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/

After nearly 25 in real estate sales, Jaclyn Barker found her next right fit, joining Tiffany Williamson at Navigate Realty as a full-time recruiter.

Over the past few years, Navigate has grown from roughly 80 agents across two North Carolina markets to approximately 400 agents in seven active locations, with Tennessee getting ready to launch. In Raleigh alone, the team is bringing in 15 to 20 new agents a month.

None of this growth came through cold calls, robo-calls, or robo-texts. As Jaclyn says in this conversation, “I despise cold calling … it’s just not my thing.”

Watch or listen to have Jaclyn walk you through the philosophy, process, and system behind this growth.

Learn why she treats recruiting exactly the way a great agent treats a client relationship, why she insists on in-person interviews of at least an hour with every candidate, and why she'll sometimes tell someone they're not ready to make the jump yet.

Find out what it looks like to build a recruiting function from scratch, when to make your first recruiting hire, and why retention is the half of the equation most teams ignore.

Watch or listen for Jaclyn's insights into:

0:00 Intro and welcome

2:25 How drive shows up early in a recruiting conversation if you know what to look for

3:38 Why recruiting and real estate sales are the same kind of people business, built on discovery and fit rather than pitching

5:33 How a long career in real estate, a difficult market, and one conversation with Tiffany Williamson led to a full-time recruiting role

10:30 What Navigate Realty looked like when she joined versus what it looks like today

12:36 The interview that shaped her entire approach, and what she decided she would never do to a candidate

18:06 Why net agent count is the only number that matters, and what it means for how you think about retention

20:53 How the recruiting function has scaled alongside Navigate's growth, and what triggered each new hire

23:28 Why she spends at least an hour with every candidate and what that kind of time in the room actually reveals
25:47 What an ATS is, why you need one, and how they selected their applicant tracking system (ATS!)

27:51 The recruiting process from first contact to offer, and why in-person interviews are non-negotiable

33:30 “I despise cold calling” - why building something worth joining eventually becomes your most powerful recruiting tool

38:15 When to hire a full-time in-house recruiter, and the investment logic that makes it worth it

40:50 Why being honest with candidates about how hard real estate is makes her better at recruiting, not worse

46:41 At the end, Jaclyn reveals how a frugal instinct went sideways, when her Apple Watch triggers, and why true crime podcasts share equal car time with real estate podcasts.

Related episodes:

→ 90-Minute Recruiting Workshop (sign up free for all the subscriber-only episodes)

→ When, Why, and How to Build Your Recruiting Department with Tiffany Williamson

Connect with Jaclyn Barker and Navigate Realty:
→ https://navigaterealty.com/join/

Connect with Real Estate Team OS:

→ https://www.realestateteamos.com

→ https://linktr.ee/realestateteamos

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

Most conversations about AI in real estate start and end with the same question: what can the agent stop doing? Tiffany Gelzinis thinks that's the wrong question.

As a real estate team leader and Realtor in Residence at Follow Up Boss who has been operating at the intersection of real estate and technology for years, she makes a different argument: that AI's real value isn't in what it removes from the agent's plate, but in what it does for the client. When the technology is deployed with that in mind, everything else gets better too: agent morale, consistency, response rates, and the relationships that drive repeat and referral business.

Learn the framework Tiffany uses to think about where AI is going, including a distinction between generative AI (you tell it what to do) and agentic AI (you train it to think like a role) that clarifies how to prepare for what's coming next.

Get what she calls the nurture black hole in every real estate database, how behavioral signals from tools like Zillow Pro surface the opportunities hiding inside it, and why the quality of your CRM data is the foundation everything else depends on.

And hear what smart messages actually do differently from standard outreach, why human-in-the-loop is non-negotiable regardless of how good the AI gets, how Automations 2.0 adds leverage with new triggers, and how she elevated a top-producing agent into a team leader role while she stepped fully into tech optimization.

Watch or listen for Tiffany's insights into:

0:00 Intro and welcome

1:39 Consistency as the must-have characteristic and why agents get in their own way more than anything else does

3:00 Why you don't always need to tell agents you deployed new technology, how to simplify for adoption, and why to focus agents on calling the right people at the right time

7:33 Elevating a top producer to team leader, including what to look for and what the transition costs in production before it pays off

16:38 The two jobs of real estate AI: operational efficiency and top-line lead surfacing, and why most real estate teams are only thinking about one

22:18 What the nurture black hole is and why every database has one

25:10 The difference between generative AI and agentic AI, how to create the right expectations, and how to deploy it effectively

27:54 Why human-in-the-loop isn't optional, what AI slop looks like in practice, and why you can't just set it and forget it

32:54 How smart messages improve response rates with contextual relevance and dynamic agent voice

34:50 Why your AI is only as good as your CRM data and the specific habits that feed the model right now

39:47 Automations 2.0 with new triggers, and the light switch analogy that makes the whole concept click

41:35 The consumer experience trend Tiffany is most excited about and how to capitalize on it

44:29 At the end, Tiffany covers travel soccer and deluxe kits for her two boys, cutting her own hair since COVID and never going back, and sea glass hunts on beach walks.

Related episodes

→ Ep 005 Patience, People, Process, and Profit with Tiffany Gelzinis

→ Ep 076 AI Voice and Texting with Tiffany Gelzinis and Kyle Draper

Connect with Tiffany Gelzinis

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

Connect with Real Estate Team OS

→ https://www.realestateteamos.com

→ https://linktr.ee/realestateteamos

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