I built my own CRM because I needed a way to run my business. I didn’t recognize how much value there was in the automation until later.
I had two strengths in real estate: expired listings and open houses. I learned the expired-listing business from my mentor, Phil Archer. That became my listing-generation specialty. With a lot of listings, I had the opportunity to hold a lot of open houses.
So I made the open house into a system.
The house was only part of it.
We had a process for how the house looked and smelled, the lights, the curb appeal and the balloons. Hosts held the open houses and asked visitors questions. They brought those questionnaires back to me.
My father helped me develop a computer program and database to support the operation. He was a COBOL engineer at Honeywell. Together, we built a way to organize the information coming back from the hosts. It was my own customer-relationship system, created around the way my business operated.
The questions mattered because I wanted to understand who was motivated and who wasn’t yet. I ranked the prospects, kept the most motivated for my own business and referred the less-motivated prospects to other agents.
That referral business continued alongside my main business. The open house was more than an event: it connected the listing, the host, the visitor conversation and what happened afterward.
The scale made the system matter.
I remember those open houses producing 100–150 leads over a weekend—real people who had walked through a house and spoken with a host.
That is my recollection of my operation at the time. It is not a forecast for another agent or a claim about what a current product will produce.
The automation had value beyond what I understood when we first built it. I came to recognize that later. Over time, I got bored with running the same system and became more interested in developing systems themselves. That was the origin of my move into technology.
August 21, 1995.
That is the date I registered iStrategy and started the company.
I had watched real estate move through very different tools: MLS books in the office, curling printouts that could turn black in a hot car, dot-matrix output, and later online access. My own work evolved with that changing environment.
I’ve been licensed in real estate since 1985, and I still am. When I say, “I practice what I preach,” that is the history behind it.