He graduated into the 2008 crash, got curious about why nobody saw it coming, and ended up rewiring how America sees its biggest asset: the home.
Brendan Fairbanks - the analyst who decided spreadsheets were not good enough for the world's largest asset class.
Today Brendan Fairbanks runs Perchwell, the modern MLS technology and data platform for residential real estate. That sentence undersells the strange thing it actually means: in New York City, when an agent pulls up a listing, searches the market, or hands a buyer a report, there is a decent chance it runs on software his company built. Perchwell operates the de facto MLS of the Real Estate Board of New York - the Residential Listing Service that the entire city's brokerage world depends on.
The current chapter is expansion. After launching in New York, Perchwell has been onboarding multiple listing services across the country, partnering with MLS organizations that have spent decades on aging infrastructure. The pitch is plain. Give agents the kind of real-time, property-level data that traders take for granted, and let them be better advisors. The product ingests listing data, tax records, transaction records, geospatial and zoning information, then turns it into visualizations tuned to a single neighborhood, a single block, a single client.
The timing is not an accident. Remote work scrambled where Americans choose to live, and the post-2020 housing market exposed how thin most agents' data really was. Into that gap, in July 2024, Perchwell raised a $25 million Series B led by Lux Capital, the firm that had backed its Series A. The new money is pointed squarely at artificial intelligence for data and workflow - the connective tissue that turns a pile of records into something an agent can act on in seconds. Notably, the round drew in the kind of investors who rarely back an unproven idea: Starwood Capital Group, Flex Capital, and, tellingly, the multiple listing services themselves - Stellar MLS, REcolorado, and CRMLS.
Fairbanks describes the goal without much drama: "I wanted to build a product that allows for a more quantitative approach to understanding the market, that agents could then use with their clients to help them get to better decisions." It is a banker's sentence about a deeply human transaction. That tension is the whole company.
Most software founders pick a market and then go shopping for a problem. Fairbanks did it the other way around. He had a problem he could not stop poking at - why is the most valuable thing most families will ever own bought and sold with the worst information? - and the company was the residue of refusing to drop it. The Perchwell story reads less like a startup launch and more like a question that never got answered, so he built the answer himself.
Bars are illustrative of relative scale, not exact ratios.
Real estate is one of the most common professions in the US, and yet very few technology companies have emerged to serve it.
In 2008 Fairbanks finished a Dartmouth economics degree and moved to New York to work in finance, arriving just as the market came apart. He spent two years as an investment banking analyst in the Natural Resources Group at Deutsche Bank, then four more as a private equity associate at First Reserve. Oil and gas deals by day; a nagging question underneath.
The question was simple and it stuck: how does a failure that large go unseen? He started pulling real estate data to understand the market, partly because he wanted to buy a place in the city himself. What he found was an asset class - the largest on earth - running on siloed, inaccessible information. Stocks and bonds had terminals, screens, models. Homes had spreadsheets and instinct.
So he taught himself to code and built his own tools to compile the data. Agents noticed. They wanted to use what he had made. That was the signal. Perchwell started in 2015, the brokerage product launched in 2018, and despite a chorus of insiders telling him it would not work, more than 50 New York brokerages signed on.
There is a particular kind of stubbornness required to build in real estate. The industry is old, fragmented, and proudly resistant to outsiders. The multiple listing service - the shared database agents rely on to know what is for sale - sits at the center of all of it, governed by local boards, layered with rules, and notoriously hard to modernize. Plenty of well-funded companies have circled the MLS and walked away. Fairbanks did the unglamorous thing instead: he learned the rules, respected them, and built software that bent to each market rather than demanding the market bend to him.
The breakthrough was not a feature. It was trust. In 2023, the Real Estate Board of New York selected Perchwell to operate its Residential Listing Service - the closest thing New York City has to an official MLS. For a company that started as one person's data hobby, becoming the rails under an entire city's residential market is an extraordinary vote of confidence, and an extraordinary responsibility. When the listing service hiccups, agents cannot work. There is no quieter, higher-stakes job in proptech.
That same year, HousingWire named Fairbanks a Rising Star, citing his work to revolutionize the MLS platform. The recognition leaned on a simple narrative the industry could finally see: he used his own home-buying experience, plus relentless feedback from agents, brokers, and consumers, to build a next-generation system, rolled out first in New York and then offered to MLS organizations across the country.
Anyone can ship a real estate app. Almost no one gets handed the infrastructure a whole city runs on. Fairbanks did - and the difference is the entire business.
It also explains his patience. A consumer app lives or dies on a launch. An MLS lives or dies on reliability measured in years. Fairbanks built a company that the industry adopts slowly and then cannot live without - the opposite of a viral arc, and far more durable.
B.A. in Economics. Moves to NYC for finance as the crisis hits.
Investment banking analyst, Natural Resources Group.
Private equity associate. Learns how capital really reads a market.
Self-taught code turns into a data platform for real estate.
50+ NYC brokerages sign on, against the skeptics.
Selected to run REBNY's RLS. Named a HousingWire Rising Star.
Led by Lux Capital, with Starwood and multiple MLS investors.
Listings, tax records, transactions, geospatial and zoning data, pulled into one property-level view instead of a dozen silos.
Real-time visualizations tuned to a neighborhood or an amenity, not broad market averages. Analysis an agent can hand to a client.
Introduced the industry's first RESO-certified add/edit API, so listings can be created and managed in a standardized way across markets.
Implements each MLS's own business rules - property types, listing statuses, local logic - rather than forcing one mold.
Operates the de facto MLS of New York City via REBNY's Residential Listing Service.
Series B capital is aimed at AI for data and workflow - smarter listings, less busywork, more time advising.
I wanted to build a product that allows for a more quantitative approach to understanding the market, that agents could then use with their clients to help them get to better decisions.
Real estate is one of the most common professions in the US, and yet very few technology companies have emerged to serve the industry.
From our perspective, we're really just getting started and are excited to work with MLSs and agents across the country.
LUX CAPITAL · STARWOOD CAPITAL GROUP · FLEX CAPITAL
STELLAR MLS · RECOLORADO · CRMLS
When the multiple listing services you are trying to modernize start writing checks into your round, the skeptics from 2018 have a harder time arguing.
Build the next generation of technology for agents to best serve their clients - and bring capital-markets rigor to the world's largest asset class.
Sources: HousingWire · Perchwell on Medium · Real Estate News · The Real Deal · PR Newswire · The Org · RESO