah, why do you think the home ownership market and banking, things like that are just so behind the curve when it comes to things like this?

Katie Shahan (07:29.796)
my gosh. It is a fascinating concept. I think it's fun when you have disruptors in the market. There's certainly new newer banking apps that are available now that give you actual interest for the money in your bank account versus traditional banks have not really given you any rewards for keeping money in there. And it's just time. They've been

alone so long. Real estate, I think that at end of the day, I mean, I probably can't say too much about my true thoughts without them coming back to bite me. But I do think that there's been we call it old money, old money that has kind of controlled that aspect and with the internet and with certain disruptors.

I do think that this is the time where we can make real estate more transparent. We're also in the age of information and the fact that Carfax has been around now for 30, 40 years and we can find out all this information about our cars. That's really the goal of Yarlow. Our app is to be like Carfax, but about your house. And, you know, with that type of information available where you can, you can do a search or even use AI now, like AI is so big.

how can we do that and implement that with buying and selling houses and make everybody you know reduce costs and make things easier easier to do.

Brent Peterson (09:10.281)
One of the challenges I suppose in the house business is that for

Brent Peterson (09:19.643)
already on board with how that works. Tell us about how you're getting everything integrated.

Katie Shahan (09:28.738)
Yeah, that's a great question. So we have to kind of start small. Carfax started with insurance companies. So anytime someone reported an accident to the insurance, a claim to the insurance company, they were able to make that information more transparent. So we don't have that availability right now with homeownership.

But what we're going for is we give homeowners tools that say, you know, you should seal coat your asphalt driveway every two to three years in Minnesota. So we say, okay, here's your reminder to do it. And here's a place where you can keep your receipt. So that way.

when you go back and you're like, okay, was there a warranty done? Is it warrantied, no cracks for two years? Or two, three years down the road, you're like, who did we hire again to do our asphalt? So it's just more of, I hate paper. I'm just gonna take a picture of it. We use AI technology to read your receipts. So it's super easy to put them in the app. You take a picture of your receipt.

it reads the receipts and categorizes it and then that way you can see, okay, this vendor, this phone number, this email, I can just send them an email and schedule that service again or I had my garage door, the spring broke twice in three years. The first time I did it,

I didn't have the app and I lost my piece of paper. Second time I did it. I had the app. I took a picture of it. It has a lifetime warranty. The new homeowner, when I sell that house, the new homeowner will see that the spring has a lifetime warranty. You just have to pay for labor. It's all right there in the app and it just makes life so much easier.

Brent Peterson (11:19.177)
That's awesome. And I have to say that I think my mic has changed. Like I think I lost my mic and now so you're going to do most of the talking for the rest of the episode since I you probably can barely hear me. I can see it's my it's on my AirPods now and it's terrible mic. But anyways, let's keep going. So tell us just tell us about the your like

Katie Shahan (11:23.373)
Yes.

Katie Shahan (11:29.929)
no.

Brent Peterson (11:43.305)
Like the virtual walkthrough, I know in the green room you talked about like the virtual walkthroughs and it seems so low tech. How is Yarlow changing that?

Katie Shahan (11:50.69)
Yeah, so that's a great point. As I got more involved in real estate, just trying to make things more transparent, I ended up getting my real estate license just so I could figure out, hey, this is how it works. This is the process. These are the steps. And you can't automate anything until you know how it fully works. So.

Um, everybody loves to, to hang out on Zillow or realtor.com or any of those, um, search sites, homes.com. Not that I'm plugging any of them, so just whatever money you want to use. And, uh, uh, I was babysitting some, uh, 12, 13 year olds and they were, they were just playing on one of those apps and they were doing virtual walkthrough rooms. They, they treated it like video games using the keys on the keyboard and

and moving around the house and it was super cool. And, but at the same time, it's still kind of like relatively low tech. Like you kind of, get an idea of what the house looks like. You can see it in its perfect, pristine photo ready condition. So what Yarlow has done is when you keep your receipts and your maintenance tasks and stuff up to date in Yarlow, what we do is when you're ready to sell your house, we recreate a virtual walkthrough.

