What a week! I put out a LinkedIn post asking founders and product teams to come show me what they’ve been building, and the response was overwhelming — 13 conversations in five days, a mix of companies I’d been following for years and a few I’d never heard of until they made their way onto my calendar.
What follows is what I saw, what stuck with me, and what I think the industry should be paying attention to.
Contre — Contract Intelligence Cory Turnbull | contre.ai
This product was born from a $10,000 mistake — a seller credit buried in a purchase agreement that nobody caught, not the TC, not the broker, and had to be paid out of pocket at the closing table. Cory Turnbull built Contre to make that kind of failure preventable.
The platform reads every document in a transaction — purchase agreements, HOA docs, title reports, inspections, disclosures — cross-references them for missing signatures, date conflicts, and compliance gaps, and wraps it all in a brokerage-trained chatbot so agents can get instant answers about their own rules and state law. They’ve been live less than a month and are already in pilots with major brokerages, with SkySlope’s sales team preparing to push the product to their entire customer base.
The AI isn’t the star here; the real insight is that real estate has a chronic reading problem, and Contre is building a system that forces documents to speak for themselves before agents and clients get hurt.
Oppy — AI Employees for Real Estate Alex Gustafson
Alex Gustafson kept coming back to the same refrain throughout our conversation: Stop thinking of this as software you set up, and start thinking of it as a person you hire. Oppy lets you build and deploy AI employees — they call them Oppies — across every channel your business already uses: phone, text, email and web chat.
Describe a role the way you’d write a job description or an SOP for a human assistant, and the platform handles the rest. A broker who can articulate what they’d expect from a great transaction coordinator already has everything they need to build a capable Oppy.
The platform has clearly matured fast; they’re shipping two to three features a week, and things like real-time website visitor engagement and pre-meeting research running automatically on your calendar feel genuinely useful rather than just demo-friendly.
SH Consulting — Real Estate Email Security Alex Shakhov
Not every essential product gets a flashy brand name, and Alex Shakhov is fine with that. His firm does email deliverability and security for real estate teams — the unglamorous infrastructure work of configuring DMARC, SPF, and DKIM records, monitoring who’s attempting to send email from your domain, and blocking spoofing attempts before they damage your reputation or defraud your clients.
Shakhov got his start years ago fixing email deliverability issues for Elena Key, and the business grew organically from there to protecting around 150 companies. The thing he said that I keep thinking about: You don’t need to be a hacker to send email from someone else’s domain. The SMTP protocol is old enough that anyone can do it. When that happens at scale, recipients mark those emails as phishing, Google takes notice, and suddenly your legitimate emails stop landing in inboxes too. You don’t know it’s happening until the damage is done.
SH Consulting is trusted by industry leaders like Gary Ashton and provides security for Gary and REMAX Advantage, enhancing overall email deliverability and strengthening its sender reputation with major mailbox providers.
Shakhov’s service is not an insurance policy, it’s tire maintenance — the preventative work that feels unnecessary until the moment it isn’t.
Homes.com — Conversational AI Search Alex Jacobs
Alex Jacobs walked me through the AI search experience Homes.com has been building into the platform — fully conversational, voice-driven, available in 50 languages, no filters required. Inside a Matterport tour you can ask it to remove furniture, check if your king bed fits, pull school ratings, and draft a client email focused on the features that matter most — all in one unbroken conversation.
The membership model for agents includes priority listing placement, retargeting ads across 30,000 sites, lead verification, and robust analytics. But the moment I’ll remember most was a small one: the AI casually mentioned a school was a “13-minute walk away,” and I pushed back on it. Walking distance is language real estate professionals have been trained for years not to use in print because it can be read as discriminatory toward people with mobility limitations. Alex took the note graciously.
But it stayed with me as a broader question the whole industry is going to have to wrestle with — when AI speaks for an agent or a brokerage, who owns the responsibility for what it says?
Agently — Agent Production Engine Maxim Grebenuk
The product is barely recognizable from what it was a year ago. Agently started as a learning management system — a place for brokerages to store training videos — but Maxim Grebenuk made a clear-eyed pivot: training doesn’t close deals. Actions do.
Agently’s newest iteration is The AI Team Leader. As Maxim puts it “We used to sell Agently as a tool. Now we sell outcomes.”
That means, instead of: Hey, buy this tool to help you onboard, train and coach agents, Agently offers: Hey, buy this tool that will onboard, train and coach agents for you.
The platform itself has been rebuilt as a gamified mobile tool where every prospecting call, conversation, and appointment has a dollar value attached to it, filling up a visual “house” that represents the agent’s next commission check. Hook up your CRM and it updates automatically.
