Hi, my name is Alex, the founder of NuAgent. I've been licensed as a real estate agent in New York for almost twenty years.
I started in commercial real estate in NYC, cold-calling landlords out of a landlord bible — hundreds of calls a day, trying to get landlords and investors to buy and sell multifamily and commercial property across the five boroughs. The work was grueling. Every relationship and every deal lived in spreadsheets and Outlook. Honestly, looking around today, it doesn't feel like much has changed for most agents.
Eventually one of my clients made me an offer to join their acquisitions team. I spent the next few years traveling the country, analyzing and underwriting investment opportunities for a national multifamily portfolio of 14,000 units across 8 states. Then 2008 happened. The deals dried up, and I was back looking for a way in.
I landed at Citi Habitats on the Upper West Side, which at the time was a very strong NYC brand moving serious rental volume across the city. It was my first real exposure to residential sales and rentals. I ended up managing a portfolio of eleven rent-stabilized multifamily buildings for a single, demanding landlord. High volume, low price points, an enormous number of leads, an exhausting cadence of showings and applications — and zero tools that actually fit the work.
I tried spreadsheets. I tried CRMs. Nothing held up. I was constantly losing leads I wanted to stay in touch with, drowning in showings, trying to do all of this while servicing my other clients and growing my own book.
This is where NuAgent was first imagined.
That was 2014. I had no coding experience, but I reached out to a developer friend, and we tried to scope an MVP. The system we needed had too many integrations and too much surface area to be meaningfully useful in any small form. It was overwhelming. Eventually he stepped away. So I started teaching myself to code — just to keep the idea alive.
Around the same time, my girlfriend was pregnant with our daughter.
I remember one month in August 2015. She was five months pregnant. We needed to move into a new apartment for our growing family. I had a massive portfolio of leads and listings that all needed servicing. I had to replace myself on the lease at our current apartment, find a new home for us, and close out every deal assigned to me — all in the same month.
It was one of the most intense periods of my career.
This was exactly when I could have used the tool I was dreaming about. Instead, I faltered. I wasn't able to service the account to the standards the owner expected, and in September he reassigned it to another agent on my team.
I was devastated. New home. Baby on the way. A significant loss of income. I realized I hadn't built up the rest of my business to absorb a hit that size — and the other accounts I was servicing couldn't fill the gap.
I needed to pivot — exhausted, but still in love with the idea of building this tool. I went to coding bootcamp. Newborn at home. Closing deals over lunch breaks and after class to keep the lights on. After bootcamp, I spent another year building the app while looking for full-time engineering work.
I ended up as a senior engineer at a Fortune 50 financial services company — working on their flagship consumer-facing website and building internal tools for various marketing teams. The NuAgent idea went dormant. I was rebuilding for my family.
But the idea kept pulling me back. I'd look at what was on the market, and while there were new competitors out there, nothing came close to the scope of what I knew this tool needed to be.
So I started building again.
This time, with almost twenty years of agent experience, a real engineering career under my belt, and the ability to battle-test every feature against actual deals and workflows. What I'm building now is the tool I wish I'd had during that August. The tool I wish I'd had when I was managing those eleven buildings. The tool every agent I've ever worked with should have had.
The mission is to help agents, teams, and brokerages of every size meaningfully increase their productivity — and to build a tool delightful enough that running a real estate business becomes genuinely enjoyable. To give agents back the time I wish I'd had. Time to be present for the people they love. Time to grow a business that sustains a real life. And a tool that makes the work itself feel good again.
— Alex K.
