Key Learnings From Scaling ZipRealty As The First Online Real Estate Brokerage

16 Jul 2023 · 1 min

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The founder of ZipRealty learned that disrupting entrenched industries requires mixing outsiders with insiders. At Roofstock, he hired people without real estate backgrounds and paired them with experts, balancing respect for regulations with fresh thinking that challenged the status quo.

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Kind of looking back though, were there any kind of key learnings or maybe lessons, you know, from your previous experience, you know, building one of the first real estate, you know, online brokerages with Zip Realty, maybe that you've taken with you to Roofstock?
Yeah, I, you know, I would say one of the things I learned from Zip Realty is it's really hard to kind of reform an industry from within when, because you have this, all this existing legacy stuff. All the regulations and all the people are used to doing things a certain way. And so you really have to kind of come at it from a very different perspective. And so when I built Roofstock, by design, I hired a lot of people who didn't even have real estate experience. We had my co-founders and I were deep in real estate experience, which was super helpful, but I didn't want to surround myself with people who just understood the way the game was played before. So there was a real balance. So I'd say a good lesson is don't ignore the existing ways things are done. I think that's one of the reasons we were able to raise money and get early traction is because we understood the industry dynamics, but also don't surround yourself by people who were just so immersed in it that they can't look at things from very different angles. And that's a delicate balance, but I think a critical one. Especially for regulated industries like real estate, you know, in businesses that have kind of complex operations.