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The Birth of Lifestyles Quest & A Digital Age of Investing

When starting a new company, it is helpful to think of its inception much in the same way as the beginning of a book. The reason being is that all of its best ideas and achievements will not flow out at once, but instead through a series of key moments along the way. So, in speaking of Lifestyles Unlimited® in these terms, one of its most formative chapters was the creation of Lifestyles Quest – a property evaluation program that forever changed the way Lifestyles Unlimited® members locate, evaluate and close on single family investment properties.

Our story begins at the same time as the investor education of one of our brightest members, Damon Janis, who soon became the creator of this groundbreaking software. What Damon immediately realized when sitting down with his Lifestyles Unlimited® mentor, Chuck Maley, to evaluate single family homes was that our process worked, but not quite fast enough.

“Every time he pulled up a house on the multiple listing service that he thought might be a good deal, it would take about 20 minutes to punch in the numbers and finally determine whether or not I should move forward. Looking over his shoulder, I thought, ‘there’s got to be a better way to do this.’”

One of the key observations he made was that Chuck was using the same sequence of steps to evaluate each property, each time.

“I noticed that Chuck was doing the same steps every time, so if I could either automate those steps or make them simpler and design the program so that it just flowed through the same sequence of events, I could match the software model to the one taught by Lifestyles Unlimited®.”

Damon knew that the best starting point for member success would always be the analysis of a well trained investor, so he didn’t try to redesign such a mind, but instead its most valuable tool. In tandem with the idea above, Damon first methodically thought out each window for data entry (or rather each step taken in the larger sequence of steps) so that it was easy to use and so that it spit out exactly the numbers the investor needed.

The end result was an exact digital replica of the Lifestyles Unlimited® single family evaluation process that reduced the evaluation time spent for one home by around 18 minutes. “I got it down to about a two minute process by creating algorithms for almost every step,” said Damon. This, combined with the program’s automatic function to refresh MLS data every five minutes, gave investors the ability to use Quest with real-time accuracy. But, this was not a stopping point for the man with a plan. It was merely the beginning.

Damon, like so many other mentors and members at Lifestyles Unlimited®, knew that his role would be three-fold; you are first an investor, second an educator and third a steward of your information. For him, this meant bridging the final gap between investors, the program, and their success with it, which to him meant being available to walk members through it himself.

“When Quest first came out, I taught a monthly class. It was a live class, so people would come in and I would show them how to do the evaluations in person. Then, I recorded the webinar a few years later once I really had my head around exactly what people needed to know.”

Now, Lifestyles Unlimited® has webinars up for both new and advanced members alike who wish to do all of the evaluation with none of the hassle. So, no longer is this process left up to the estimation of a real estate agent, but to the investor at the helm. That said, our members are benefitting from a digital age of real estate investing where the chips they play with and the rules they play by are completely their own, thus making Lifestyles Unlimited® that much more of an open book.

Int. “What is one bit of advice you would give a new member who is using your 7-day free trial?”

Damon: “I recommend that they put their own house in as a subject property, go find out what the comparables are and look at it as an investment property…a lot of people think the home they live in is an investment, and in this case, you can find out exactly how good of an investment it really is.”

Damon Janis Professional Image
Lifestyles Unlimited® Member
& Creator of Lifestyles Quest,
Damon Janis