Local wins: The relationship revolution in the age of AI

David Lykken
Listeners, I’ve been talking a lot about the conference that I attended, that Total Expert threw. It was a great conference and, once again, made one of those significant connections that we make at conferences. You wonder, why did you go to these things?

And it’s to make connections like I made with Matt Marx. Now, I’ve known Matthew Marx, I’ve known of him for a good number of years. We were aware of each other, had an awareness of, but I really didn’t appreciate what he’s built, Evocalize, until we really started talking and then I go, I’ve got to have you on the podcast.

He is co-located. He lives here in my beloved Austin area, where we have beautiful temperatures today, but he’s up in his Seattle office, the other office, and I used to live up there for 18 years, so I know what the weather he’s dealing with up there. But, Matt, it’s so good to have you join me today on this beautiful down here in your other home, but I’m sorry that you’re having to deal with the weather you are up there in Seattle.

Matthew Marx
David, thanks for the kind intro. Awesome to be on with you. I’m teased because my laptop has the Austin temperature and weather up in the corner of my screen, my MacBook shows it up there, and I look outside and we have in Pacific Northwest what they call an atmospheric river coming over top of us, as you’ll probably remember from your years spent up here.

And so, yeah, we picked a little bit the wrong week to come up and do a company offsite up here, but nonetheless, great to be on with you and we’ll just be jealous of you up here shivering. I literally have a heater on underneath the desk here.

David Lykken
I remember those days. So then Gore-Tex, everything. Gore-Tex shoes, Gore-Tex, everything Gore-Tex.

But thank God they made Gore-Tex for Seattle, right? That’s not what we’re talking about. It was really good seeing you.

But one of the things I want to start off and talk a little bit about is the Total Expert Conference. It is really one of those unusual conferences that there are so many good things, and they say, isn’t that just for CMOs, chief marketing officers, and the marketing crowd? It is, but it’s a lot more than that.

If you could talk to that a little bit.

Matthew Marx
Yeah, Total Expert’s been a partner of ours, pretty close partner for several years now, and so I think we’ve been fortunate to go, I’ve been personally fortunate to go and talk at the last, I don’t know, three or four of them. And this year’s in particular, I think the industry generally feels that, you know this better than I do, but the industry feels like it’s coming out of the doldrums, and you could feel it at the conference. And so that conference is great for a number of reasons.

You’re right, it’s a melting pot of roles. It’s not just the marketing role. It’s not just the CMO.

It’s a lot of different folks, right? There are folks dealing with the CRM directly and folks dealing with all kinds of other things, right? And gosh, like all things, AI was front and center at this one, and the relationships there, this industry is just so great.

It’s close-knit, tight, and the relationships that you make and build and develop, we’ve been building, that to me is what brings it to the next level, because you start to share learnings and lessons and stories, and we hopefully, by doing that, can lift the industry’s ship.

David Lykken
Yeah, and that’s one thing I’m impressed about you, Matt, is that you really are unselfishly sharing knowledge out there to help everybody. You co-founded Evocalize. The vision, if I understand correctly, was to simplify and automate the digital marketing for multiple locations, multiple brands’ locations, and so I’m really excited about understanding the vision, but before we go there, tell us a little bit about yourself and your background.

You’ve got a very successful background. You’ve launched a number of things and run things very successfully. I want to hear about them.

Matthew Marx
Thank you. Thank you, sir. So I actually started my career as an engineer.

So I was a software engineer writing code back in the kind of dot-com era. Showing my age a little bit, but pretty quickly realized that I was a fairly mediocre engineer, but I got really excited about invention, and so how do we develop technology and products that fit a business goal? 

Went and got my MBA and was in the strategy consulting world for a while in London and Boston and bounced around, but before starting Evocalize, what really led me to start the company, I was on the senior leadership team of a company out of Austin, the marketing technology company called Bazaarvoice, that we scaled pretty fast and took public back in 2012 on the NASDAQ for a couple billion dollars.

David Lykken
Very successful IPO, yeah.

Matthew Marx
It was the great entrepreneurs behind that one, and it was mainly e-commerce. Crossed over industries quite a bit, but we learned some things there, and one of the things that I learned in particular and led us to found this business was that in the marketing ecosystem, small businesses have been left behind a little bit. They don’t really have enough across industries.

