If you've ever scheduled a contractor for a client repair, managed a make-ready before a listing, or spent an afternoon coordinating vendors so a seller could get to market faster, you've already done the work of a renovation business. You just haven't been getting paid for it.

Holly Torri figured that out and built a business around it. She's a fifth-generation DFW resident and the founder of Torri Realty, a boutique independent brokerage in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex where she still produces, coaches her own agents, and deliberately keeps her roster between 7 and 15.

Alongside the brokerage, she runs property management and a make-ready and renovation company, a separate LLC she built from the vendor network she'd already been managing for years. The same crews have been showing up for a decade, in part because she pays them the same day every time. Her renovation business tends to pick up exactly when the sales market slows down, which means she's evened out her revenue flows.

In this conversation, Holly walks you through how the three businesses fit together, what it took to go from an informal vendor network to a formalized operation, and what she's learned in six years of running an intentionally small indie brokerage her way.

Watch or listen for Holly's insights into:

0:00 Intro and welcome
2:46 Why your online presence and your in-person presence need to tell the same story

4:29 How a relocation, a career pivot into real estate, and two years inside a property management company shaped the brokerage she eventually built

8:33 What Torri Realty looks like today and why she built it to stay small

9:56 Why she chose indie over franchise and what becomes possible when you retain full control over culture and standards

15:10 How to structure a week as a producing broker who also coaches agents and runs two other businesses

18:17 Why your ops person doesn't need a real estate license, and what happened when Holly finally found the right support with someone who had never sold a house

22:15 How the make-ready and renovation business started and why it tends to pick up exactly when the sales market slows down

28:00 How to turn an informal vendor network into a real business: separate LLC, negotiated rates, project plans, and the payment philosophy that's kept the same crews coming back for a decade

30:26 How to position make-ready and renovation services to other agents without making them feel like you're competing for their clients

36:17 What a high acceptance rate on Zillow Pro sphere connections looks like in practice, and why it's a manual process not a mass one

41:09 What she would tell an agent on the fence about starting a team or going indie

43:17 At the end, hear about a laminated $18.39 electricity bill, vintage Pyrex, Mahjong tiles, and a Monument Valley road trip with no plan and no cell service.

Check out Zillow Pro:

→ https://www.zillow.com/agents/zillow-pro/

Connect with Holly Torri and Torri Realty:
→ https://www.facebook.com/holly.torri

→ https://www.instagram.com/hollytorrirealty/

→ https://www.facebook.com/torrirealty

→ https://www.instagram.com/torri_realty/

Connect with Real Estate Team OS:

→ https://www.realestateteamos.com

→ https://linktr.ee/realestateteamos

→ https://www.instagram.com/realestateteamos/