Warehousing Some Respect
Greg Rand watched his mother work hard to build her real estate business, even though realtors often didn’t get much appreciation. He was determined to change that image.
By Greg Rand
My earliest business memories are related to real estate because my mom, Marsha Rand, launched her real estate career when I was in elementary school. She went from a rookie agent to a top producer, to a branch manager and finally the owner of her own firm. Century 21 Rand was a startup that had culture as its foundational value proposition. It was quintessential Century 21—a rowdy band of women who sported gold jackets and took on the town.
Entrepreneurial Foundation
I learned three key things about the business from watching this all unfold. First, entrepreneurship in real estate works. Second, family is the most important thing, unless an agent is having a problem, and then solving their problem is the most important thing. And third, the public didn’t appreciate real estate agents enough. Every time a real estate agent was depicted on TV or in movies, they were lampooned. That was my mom! I still remember how it bothered me as a kid.
I worked in my mom’s company in many mission- critical capacities: licking envelopes, answering the phone, sticking photos into photo books…. I graduated to taking pictures and having them developed at a 24-hour photo.
I observed that something important was taking place in that office. People would come out of conference rooms elated. “They just bought their first house,” someone would tell me. Or they would come out looking horrified. “They just bought their first house!” The range of emotions told me something weighty was going down.
It didn’t make sense to me that a profession in which something so important was being handled was also made fun of.
The Dawn of Data
One day when I was answering the phone on the weekend, I had a revelation. I had been trained not to give out the price of the house until I got the caller’s phone number. Hmm. The caller wanted information, and we weren’t providing it.
I filed that impression away for a few years until I learned about the coming “information superhighway.” I read a speech from NAR president Bill Chee in which he characterized the situation as a bunch of hungry lions coming over the hill while a few chihuahuas fought over a piece of meat. Those little dogs were about to be devoured. The chihuahuas were realtors, the lions were the consumer public and the meat was housing data. They wanted it. We were hoarding it. And the internet was going to blow us to smithereens. The customer wanted information, and we were intentionally getting in the way.
At the time, I was 24 and making six figures as a mortgage sales guy. I quit that job to start a company based on “public access to MLS.” Mike Toner, a college buddy and I launched RealtyVision, one of the first two companies in the country to display interior tours of houses on computer. This was pre-internet. The computers were encased in kiosks in public places. Our business model was fatally flawed due to lack of distribution. If we had held out a couple of years, RealtyVision would have been a website and I would have retired by 30. But we didn’t hold out. We ran out of money and got jobs.
HFS, Inc., the company now known as Realogy, had hired Bob Pittman as the new CEO of Century 21. Bob was one of the founders of MTV, so he was a whiz kid CEO. I pitched RealtyVision to Bob’s team, and they said “no.” Instead, they offered me a job to do half-day technology seminars for their agents. This was 1996. I did 70 cities in 18 months. We showed audiences ranging from 20 to 400 real estate agents that technology was not their enemy.
I have some priceless memories of the first time my audience saw things like email attachments.
As the Technology Evangelist, I got to work on the IT team that deployed the first Century21.com, which was also one of the first real estate websites with MLS data. Public access to the MLS was a huge success, and I believe it’s the reason the industry has thrived for so long. The customer wanted access, and we gave it to them. You can make fun of realtors all you want, but they stared down those lions and made friends. If they had held out and fought the release of MLS data, there is no doubt they would have gone extinct.
All in the Family
That was a wild ride that allowed me to make a minor impact on a large part of the country. Then my mom pitched my brother Matt and me to join her in the family business. My dad wanted to retire, and she wanted to begin a transition.
I jumped at the chance to have a deeper impact, if on a smaller geographic scale. It was an honor to be asked. I had spent almost a decade in the real estate tech space. Now it was my time to work on the other side of my theory—that real estate is too expensive to take lightly. Real estate is a financial service.
This was late 1997. We switched from Century 21 Rand to Prudential Rand. Flying the flag of a financial services powerhouse was perfect for where we wanted to take the company. We grew from $7 million in revenue to over $50 million within 10 years. We layered in mortgage, insurance and title businesses. We did our best to present a “business suit” version of real estate sales. We were a top-quality firm, but we were still essentially doing it the same way as everyone else.
In 2008, we switched to Better Homes and Gardens and took on a much softer brand, which has worked like a charm.
Launching a Dream
I left shortly after. Not because of the brand change, but because it was time to launch the business of my dreams. There was a housing crisis underway that proved that no one—not the bankers, not the government, not the realtors and not the consumer—really knows enough about real estate as a financial asset. As dependable as it had always been, you could screw it up if you tried hard enough.
I believed down to my toes that the housing crisis was going to give way to a massive investment boom and then a recovery. It sounds obvious now, but back then it wasn’t. I even got invited to appear on cable news 70 times based on my willingness to be a punching bag for people who wanted to trash the housing market. I wrote “Crash Boom!,” a book about how to play to the coming recovery like a pro.
It was time to launch OwnAmerica. I remember that day. I expected tears. My brothers (Joe Rand had joined by then) and mom would surely beg me not to go. I had a whole hour set aside in my calendar to talk them off the ledge. The meeting lasted five minutes. I guess I had become hard to work with? More likely, they are the kind of family that understands following a dream and wanted that for me.
OwnAmerica started as a training and technology toolset for real estate agents who wanted to participate in the investor gold rush. Adam Stern, my co-founder, had sold 4,000 packages and built a national network of certified investment agents. Then we started going after the institutional investors that came into the space around 2012. We landed a few and spent the next seven years being a service provider helping professional investors buy and sell rental property at high volume.
It was an exciting business, but an institutional marketplace platform wasn’t the real mission for OwnAmerica. I wanted to build a national brand for single-family rental investors—a wealth management company that uses rental houses as the vehicle for financial planning.
In 2018, the consolidation of large SFR funds began to turn into consolidation of SFR service providers. Kevin Ortner, the CEO of Renters Warehouse, was an industry buddy who had a very compelling puzzle piece—the largest property management company in SFR. He had the infrastructure I needed, and I had the tech sizzle he needed. We both had the same dream. Renters Warehouse bought OwnAmerica in January 2019. We are rapidly building the first vertically integrated real estate investment firm: a real estate investor portal floating on top of a real estate investment brokerage, bolted to a property management company. Our goal is to help the millions of SFR investors out there who are doing it the hard way, and to help the millions more who believe in real estate investing but are intimidated by it. They all deserve a company that places them at the center of the universe.