They don’t really have enough money to go hire a great agency. They don’t have the money to hire data scientists and data engineers and all these people that we saw the biggest brands in the world, the Walmarts and the Amazons and everyone else hiring, and so could you use automation in those days, the early stages of AI, to bridge those gaps and allow local businesses to succeed. 

And we started with the real estate portals, so we took venture capital funding, as you do, and started out, as I think you and I have talked about many times, we started out building our technology with Redfin in the days where they were trying to grow and get to the stage where they could go through an M&A event, so a little bit happened out of the e-commerce industry into the housing industry through that vector, what, seven, eight, nine years ago now when we were founding the company.

David Lykken
You’ve done an amazing job. I love the vision for Evocalize, and I want to get into that just really. What is the problem you’re solving, and what is the big picture vision?

Matthew Marx
So, like I mentioned when we talked about why we started the company to begin with, we started out, we just really had this belief that local businesses were being left behind by the kind of digital and marketing revolution, and so a lot of people, nothing against a postcard or nothing against a billboard. 

There are certainly use cases for those techniques, but that was already a pattern local businesses were using, and they knew how to use it, but we thought we could help them compete better by applying technology, and so we worked with, David, you and I were talking about, we worked with data scientists at Redfin. 

They were also an investment by the same venture capitalists that invested in us early on, Madrona Ventures out of Seattle, seed investor, and then we start kind of word spread.

We built effectively what became a growth engine for the real estate industry, starting with the real estate portals, and so with Redfin, we scaled up to very large spend levels, and what we did was took all their data and used the data to figure out in an automated way how to go find buyers and sellers out of Facebook and Instagram, and then it became Google, and now it’s become TikTok. 

And so what most people don’t know is the portals, like Zillow and all the other portals, they source a large portion of their leads that they resell to the industry from the channels where people spend the time, so they’re sourcing their leads in these channels, and so we thought, and we actually built the engine that Redfin used and then Realtor.com used, became an investor, did some work for the other portals as well. 

And so that was the foundation, David, of where we started, and we had a little bit of an epiphany there that there’s a lot of data in mortgage and in real estate that is laying unused, and it can be used to make real positive contribution margin ROI for folks and allow them to control their destiny a little bit more than they were before.

David Lykken
Get a little more into how the sausage is made. If you don’t mind getting into a little more understanding of what you’re talking about is conceptually, but how do you actually go and do it, and if you could give some examples of the outcomes that your clients are realizing?

Matthew Marx
Sure thing. So we took that foundation with the portals, and again, we would take their data. So think about a portal like a Realtor.com, right?

You have home listings. You have crime data. You have school data. You have local neighborhood information. You have home valuation, right? You have all these mortgage calculators, right?

You have all this stuff there, and these portals, most people don’t think of them this way, but they’re really marketing engines. That’s all they are.

David Lykken
They’re a lot.

Matthew Marx
They’re sophisticated, but they’re marketing engines built to generate leads, nurture them, and then sell them in various different ways, right? And so, again, what we do for them is we automate the portion of their business that’s not someone just happening upon their website. 

It’s sometimes 50% of the business they get from actually running content and marketing, finding a first-time home buyer out on living their life, out on Instagram or TikTok, providing the right content against the right target segment, bringing them in, nurturing them, finding them again on another channel, bringing them back in, and building this loop that learns from its successes and learns from its failures through AI and gets smarter over time. 

And so what we did after the portals, we expanded it to most of the largest U.S. real estate brokerages. So we put it in for eXp and Kelley Williams and lots of the other big real estate brokerages. They handed it out to all of their users, their agents, so they could just press a button and all this complicated stuff that the portals do to find pockets of first-time home buyers and veterans and all this stuff, it just happens for them. And at the end of the day, they get leads that are increasingly nurtured with AI to just have a warm transfer.

And by doing that, they get to work with a lot of lenders doing this now too. They get to skip the markup from the lead sellers and own their own relationship from the beginning and build it over time.

David Lykken
And we have lenders—and that’s the part I wanted to underscore because I think what you’re really creating is you’re just intermediating to a certain degree the aggregators that are trying to aggregate this data and resell it. You’re really creating an opportunity for those that want to aggregate their own data. Is that the best way to put it?

Matthew Marx
Yeah, that’s right. And honestly, don’t share the leads. Build the relationship first and own that relationship. And nurture it. 

That’s to be resilient in your business and to grow a big business beyond your sphere or the people that you know. That’s really what you need to do.

