Data Nerd.
Story teller.
Builder.

I'm a bit of a data nerd. That's probably the right place to start.

Something about having access to information that explains what's actually happening beneath the surface has always sparked something in me — and curiosity, in my experience, is where the good ideas come from. I grew up a military brat, which is a polite way of saying I moved all over the world before I learned how to tie my shoes properly. My family finally landed in Moore, Oklahoma right around the time I was starting high school, and Oklahoma is where the roots actually took. Most of my working life has been spent as an entrepreneur of one stripe or another — usually wearing a half-dozen hats at once, none of them particularly well-fitted — and the thread running through all of it is the same thread: what story is the data actually telling us?

For years I was frustrated with the tools our industry sells itself. There's no shortage of expensive platforms promising a wealth of data, but most of them leave you bolting information together yourself and praying you didn't miss something important when it comes time to tell a client what you found. At the local level, most brokers aren't using the advanced tools at all — and the ones that are still end up wrestling with the same assumption at the center: that the answer is in the comps. But comps are only part of the picture. I've always felt like the more interesting answers are in what's not there yet.

Signal Intelligence started, honestly, because I couldn't find a CRM that worked the way my brain worked. Something that let me pivot between deals quickly, add people to call lists, get creative about who to call next. Instead of paying for another feature on another platform that almost worked, I started building my own. And because I didn't want to manually import every listed property in Oklahoma County, I found a way to pull the county parcel data and map the whole thing myself.

That's when the snowball started.

Looking at all that data laid out in one place, I realized I had far more information than I was actually using — and I started wondering if I could build a localized version of the kind of heat maps the big platforms sell for thousands a month. So I added another data source. Then another. And the more I fed in, the more the map started telling me things.

At some point I remembered Newton's gravity formula — the force of attraction is proportional to mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance — and I wondered what would happen if I applied that logic to the movement of capital and the clustering of investment. First pass, a dozen little purple dots lit up on the map, and every single one was a cluster I could identify and validate against what I already knew was happening on the ground.

That moment rearranged my brain. I had stumbled into something worth saving and expanding.

Since then I've been backfilling parcels, hunting for new public data sources, tuning the calculations, and watching the system get sharper every month. It now identifies properties just beyond established clusters that haven't traded in a long time and are primed for movement. I don't have to make random cold calls anymore. I can make one targeted call, with the data in front of me and a story to explain why I picked up the phone.

And that's the real difference. The story.

Years ago, before any of this existed, I was invited to do an open-mic presentation for the Chamber of Commerce. I was new at my firm, up against heavy hitters pitching major developments, and I didn't have anything I thought would land. So I did something a little reckless — I took the mic and made a case for art as a catalyst for development. Showed examples of where it worked. Made fun of where it went horribly wrong (ask me about the OKC Ring sometime). Tried to argue that you don't need millions of dollars to make a place worth investigating — you need people being creative and a little bit weird.

Afterward, a billionaire developer walked up and said, "Wow — such passion. How can I help?"

It rocked my world to be noticed for taking a different approach, for telling a story about a place I thought was primed for something new. He became a mentor of mine for years. And he's the one who first said the thing I've never stopped thinking about: people's experiences are their stories, and the better we get at reading those stories, the better we get at being of service.

That's the whole job, as far as I'm concerned.

I could have walked away from brokerage to build tech full-time. Plenty of founders have. The honest answer for why I didn't: real estate is the business of putting people into buildings, and I like the people part too much to trade it in for a keyboard and a stock option schedule. Being a broker means you're there when someone is making one of the most important decisions of their business. You're a confidant. Sometimes a guardian angel. Always a sounding board.

And I get to learn from everyone — city officials, developers, other brokers, tenants, contractors, the people walking into a space for the first time and telling me what they see. Everyone has something to offer that I don't already know. I call myself an "ah-ha" junkie because I love the moment of realization when something clicks, when a pattern reveals itself, when someone tells you something that makes your brain hesitate in the best possible way. Those moments almost always happen in conversation with other people. A platform I built from nothing was never going to replace that.

So I kept doing both. And the more I've done both, the more I've realized they were the same thing the whole time.

Here's something most people don't know about me. I went to college in New York to become an actor. It took me about two years to figure out two important things: I wasn't very confident in my own skin, and honestly, I wasn't that great of an actor. So I pivoted into producing and managing theater, and through a series of very pleasant accidents ended up working with several highly successful Broadway producers. One of them even talked me into opening my own producing office — which I did, for a few years, before coming home to Oklahoma.

I thought I'd left theater behind. Theater had other plans.

I've been on the board of OKC REP since 2016, and I served as treasurer through the pandemic — one of the most meaningful chapters of my non-profit life. OKC REP puts on new works that have never been seen in this city before, built around the community the theater sits inside. Theater is the most ephemeral art form there is — when a show closes, all that's left is the memory of having seen it, and who you saw it with. Our lives get shaped by the stories we share with the people we love.

My mother was an English lit major. I grew up on Shakespeare and English mythology, sword fights and wizards and dragons. The fact that I'm now a commercial real estate broker who wrote his own predictive AI platform is not as far from that childhood as it sounds. I'm still chasing stories. I just have different tools now.