And so when a buyer comes to your house, they can scan a QR code on your front door and then it takes them room by room and all of the changes you did to your house. So for example, I was working with a realtor up in Andover, Minnesota and he was selling a house. And when you walk in through the into the living room, there's this hole in the wall with this great

and it has a power cord and it has a dial on it. And I was like, I can't figure out what that thing is. I had no idea what it was. And the homeowner was a electrician, so he's very handy. He can cut holes in walls and he installed a heating, like a standalone heating system, like a space heater. That's what I'm trying to say. He installed a space heater in the wall.

Katie Shahan (14:06.402)
because that's where his wife loves to sit and she always gets cold. So, and I was like, if you never told me what that was, if I bought this house, I would have no idea what it was. I would be like freaking out. I'd probably have to call an electrician to figure out how I remove it or what I do to it. So instead of doing all that, now because you scan that QR code when you walked into the house, you can see exactly what it is, how long it's been there and you kind of know the purpose of it versus

not knowing. So we do that. We walked to the house. This house at Andover had a pool, an above ground pool. I've never taken care of a pool before. I have no idea what to do. So it actually came with like a pool maintenance guide and it's all online. So when you scan that QR code, it takes you to a custom website and it takes you through the house room by room, who painted it, was it professionally done, was it DIY, when was it done.

How often was the furnace filter changed? But then when it came to this pool guide, it was amazing that, okay, maybe I'm not as afraid of buying this house as I thought I was because it tells me how to winterize it, how to un-winterize it in the summertime, what chemicals do I put in, how often do I put it in. So was really cool that you just get a whole like user guide to your house. And we see that during the buying process. So we don't have to wait until after the documents are signed.

We get it while we're in the buying process. So me as a buyer, I'm way more confident of putting an offer in on a, an above ground pool house than if I was just by myself and I was asking open AI or, or Google or someone, how do I take care of an above ground pool in Andover, Minnesota? So it was really cool. So that's kind of what we've done with Yarlow is, is we, we call it our sales success toolkit is where we create those virtual walkthroughs. create your.

your home ownership guides and then that way when buyers come to look at your house, one, they feel more confident in the purchase that they're going to make and two, we're seeing some higher initial asking offers. So it's exciting.

Brent Peterson (16:14.321)
And are you are you adding like a checklist of things that people should be covering when they're doing that?

Katie Shahan (16:21.09)
Definitely. So right now, every time someone initiates a sales success toolkit, our Yarlow reps actually reach out to them and we look at the photos that were taken of the house and we see like, hey, there's a discrepancy between the photos. It looks like you've got new countertops. You what type of countertops did you get? So we were able to kind of get more clarifying answers. So if the homeowner is like, yeah, I forgot I did that.

then we we kind of help draw out that information and see if they have any documentation to back it up. Because a lot of times I'm of the mind that if I don't see a receipt for it, you know, did it actually, you know, what actually happened? So we try and get, help the homeowners, the sellers walk through what information they can put in and then, you know, create that buyer's a homeowner user guide.

Brent Peterson (17:19.689)
That's really cool. So what's next for Yarlow? What do you see coming up this coming year?

Katie Shahan (17:25.996)
Yeah, so I'm really excited. I just met this other company. He is a roofer out of North Carolina and he's building, you know, one of the things I think when you talk to homeowners, a lot of us really do not like, not to name drop, but like it's a website with a woman's name and it has a list on it because they sell your information. So if you ask them,

you know, information about a decking, I want a new deck. All of a you get painters calling you and you're like, whoa, like, don't tell my information. I don't want that. So basically what we're working on is combining our technologies and he has the home service professionals. And so when we're saying, hey, it's time to seal coat your asphalt driveway. Here's a person in your area who can do it. And this is his quote.