There’s a lot of nuance, a lot of layers to that that go beyond, like if you’re a loan officer, the local realtor relationship becomes a part of this marketing puzzle. But David, really, you look at today’s landscape and we can get into this if you’d like, but if you look at today’s landscape and the consolidation. The same real estate portals with lenders, the question is, why are they doing that?

David Lykken
Yeah, what is driving it?

Matthew Marx
They want to make first connection with the home buyer or the borrower, and then they want to nurture that. And if you think of Rocket, everyone’s trying to care about it.

David Lykken
Rocket’s two acquisitions, both on the top of the sales funnel and then owning the largest service area. It’s pretty obvious that there’s a race to get to that consumer and build that relationship.

Matthew Marx
Yes, sir. And so the question is, what do all the other loan officers that are not part of that ecosystem, do we really think in the industry that we’re going to get the best choice of business and leads out of Zillow building their own or Rocket, the Rocket Redfin, Mr. Cooper? Are we going to get the best source of leads from those going forward?

We might get zero. We might get some, but they’re probably not going to be the highest quality. Our thought was, how do we give people the same tools again that they use, that these portals use, to skip that and source the same lead and work it over time without them having to make every single call and every single text automate the daggum thing so every loan officer has their own local growth engine that works just for them and no one else, right?

That’s what we kind of get fired up about.

David Lykken
Oh, yeah, yeah. I get excited about it too. And listeners, you’re hearing a theme in the recent podcast I’ve been recording is how do we do this?

If we have Rocket buying Zillow and then buying PHH, we’re looking at the consolidation, people racing that. How can you compete in this? This is why you need to get to understand what Evocalize is doing and get to know Matt and his team.

It’s really exciting. Matt, talk about what it means for agent LO relationships and why is this now more important than ever to focus on building these local relationships?

Matthew Marx
Yeah, I think first, one of the things that we see out there, the local is really important, right? So how do you compete? Is it still where it’s at?

David Lykken
Do you really believe that it’s still where it’s at?

Matthew Marx
I do. Because I think there’s some data that, yeah, and there’s some data that leads us to believe that, right? So if you think about, we’re an AI-based company, right?

So this is me, the founder of an AI technology, marketing technology company using these stats. But AI obviously has exploded in usage with consumers and with professionals, both of them. If you look at content on webpages, in 2025, 74% of the content of webpages was AI-generated, right?

And so if you think about that as a core keystone, we really start to understand or understand the prevalence of AI. There’s not gonna be less of it in the future, right? And so what I think about those local relationships, David, I really think about, and by the way, along with that comes a lot of misinformation and disinformation and fraud, right?

You and I were talking about the documents we get trying to scam us into things, right? And the stats back that up. 80% of recent study, 80% of consumers are worried about AI-powered fraud and 68% are worried about content used to deceive them.

That’s not gonna get worse. That’s gonna get worse as a problem.

David Lykken
Yes, the problem’s exacerbated. It’s just growing and growing. I just had that happen twice today.

Matthew Marx
Oh man, that’s terrible. And so that’s the negative of AI. The positive of AI is it can scale your activities, but we firmly believe that local at the end of the day is going to be required in the future world because there’s gonna be a trust that’s associated with a handshake at the end of a deal.

David Lykken
That’s what goes back to the local part. That’s the going back to the local part. When you know and trust someone in your community, you’re walking into the local hardware store, you trust the hardware guy, so to speak, that’s standing behind the counter because you could talk to him if he recommends a particular product.

It’s just different than going online and reading a review and what’s driving that, what’s the algorithm that’s driving that.

Matthew Marx
I think you’re so right, David. And then you asked about the agent-loan officer relationship. That becomes even more important because now we’re presenting how has that become more important?

David Lykken
I agree with your statement. I can see it conceptually, but I’m really wanting to understand how from your perspective.

Matthew Marx
The first thing that I would say is you unify the reputation, the local reputations. You’re known in your local community as a realtor and as a loan officer. And so you each have your own pools of people who you know.

And if you do good digital marketing and doing your job, more and more people are learning about you every day. But when you appear as a team, when you market together, when you appear as a turnkey option, and I think people don’t realize the benefit of that for segments like first-time homebuyers, like folks who are trying to get into homes. It’s a daunting process.

We live this and breathe it every day. We’ve done lots of home transactions. I think you’re working on one right now. We’ve got a lot of stuff going on, right? But most people don’t live in that world. And this is a scary, frightening transaction.