His philosophy on accountability was delivered without much sentimentality: motivation, coaching and persuasion all evaporate. What actually works is showing clients like Team Fast the direct, visible line between the action they’re taking right now and the money they’ll eventually put in their pocket.
He’s not trying to turn every agent into a top producer — he’s honest that it’s really designed for that middle 30 percent of agents with potential who aren’t getting the structure and feedback they need to become consistent.
Cloze — Real Estate Platform and Brokerage Intelligence Alex Coté and Dan Foody
Cloze built their product from outside the industry, started mobile-first, and that DNA shows in how they think. The platform automatically pulls in an agent’s email, calendar, and real phone text messages — not a secondary line — runs it through AI to surface what needs attention, and now includes on-device meeting transcription that never sends audio to the cloud.
In recent years, marketing and lead management capabilities expanded beyond Cloze’s original CRM capabilities, while newer additions bring hundreds of integrations with tools like RealScout, SkySlope and Canva directly into the agent’s workflow without bouncing between tabs, and a voice assistant that can act across third-party apps from inside Cloze itself. But Dan Foody’s point about proprietary data is solid: Everyone is rushing to adopt AI, but if you feed the same data into the same foundational models as every other brokerage, you get the same outputs.
Cloze unifies data across a brokerage’s systems so that it can be used more effectively. The brokerages that will actually pull ahead are the ones who figure out what data only they have — the depth of their agents’ relationships, the history of their conversations, the patterns in their pipeline — and use that as the input. Listing data is a commodity. Your relationships aren’t.
Showami — On-Demand Showing Platform Joshua Kuchar
Showami is the Uber for real estate agents — when you can’t be somewhere, the platform finds a qualified local agent to handle the showing, open house or conduct property tasks on your behalf. Between 30 percent and 40 percent of activity on the platform now comes from the rental side, with property managers and investor-focused agents using it to get someone to a door when they can’t be there.
The platform has tightened up its agent quality scoring significantly, added location check-in within a half mile of a property, and is building toward real-time tracking. But the insight I’ll be thinking about longest was Joshua Kuchar’s view of geographic expansion: Most brokers assume entering a new market means staffing up and committing significant resources before proving demand. His advice? Send one person and use Showami to handle the overflow until the market earns a second hire.
That reframes the platform not just as a coverage tool for busy agents, but as a low-risk market expansion strategy for brokerages that want to plant a flag somewhere new without a permanent solution before testing demand.
Conrad — One System for the Full Transaction Leo Jorge
Leo Jorge built Conrad around a simple thesis: Zillow and Redfin are catalogs. Conrad wants to be the store. The platform connects consumers, agents and loan officers in a single AI-driven system, and has found its early traction with mortgage brokerages, where an AI assistant named Link reaches out to incoming leads via text, handles objections with vertical-specific knowledge, and progressively extracts the information needed to keep a deal moving — feeding into a home search portal that shows buyers exactly what they can afford based on their actual approval with integrated lenders.
Licensed as a brokerage in seven states now, the real estate side is still catching up to the mortgage side. But the logic is sound: Start with the loan officer, attach home search to real approval data, and weave the agent into the same system to thread the needle that bigger players have been trying and failing to thread for years.
Easy Contract Pro — Guided Offer Drafting Carson Fooks
Carson Fooks’ story might be the most human one of the week. He’s a 23-year-old agent in Maryland who got frustrated as a new licensee trying to figure out which forms were required, which were optional, and how to move through a contract without making errors — so he spent the past 10 months building a guided, question-based offer drafting platform entirely on his own.
It auto-fills data from the MLS, calculates FHA loan amounts that Maryland agents typically do by hand, flags missing disclosures, generates a client-friendly summary sheet explaining every form in plain language and packages everything up for signatures.
Fooks has something real here, a clean, functional tool that solves a genuine pain point. However, the conversation turned into an honest moment about focus: stop building features and start finding users. The minimum viable product is already there. Every new addition delays the moment where that product finds its people.
AutoReel — Listing Videos for Every Price Point Alok Gupta
The premise is simple: The same way professional photography became accessible to every price point over the last two decades, video should be, too. AutoReel generates listing videos automatically without a videographer, and it’s aimed squarely at the bottom 80 percent of the market — that average $300,000 home where nobody is hiring a video crew.
Alok Gupta already has thousands of active paying customers, including high-profile agents whose videos are already out in the world. The conversation was less about explaining the product and more about what comes next. Check out how super user Heather Herr is using AutoReel.
