Cayce Ullman

Most people treat the real estate commission the way they treat gravity - a fixed cost of moving through the world. Cayce Ullman never accepted that framing. He spent more than twenty years building software, and software people share a habit of mind: when a system charges a toll that the process itself doesn't require, they start looking for the wiring underneath.

Ullman is the CEO and co-founder of ListingSpark, an Austin company that lets homeowners list, market, and sell their properties for a flat daily fee instead of a percentage-based agent commission. The premise is simple and slightly heretical: the information a seller needs to price and manage a listing is more available than it has ever been, so the tools - not the middleman - should do the heavy lifting.

That idea came out of listening. Ullman and his co-founder, licensed broker Aaron Jistel, kept hearing the same thing from clients. Owners were confident they could handle their own listings if someone handed them the right instruments. They wanted expert advice on tap for the moments that mattered, and a clean, self-directed process for everything else. ListingSpark was built around that split.

The result is a patent-pending system that charges a flat, daily fee to list, market, and sell a home on the same networks the professionals use. Sellers get MLS syndication, market-comparison and pricing data, photography, sign-and-lockbox logistics, and offer management - the machinery of a modern sale, minus the six percent at the end.

Ullman did not arrive in real estate by way of real estate. His path runs through some of the more demanding corners of the software industry. He studied computer science at the University of Southern California in the early 1990s, then went to work where the code had to be fast and correct: as a Senior Software Architect at E*TRADE Financial, in the era when trading was moving decisively online.

He founded and led engineering at ActZero, then landed at Cisco as a Director of Engineering inside its IronPort division, the email-security group. From there he helped build AlienVault, the security company later folded into AT&T CyberSecurity, rising from VP of Engineering for the US to Senior VP of Product Development.

In 2009 he took a detour into consumer media that many people have quietly benefited from. Ullman co-founded Plex, the media-server platform that organizes and streams personal collections, alongside Scott Olechowski and Elan Feingold. It grew from a niche media-center project into software running in millions of households - a lesson, if he needed one, in what happens when you hand ordinary people professional-grade tools.

Along the way he also worked the other side of the table as a General Partner at Ullman Capital, the investor's view of how companies get built and funded. When he and Jistel started ListingSpark in Austin, Ullman took the CTO seat - the natural role for a career engineer. In 2023 he moved into the CEO chair, trading the architecture of the product for the architecture of the company.

The word Ullman's company keeps coming back to is self-directed. The bet is that a homeowner, given clean data and a guided process, can run a sale that used to require handing over the keys and a commission. Pricing tools lean on market comparisons rather than gut feel. Listings syndicate to the major websites. Paperwork, photography, and lockbox logistics are handled inside the platform. And when a seller hits a moment where they want a licensed broker's read, the advice is there - Jistel runs a licensed Texas brokerage behind it.

It is a very engineer-shaped answer to a very human transaction: automate the repeatable parts, keep a person in the loop for the judgment calls, and let the seller keep the money that the automation made unnecessary. For Ullman, that is less a disruption story than a correction - closing the gap between what selling a home actually requires and what it has traditionally cost.