So we have reputation in this AI chaotic world, but we have reputation of the package deal. We’ve worked together before. We are united. We’re an agent and a loan officer. We’ll get your loan done. You’re not going to fall down there.

And the trust of the two parties that they have against for one another rolls out into the whole community. So we see that in the data when we have a functionality in our technology that allows co-market, digital co-marketing. So loan officer can invite a realtor, can invite a loan officer from our network.

That’s nice. When they market together, the performance skyrockets. We’re talking 60, 70, 80% more effective on the ground level because people feel like they have a turnkey option there.

David Lykken
Yeah, it’s really important as we look for the future of where things are going, this co-marketing relationship that you’re talking about. And I think there’s more trust. We’re really getting to, who do we trust?

I’m looking at different companies and the consolidation that’s happening, as you talked about earlier, is really, appears to be favoring the big guys. And how do we feel like we can commute? It’s the relationship.

That’s co-marketing. You really hit on it. Again, I want to understand, for our audience, connect some dots again. How do you support that co-marketing? What is Evocalize specifically doing there?

Matthew Marx
Yeah, so we, again, we work with, I don’t know, half, not quite half of the top 30 retail lenders. And we work with about half a million real estate agents through their parent brokerages. And so what we allow them to do is simply have a little dashboard.

David Lykken
You’re working on the connection?

Matthew Marx
That’s right. So we’ll allow you to invite someone you know or pick from the network of folks that are already in there in your local area. That’s not all we do, but it definitely boosts your marketing capability.

When you can press a button, the AI assembles your marketing program for you. It does all the stuff. It builds your landing pages.

It builds your lead funnels. It knits it all together. It runs it in YouTube.

It runs it in Instagram and the right things, the right places, right? You show up in Google search when people are searching. But when co-marketing is added, you not only split the costs in a RESPA compliant way, all the documentation is prepared for your lender, but you appear as this, your performance skyrockets because you’re both getting the leads, first of all.

So that’s a 50% split right there. And secondly, the performance from there actually increases, as I mentioned earlier, because you appear as a trusted pair and trusted partner. So that’s what we digitize that whole process.

So it’s just, you can invite, press a button. It invites your lender. They get an invite. They can put in their credit card. You can put in your credit card. Handles all that.

Handles the compliance documentation. Handles all the lead TCPA documentation so we keep you out of trouble with all the terms and conditions. They even agree to AI calling and follow up, which we’re starting to do increasingly on your behalf.

And so it basically tries to make, again, the technology is finally there, David, to let this come together so you don’t have to spend your life. You can go shake hands. Again, which we encourage people to do.

David Lykken
When you hear this, it’s so easy to get caught up, Matt, into thinking, I don’t have a technical background. I can’t do this. And that’s really what Evocalize and what you’re trying to do is get that off of their plates and them getting back to the handshake, that person-to-person connection, which is so important.

AI is at the center of almost every conversation, Matt. We hear it these days more so than ever. You told me that the importance of a handshake in the AI world is not diminishing in its importance.

I’m now starting to understand why you’re saying that. Go a little deeper into that if you would, Matt.

Matthew Marx
Sure. So again, the vision that we have, and I just think it’s a vision the industry can embrace. A lot of people get afraid is better than I do.

People have a lot of fear. We heard some of that at the Total Expert conference when we talked about borrowers and a lot of fear, a lot of fear from the LO community about AI. You may have seen some stats that said that about as many people are asking for housing advice on ChatGPT as they are their housing professional.

That’s fear. But really, at the end of the day, and we all know this, but this is the largest transaction people will do in their lives. We’re not selling Nikes, right?

David Lykken
Sometimes Nikes are almost as expensive, it feels, as a new house. I’m joking, of course. It does.

But the reality is you’re right. This is the most important transaction. This is where you put your babies down.

This is where you sleep. This is where you drive home to after work. And so it is the most important transaction that comes back to that co-marketing, that co-laboring, that co-partnership within the community that does have a decided advantage.

But how does AI help enable that? And that’s really some of the things you’re doing. You’re using AI to enable that, not work against that.

Matthew Marx
That’s right. We think if we free folks up from doing all of the marketing, busy work, all of the initial calls, all of the texting, and that’s where Total Expert comes in with some connection to some of their nurturing journeys. We connect with some other platforms too, but Total Expert’s a fantastically sophisticated partner there for us.

If all that just works and flows, you don’t have to do anything other than answer the phone, maybe make a call here and there. We think that gets you into the community more. It gets you into the coffee shop.

