A designer who read the tax code, decided the qualified intermediary industry was overcharging for fax machines, and then quietly built a free one.
Inside a 1031 exchange, the money sits. For 45 days, then 180. It waits in a bank account while a real estate investor scouts a replacement property and a qualified intermediary - a creature of IRS code 1031 - holds the cash so the seller never touches it. Traditionally, the intermediary charges a flat fee for the privilege. Sometimes a thousand dollars. Sometimes much more. The interest the deposit earns? That stays with the intermediary too.
Judd Schoenholtz looked at that arrangement and called it strange. Then he built a company that flips it: Deferred.com charges the customer nothing, and shares the interest the funds earn while they sit. The fee column reads zero. The economics work because the float is the product.
That is the kind of move he keeps making. Read the small print of a giant, inert market, find the place where the customer is paying for inertia, and put a small, fast, well-designed company on top of the inefficiency.
Make things 1% better every day.- Judd Schoenholtz, company value, Open Listings
Before any of this, there was Huge. The global digital agency where Schoenholtz spent roughly a decade as Group Director of User Experience, building screens and flows for Google, Dell, IKEA, JetBlue, Samsung, Target, Fox, Vans. The list is long and brand-name and almost ironic - tucked inside it is the National Association of Realtors, the trade group representing the very brokerage establishment he would eventually compete with.
The pivot to founder happened domestically. In 2011 he and his wife bought their first home. The transaction was, depending on the day you ask him about it, either annoying or unconscionable. He has not really stopped trying to fix it since.
Open Listings was the first answer. A self-service real estate platform that rebated commission to buyers, applied to Y Combinator, got rejected, took the feedback as a brief, shipped an MVP, moved the team in together, and re-applied. The second time YC said yes - Winter 2015. By the time Opendoor acquired Open Listings in 2018, the company had saved homebuyers more than $25 million in commissions.
Then came Balance Homes - a home equity co-ownership platform, founded with a similar instinct that ownership and access to housing capital were stuck in a previous decade. Balance was acquired in 2023. There is a pattern here, and it is not coincidence. Schoenholtz keeps choosing the same enemy: the part of the real estate transaction where the customer pays for someone else's outdated workflow.
Which brings us to Deferred, co-founded with Alex Farrill and Aaron LaRue. The qualified intermediary business is roughly as old as the modern 1031 exchange itself - 1984, give or take, depending on how you count. It is paper-heavy, lightly regulated, and surprisingly profitable for the firms that have figured out the float. Deferred argues that the float belongs to the investor, not the intermediary, and that the documentation can be largely automated. In April 2025 they raised $3.6 million in seed funding to prove it.
Deferred
Co-founders: Alex Farrill, Aaron LaRue. Backers: B Capital, Fika Ventures.
Open Listings
Y Combinator W15. Acquired by Opendoor, 2018.
Balance Homes
Co-ownership platform. Acquired 2023.
Huge
10 years. Group Director of UX. Acquired by IPG.
A simplified look at where a traditional qualified intermediary's revenue comes from, versus what Deferred chooses to do with the same dollars.
Illustrative, not to scale. Deferred shares interest earnings with the customer; traditional intermediaries typically keep float income and charge a transaction fee.
"Make things 1% better every day."
Open Listings company value
"To Bryson!"
Favorite toast, honoring his co-founder's late father
"Not sure, what is truth these days?"
Asked about unpopular truths
Y Combinator passed on Open Listings the first time. He treated the rejection like a product spec: ship an MVP, find real users, move the team into one apartment, apply again. Accepted into W15. The lesson he kept: the no is a brief.
It's the part of the day he protects. He credits it with his happiness, his balance, and - usefully for a founder on his third venture - his productivity.
At Huge, one of his clients was the National Association of Realtors. He has spent the decade since competing, in various ways, with the brokerage model that group represents.
The U.S. 1031 exchange market moves enormous sums of capital each year - the precise figure depends on the data set, but the consensus is "very large and very stuck." Schoenholtz's stated aim is to modernize and democratize it: make the process transparent, the funds secure, the documentation automated, and the fee structure customer-aligned.
The wider thesis is the same one he has run for a decade. Every transaction in real estate has a paper layer. Behind the paper is a workflow. Behind the workflow is a fee. Find the fee that exists because of the workflow, not because of the value, and remove it. Deferred is the cleanest expression of that idea so far.