Why We Built arro.

I spent about seven years as a buyer's broker in Santa Fe.

Not a big firm. Not a team. Just me — a one-man shop called Home Sweet Home Santa Fe, working mostly with friends and people I knew, helping them buy houses. No listings. Strictly buyer side. I believed then, and I believe now, that representing a buyer is a specific craft, and that doing it well means you're not trying to do anything else at the same time.

During those years, I watched something happen over and over again that bothered me. Not in a dramatic way — more like a slow, low-grade frustration that builds up over time when you keep seeing the same thing go wrong.

The thing that kept going wrong was how buyers found their brokers.

The Ways It Happens (And Why Most of Them Aren't Good Enough)

When someone decides they want to buy a house, they eventually need to find a buyer's broker. According to NAR's 2025 data, 43 percent of buyers find their agent through a friend, neighbor, or relative. Another 7 percent inquire about a specific property they found online. Another 5 percent meet someone at an open house. About 4 percent get a cold contact from an agent. The rest trickle in through websites, signs, and other channels.

Here's how each of those actually plays out:

A friend refers them to someone. This is by far the best of the options. Your friend liked this person, trusted them, and is putting their reputation on the line by making the introduction. There's a personal dimension to it. The problem is that your friend is probably not thinking about whether this broker is actually a good match for you — your timeline, your communication style, your priorities, your life. They're thinking about who they liked. That's not nothing, but it's not matching. If you find a good broker this way, you're fortunate — and you may not need arro.

They call on a property. They see a listing they like, they call the number on the sign or click the contact button online, and the listing broker picks up. This one is my least favorite. That broker works for the seller. Their job is to get the best deal for the seller. An ethical broker will tell you this upfront and offer to represent you on other properties — but even then, you're not choosing a broker based on fit. You're choosing whoever answered the phone. And the conflict of interest that's baked into that situation is real, and most buyers are completely unequipped to recognize it, let alone manage it.

They meet someone at an open house. This is a variation on the above. The agent hosting the open house is usually working for the seller, or working for the listing brokerage. They're there to generate leads. Some of them are excellent buyer's brokers who will tell you exactly who they represent and offer you a fair shot at working together. Most are not going to tell you upfront that this is a lead-capture situation.

They walk into a firm or Google one. They're new to town, or they don't know anyone, or they just start searching. They find a brokerage that looks fine, call or walk in, and get whoever is next on the roster. No intake. No questions about what they're looking for in a working relationship. No consideration of whether this person is a good match for them. Just: you're next, here's your client.

I watched all of these play out hundreds of times. And the thing they all have in common is that none of them involve any real matching. It's all happenstance. The most important professional relationship in one of the biggest financial decisions of your life, and it's essentially random.

Why I Didn't Build It Then

I had the idea for arro. around 2013, 2014. I'd already closed my brokerage by then — the 2008 crash had taken care of that — but the problem was still sitting in the back of my head.

The crash was a clarifying moment. I watched buyers who had been rushed into purchases they weren't ready for lose everything. I watched the industry that had rushed them shrug and move on. I closed up shop, went and built other things, started HANGTIME, kept moving.

But the problem didn't go away. And building what arro. needed to be at that point would have been prohibitively expensive. The cost of building a genuinely useful, genuinely intelligent product was out of reach for a scrappy founder in Santa Fe. So I put it on the shelf.

Why Now

The economics of building software changed dramatically.

What used to require a team of engineers and millions of dollars in infrastructure can now be built by a small, focused team with the right tools. The cost came down by an order of magnitude. And when I looked at the problem again — really looked at it — I found that it still hadn't been solved. Not well, anyway.

The matching problem is still there. Buyers are still finding brokers by accident. The industry still treats the buyer as a lead to be converted, not a person to be served.

And now, on top of all that, the 2024 NAR settlement changed the rules of the game in ways that most buyers don't fully understand yet. The old assumptions about how buyer representation works, who pays for it, and what buyers are entitled to expect — all of that is in flux.

arro. is the answer to all of it. Not a lead-gen platform. Not another real estate search tool. A confidence platform — built for buyers, from the ground up, that helps them understand the process, know where they stand, and find the right broker at the right time.

I spent seven years watching this problem from the inside. I've spent the last few years building the solution.

That's why we built arro.