It gets you into the school event. It gets you into the community event. Right?

And again, we feel like that’s where look, the relationship you spend in the community with your partners and with the community writ large, your local community, that’s where you should be. And the technology can handle all the rest of it, but it can’t handle the human touch at the end of the day and the trust that comes with that. 

So, largest transaction you do in your life, I like to say, you want to shake someone’s hand at the end of the day and you want to look them in the eye and you want to know who they are.

Because otherwise, they could be a fake bot created online and you just don’t know. So, I think David, to me, that’s why is local important? Local is important because you can become known and you need to be known.

You need to know and work with your lender partner, your loan officer or your agent, regardless of which side of the housing industry you’re on. You need to spend face-to-face time with the people, just like a politician, right? The people in your area.

And you know what AI can’t do? It can’t do any of that. It can’t do any of that. So, that’s the power, to me. I think the future is very much returning to a human, local path.

David Lykken
That’s encouraging to hear you say that, especially having the tech background and the success you’ve had. I drive through some of these towns up in Washington State. I’ve been through Wenatchee.

You look at some of these, Yakima, you look at some of these towns and there’s always this large Walmart sitting outside of the downtown floor plan, the fore pit, the map. And you look at all the people, the traffic going in and out and you drive down Main Street and you see some of these communities and you see a lot of those small mom and pop stores boarded up. They’re not there.

This is different than that because that’s a transactional model. Everyone’s looking for the lowest price. Everyone’s trying to make their dollar go further. I get the Walmart model. But this is a different type of dynamic. This is where you’re buying a home.

You’ve got to know who is the person that’s making that recommendation and what is their interest in it. I really applaud your vision, Matt, for what you’re doing. It’s very exciting to see the overall place that I think that you’re bringing us back to is the human-to-human connection and kudos to you for that while still taking advantage of all the technology that is out there today.

Matthew Marx
Thank you, David. I appreciate that. And again, if we can move the needle just in a small way, help people, help people.

Basically, again, we talk about it as a growth engine because we judge ourselves on ROI and performance and closed loans and that’s what that’s what practitioners want. They don’t care how many people saw something online. They want to know how much can you prove that you brought in incremental sales and so that’s why progressive lenders like rates, guaranteed rate, financial, runs these local marketing programs on every loan officer’s behalf.

A loan officer doesn’t even have to press a button. They can come in, press a button, and add more but they do it because they have tied it all together and they see they get $3, actually a little bit more now, $3 for every dollar they spent. So it’s a 3 to 1.

So if you have that kind of return, we have partners Mutual Omaha, Guild, they’re all doing the same, let’s say, planted home loans like Atlantic Bay, they’re all doing the same model and starting to roll it out to more and more loan officers, prove success, get quantifiable ROI in their organizations and then roll it out across the entire thing because then you remove the complexity from the local practitioner, free them up to work in person with more people and have that personal trust.

David Lykken
I’m glad you brought us someone, especially Atlantic Bay, that’s one of my clients and I think the world of Emily Gardner out there who’s doing a yeoman’s work in a very competitive world. Matt, so good to have you here. I’m so grateful to get to know you in a better way and know that you are connected to my old stomping grounds where I started the industry 52 years ago and so connected to where my home is now here in Austin, Texas.

Thank you so much for coming on, friend.

Matthew Marx
Thank you so much for having me, friend, and I look forward to shaking your hand at the next chance we get in Austin or Tennessee or at an event.

David Lykken
Yeah, yeah, you’re leaning into where I’m going to be going is Tennessee, leaving Austin here eventually, but it’s so good to have you here and let’s break bread here soon. Thank you so much. Enjoy your time up in Seattle as best you can at this time of the year.

It’s great to be there in August, but this is the time of the year that’s not always so pleasant. All right, friend.

Thank you. Folks, I hope you enjoyed this episode. It was made possible by our sponsors, Byte Software, First Close, Angel AI, True, Candid, MBA, LendersOne, Modex, Redder, Mortgage Advisory Tools, and Fuel Inc.

Have a great week. Have a great holidays. Looking forward to seeing you soon.

Narrator
You’ve been listening to Lykken On Lending. Our passion is to bring you the latest insights, trends, and updates from the world of mortgages. So on this show, if you’re a seasoned industry veteran or just getting started, it’s your go-to source for all things mortgage.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this show. We’ll be back soon. Take care, and we’ll see you next time on Lykken On Lending.