So we're trying to really automate it. So you almost have a concierge with your homeowner, know, as being a homeowner. One thing when it snows three feet and I have to go and shovel, I'm like, I'm not doing this. And I know Brent, live in Hawaii now and you don't have to shovel three feet of snow. But for those of us who do, I'm always like, isn't there someone I could call who would just shovel my snow for me or my sidewalk? And so that's what we're trying to do is create that home ownership.

ecosystem that we can ask you, hey, just know, do you want help clearing your driveway at 6 a.m. so you can stay in bed? You can say yes or no, or hey, it's time to do, you have a wood burning chimney, let's prevent chimney fires, do want me to come and clean your chimney? This is how much it would be. So we're trying to just put you homeowners in the driver's seat, they can say yes or no, we're not emailing them, we're not.

Calling them, it's just an in-app notification. Hey, this type of maintenance is due. Do you want to do it, yes or no? You say no, that's cool. If you say yeah, okay, we'll send to someone over to do it. So that's kind of what we're integrating next. We're really excited about it and hopefully completing that circle of making home ownership so much easier. And then of course, as much DIY stuff as you can, because if you were to contract every service that needed to be done to your house,

Katie Shahan (19:47.694)
We would all need to be as rich as Donald Trump or Bill Gates or somebody.

Brent Peterson (19:55.507)
So that's really cool. are you like, I can see the need for drive away lawn service as instead of buying a subscription to a company, you could get it on demand and then whomever is available and can do that. The lowest rate would be the one that would come just like Uber. Is that the kind of the idea?

Katie Shahan (20:11.532)
Yeah, that is exactly what I want. I mean, that's probably, yeah, that probably won't be available for another year or two, but that's exactly what I want is putting homeowners in the driver's seat and.

Brent Peterson (20:16.381)
Yeah, no, that's awesome.

Katie Shahan (20:25.806)
It's also giving a nod to home ownership. mean entrepreneurship for people who want to break into the market so they can say hey Just kind of like uber with drivers. That's a great analogy We're just saying hey is anyone want to go shovel Brett sidewalk for 70 bucks and see if anyone bids on the project and go for it

Brent Peterson (20:47.561)
Yeah, leaf cleanup too is in the fall is another big one that it's amazing how fast those guys can get all your leaves cleaned up and how you spend an entire weekend raking and then only to find that your oak tree is going to dump them a little bit later.

Katie Shahan (21:03.438)
Mine is I would get my, I think it was my oak tree, it would dump seeds at the last second and then it would snow and there would be all over my roof clogging my gutters and I'm like, my God, I'm going to get ice dams. How do I prevent ice dams when it's already snowed? So yeah, it's amazing what happens at the last minute and you're out of town or you have company over or you're not, there's no way you're going to get to it.

Brent Peterson (21:33.571)
Katie, we have a few minutes left at the end of the podcast to give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they'd like. What would you like to plug today?

Katie Shahan (21:41.198)
So as you know, I'm the CEO of Yarlow. It's Y-A-R-L-O-W. It's free on the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. If you guys wanna give it a download, give it a try, that would be amazing. There's a feedback button that sends an email to me exactly with any tips that you guys can think to make our app better.

But love it if you guys download it again, it's free It's a way to get rid of all those paper receipts you take a picture of it. We store it for you And then you can get rid of that clutter. That's like my worst thing is I'm so terrible at paper clutter So that's my shameless plug download the Yarlow app Y-A-R-L-O-W and hopefully we can make homeownership easier for everyone

Brent Peterson (22:29.405)
That's awesome. I'll make sure I get all those into the show notes. Katie Shahan, thank you so much for being here today.

Katie Shahan (22:35.864)
Thanks so much, Brett. I really appreciate it and maybe we'll see you at another EO event.

Brent Peterson (22:43.145)
Yeah, absolutely. The EO Rally is coming up May 8th, 2025. All right. Thanks,

Katie Shahan (22:48.6)
another shameless plug.