March 5th, 2026
In 1965, a Yale undergraduate named Fred Smith turned in an economics paper proposing a dedicated overnight air delivery network for time-sensitive packages. His professor reportedly gave him a C, noting that the idea, while interesting, wasn't feasible. Nine years later, Federal Express launched with 14 small aircraft and 389 employees. Today it moves 16 million packages a day.
Here's what gets me about that story. The need was always there. Businesses had always needed to move things fast. The friction, the delay, the uncertainty of "when will it arrive?" had always been a problem. Fred Smith just decided to fix it, when everyone around him was busy explaining why it couldn't be fixed.
Reed Hastings had a similar moment. In 1997 he returned a copy of Apollo 13 to Blockbuster six weeks late and got hit with a $40 late fee. He was irritated enough to wonder why on earth the rental model worked that way, who it actually served, and whether there was a smarter way. He and a partner launched Netflix the following year. Blockbuster had 9,000 stores and passed on the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million. You know the rest.
What both men shared wasn't genius, exactly. It was the willingness to look at something everyone accepted as normal and ask a simple question: does this have to work this way?
I've been asking that question about real estate for a long time.
Buying or selling a home is one of the most significant financial events in most people's lives. And yet the process is filled with unnecessary friction. Sellers endure weeks, sometimes months, of strangers walking through their home on evenings and weekends. Buyers spend months monitoring Zillow, finally fall in love with a home, and discover it already sold. Both parties absorb real inconvenience and real uncertainty because that's simply how it's always been done.
I don't usually write about my businesses. I reserve that for advertising, not here. But what I'm about to describe isn't really a business. It charges nothing to anyone, buyers, sellers, or agents. I'm funding it personally because I believe the current system fails consumers in ways that are completely unnecessary, and I want to do something about it.
It's called seehomesfirst.com.
Here's how it works. Buyers go to the site, enter their price range and preferred area, and register. That's it. On the other side, when a real estate agent signs a new listing, within 24 hours and before a sign goes in the yard, before the home hits MLS, before Zillow or Realtor.com or any other search site knows it exists, the agent uploads a photo, the price, the area, and a brief description of the home's key features.
Within minutes, every registered buyer who matches those criteria receives a text. The text includes a photo of the home, a link to the description, and also a "contact listing agent" link. If the home looks interesting, the buyer clicks the link, and the listing agent is immediately notified to call, answer questions, and arrange a private showing before the home is ever publicly marketed.
Buyers can bring their own agent to the showing, or meet the listing agent directly and retain their own agent afterward if they want to make an offer. Either way, no obligation, no pressure, no competing offers from the public.
For sellers, the appeal is straightforward: the possibility of a clean, quick, private sale without the exhausting disruption of the traditional process. For buyers, it's a first look and opportunity to buy, before anyone else. For agents, it's an easy way to expose new listings to serious buyers.
Any agent in the Phoenix market can upload their new listings at shfupload.com as long as the homes are not yet in MLS, on Zillow, or any public search portal. And it's free.
My longer vision is to have a database of most every serious buyer in every U.S. market to streamline the entire process for buyers, sellers, and agents. This would eliminate the many negatives of marketing homes on websites like Zillow that show days on market, records of price adjustments, and offer guides recommending buyers make lower than list price offers, while diverting buyers interested in a home to pay-for-lead agents who know nothing about it. The "system" desperately needs to be fixed.
Fred Smith's professor was wrong. Feasibility isn't the obstacle. Imagination is.
The home buying and selling process doesn't have to work the way it always has.
It just needs someone willing to ask why, and then do something about it.
Seehomesfirst.com is free to use. I hope you will.
