Marketplace

Agent Lead Exchange

Real-estate referral and lead marketplace

My role: Founder and owner — direction across the business model, unit economics, legal and broker compliance requirements, payments and operations, go-to-market, workflow design, and AI-assisted product development
Current status: Beta launch phase. No user, revenue, or growth figures are published.
Shown as case studies of my work; not offered as products or services.

The origin of the platform

Agent Lead Exchange began with a colleague in residential real estate who needed a better way to manage leads she referred to other agents. Following every referral through completion was tedious but essential, and the manual work was limiting how much business she could handle.

I connected that need to a broader opportunity: agents in different specialties regularly encounter work they can’t serve well themselves. A residential agent with a business-sale opportunity, for example, could refer it to a business broker and earn a referral fee if the transaction closes. I enjoyed building the platform because it joined several parts of the real-estate and business-brokerage ecosystem around a practical workflow problem.

The decisions and workstreams I directed

I set the direction across these business, operating, market, and product workstreams. AI-assisted development is one part of the work — not the whole of it.

Business and ownership structure

The entity, the marketplace model, and the harder decision underneath it: who the customer is on each side and what the platform is accountable for between them.

Financial model and unit economics

What a lead is worth, who pays, how disbursement works, and how subscription, advertising, and directory revenue fit together without one cannibalising the others.

Legal and compliance

Real-estate referral and broker compliance requirements — licensing constraints, compensation rules, and the safeguards brokerages require — translated into platform rules rather than terms of service.

Operations, vendors and support

Payment and disbursement handling, participant onboarding, dispute and quality processes, and the support model behind a marketplace where both sides need recourse.

Market and go-to-market

The cold-start problem: which side to build first, how to reach agents and brokerages, and what makes an informal referral network move to a structured one.

Product, workflow and AI-assisted development

Routing rules, reputation model, multi-sided permissions, product direction, and the AI-assisted development used to make the concept tangible.

Why the system exists

What was broken

Real-estate referrals move informally. Leads are traded through personal networks with inconsistent quality, unclear accountability, and no reliable structure for compensation or compliance.

What became possible

A referral is a transaction. Given a clear structure for routing, reputation, and disbursement, informal trading can become a marketplace with defined rules for both sides.

How I designed the response

Design the economics before the interface. Establish who pays, who benefits, what a good lead is worth, what safeguards brokers require, and how the marketplace stays balanced as it grows — then build the workflows that enforce it.

What was designed

Multi-sided user model with distinct participant roles
Referral workflows from submission through outcome
Private and public lead pools
Lead routing rules
Reputation concepts tied to real outcomes
Subscription monetization plus advertising and directory concepts
Payment and disbursement concepts
Broker compliance and operational safeguards

Directing the connected decisions behind a two-sided business — economics, compliance, monetization, operations, market, workflow, and AI-assisted product development — where weaknesses in one area affect the entire model.

Marketplace design
Unit economics
Licensing and broker compliance
Payments and disbursement operations
Monetization strategy
Go-to-market strategy
Multi-sided user modeling
Lead-generation systems
Growth strategy

How the System Works

A structured referral marketplace: opportunities come in, rules decide who sees them, and compliance requirements are enforced by the platform rather than by memory.

Layer 1
Participants
Who sends and receives opportunities.
- Referral sources and receiving agents (People)
- Brokerage and participant boundaries (Security)
Layer 2
Routing
Rules decide who sees an opportunity and when it moves on.
- Lead or referral submitted (Workflow)
- Lead routing engine applies the rules (Automation)
- Participant reviews and accepts (Human decision)
Layer 3
Business rules
The commercial and compliance logic of the marketplace.
- Broker-compliance safeguards as platform rules (Security)
- Subscription monetization (Workflow)
- Payment and disbursement concepts (Outside service)Planned
Layer 4
Support and oversight
Help and administration built in.
- AI support grounded in platform knowledge (AI)
- Escalation to a person (Human decision)

People
Security
Workflow
Automation
Human decision
Outside service
AI

Features that are part of the product, not separate products

Lead routing engine

Rules that decide which participants see which opportunity, and when it moves on.

Compliance safeguards

Broker-compliance requirements expressed as platform rules rather than policy documents.

Multi-tenant separation

Brokerage and participant boundaries enforced at the platform level.

AI Support

A reusable AI support layer built into the platform: platform-specific knowledge grounding, AI chat support, escalation to a human, support-ticket handoff, and administrative controls.

AI Support and multi-tenant separation are architectural patterns reused across the platforms rather than rebuilt each time.

What I took from it

Marketplaces are decided by incentives and trust, not features. Product economics has to be designed at the same time as the workflow.

A decade of sales leadership and revenue responsibility, plus current real-estate and transaction work. I’ve spent my career on the side of the table where incentives and trust are earned.

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