Not happy with an app? Build your own.

One of the big real estate brokerages we met with recently was using a major deal processing and storage application. I won’t name names, but it should be obvious. I also don’t want to get into any trouble.

The big brokerage had in house developers, were building their own platform, and weren’t happy with the app.

So they built their own.

This was a few years ago.

This past year, in the course of six months, I did the same, for my ‘relatively’ big brokerage.

We’re not 100,000 agents. Not 50,000. Not even 10,000. We’re just over 2,000 agents.

And when I say six months, I really mean less than a week. (The project itself was done in a week, but a six month delay over choosing alternatives to an in-house built app put my work on the shelf. I dusted it off, and launched it live just a few days ago.)

We’re in the era where apps can be built overnight. Not with the expectation of it becoming enterprise level, software as a service, or scalable. But at least MVP, and onwards.

If you’re not happy with an app, you can build it.

Vibe coding apps such as Lovable, Base44, etc. are one place to start.

Claude Code or ChatGPT Codex is another.

Companies big and small can fully build out their own tech stack, working the way they want it to, and custom crafted to the way they do business.

You no longer have to plug in your processes into an app that doesn’t address all of your nuanced needs.

You could literally build out your own functions based on what you need, down to the littlest detail.

And this can be done very quickly.

I’m not saying these apps will work perfectly. What app really does? Nor am I saying these apps can instantly scale to hundreds of thousands or even millions of users. Though the infrastructure services hosting these apps are certainly addressing that capability.

We have to accept this. And we’re talking about what can be done today. Imagine what can be done a year from now, five years from now, ten years from now.