The strategic insight hiding in plain sight: Agents like Heather Herr and Glennda Baker aren’t just customers; they’re walking case studies. Run ads with their videos. Put them on the homepage. Let the loudest voices in the room do the selling.
PresentMyOffer — Offer Management and Compliance Paul Mikhail
Paul Mikhail launched two months ago and already has nearly 600 active users with roughly $40 million in listings and offers flowing through the platform — which tells you the pain point is real.
The product gives listing agents a unique submission link for each property, automatically notifies buyer agents when their offer is received and viewed, provides sellers their own dashboard, and gives brokers a top-level view of every offer across all their agents’ listings without anyone having to manually forward anything. Seven years of record retention is baked in, and every edit generates a timestamped audit trail.
Mikhail’s origin story says it all: As a newer agent he submitted a clean cash offer five times on the same property, got screened repeatedly, watched it go under contract and come back, until his broker sent a formal email demanding written confirmation the offer had been received. Within 24 hours it was accepted.
The offer is the moment that matters most in a transaction, and for years it has lived entirely in email inboxes and scanner queues. Mikhail built the thing that should have existed all along.
Broker Recruiters — Hands-On Agent Recruiting Brant Levine
Brant Levine launched in January, so he’s barely five months in, but the data he shared was hard to argue with. His firm embeds so deeply into brokerage clients that nobody on the outside ever knows Broker Recruiters exists — his recruiters operate under the brokerage’s email domain, attend internal meetings, and are introduced as the company’s own growth managers.
They work with a deliberately small roster of clients, assigning one recruiter to one or two territories, because the model only works when they’re genuine subject matter experts on the brokerage they represent.
His core insight is about where recruiting actually breaks down, and it’s not at the front end where most companies focus. It’s in the follow-up. The sales manager has a great first conversation, feels confident they’ve won the agent, and then the whole thing falls apart because nobody does the patient, unhurried work of connecting that agent with the right people inside the brokerage.
Brant built his whole service around solving that specific failure point — and a 70 percent meeting hold rate against an industry norm closer to 40-50 percent suggests he’s onto something real.
Pairing this service with Courted could be a huge win for agent growth.
Ultradian.io — Focus and Productivity Coaching Peter Moulton
Peter Moulton is a veteran real estate coach who has spent six years developing something he calls the Ultradian Method, now finding its early form as a software product.
The premise is rooted in a 1953 discovery about human cognitive rhythms: The same 90-minute cycles that govern sleep also govern waking performance, and Moulton has built his coaching practice around structuring the day into focused sprints with deliberate recovery breaks between them.
The software is still in alpha, but the methodology behind it is anything but primitive. His opening observation, validated across thousands of coaching clients, is that most people are genuinely productive for less than three hours of an eight-hour day. The solution isn’t more tools or more notifications; it’s protecting the first cognitive sprint of the morning for revenue-generating activities, and letting everything else follow.
It sounds almost embarrassingly simple until you realize almost nobody actually does it.
Mosaic — Client Lifecycle Platform Sheila Reddy
Sheila Reddy drew a line in the sand early in our conversation: CRMs are built for leads, and Mosaic is built for clients. Those are fundamentally different perspectives, and most of the industry has been trying to serve both groups with the same tool.
Mosaic covers the full client lifecycle — weighted property search that scores listings against a buyer’s actual needs and wants rather than just filtering, collaborative transaction management that brings the client into a shared portal instead of leaving them in an email thread, and a post-close homeowner experience that includes document storage, a curated vendor directory, estimated insurance renewal reminders, property tax alerts and ongoing home value tracking.
The idea is that once a client is in your ecosystem, they should never really need to leave it.
Sheila’s framing of the competitive advantage this creates — not just as a feature set but as a positioning shift — really resonated with me. There are transactional agents and there are advisory agents, and the agents who can articulate that difference in a listing presentation or a buyer consultation are increasingly the ones winning the room.
Eighty percent of sellers call only one agent before they list, so becoming that agent of choice isn’t about who has the best yard sign. It’s about who has stayed meaningfully present through the entire arc of homeownership — not with holiday drip campaigns, but with genuinely useful, personalized touchpoints that make the client feel like their agent never really left. Mosaic’s infrastructure makes that possible.
Five days. Fourteen conversations. What struck me most across all of them wasn’t any single product but the pattern.
The best founders this week weren’t chasing the shiniest problem. They were each solving something specific that had personally cost them time, money or sleep, and then building the thing they wished had existed. At the end of the day, that’s still the best reason to start a company.
If you’d like to have your product or service featured in our next Diary roundup, drop us a line at HomeCodeReviews.com .
