By Alison Rogers | Commercial Observer
A buyer using the big Texas multiple listing service HAR.com who looks up Ben Caballero’s listings might notice that he has one or two that are active. Yet, of those that are recently sold, he has 10,000. A broker as big as Texas, Caballero has, in his career, sold $27 billion worth of real estate. That’s more sales volume than Rupert Murdoch or Peter Thiel has money.
Given those stats, of course Caballero is a legend in the residential industry. His angle is that he services homebuilders, a difficult crowd, but Caballero keeps them happy by offering a platform that connects them with the MLSes they list on.
The son of two brokers in Tampa, Caballero decided when he was a teenager that he wanted to be a broker and a builder. He moved to Texas, he said, “with $500 and a wife, and a car that I had borrowed from my mother.”
But he also had a tinkerer’s sensibility. He recalls that he started an apartment rental service because when he used one, “they weren’t very courteous, so I thought, ‘I think I’ll go into competition with them.’ ” He remembers that years later, as a broker, “Builders would fax us their sales sheets with things scribbled all over it, and we had binders of listings, and it was just a mess, and I said, ‘We have got to automate this.’ ”
Caballero’s tech is home-built. The first iteration, launched in 2007, took him three years.
“I don’t have a college degree,” he says. “I look at my failures, and that’s my tuition to learn.”
Still, with persistence and partnerships, his firm, Dallas-based HomesUSA.com, has so automated the listings process that it’s adding a new builder client every few weeks. And no wonder: The current iteration of the platform, known as SpecDeck, eliminates most manual data entry. “Builders have entire teams for sales,” Caballero noted. “What they do want from Realtors is what I do, which is to get the information out.”
Asked if he has plans to retire, the 83-year-old Caballero said, “I do, but maybe in another eight to 10 years. I have some things I want to accomplish first.”
Original story is from the Commercial Observer here.
