Stephen London, president and co-founder of Fello, has a simple pitch: The leads you already have are worth more than the ones you’re buying.
Fello is the lead-nurturing platform behind Felix, an artificial intelligence-powered outreach agent. London has spent years watching top real estate teams run on a treadmill, chasing new leads while their existing databases transact without them.
For London, Felix is the fix for the lead-nurturing problem. And whatever disruption AI brings to real estate, he’s betting the outcome will be net positive.
London is one of a handful of senior real estate leaders tapped to be part of the Inman Advisory Council. Members of the council will work directly with Inman leadership on editorial direction, events and community strategy.
London sat down with Inman recently to discuss why the traditional real estate lead model is breaking down, what the agentic wave of AI means for Realtors willing to adapt and what he’s most excited about as he joins the advisory council.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: Fello recently shared an article on Inman that discussed what your co-founder and CEO Ryan Young called “the lead trap.” When did you first start to notice that problem clearly, and how do you think Felix solves it?
Stephen London: There are two major inflection points where we noticed it firsthand. Fello started with a company called Flash House. We were basically doing agent-led iBuying at the time. Ryan [Young] runs one of the larger real estate teams in the country, and we noticed that he kept buying leads while we were working his database to find cash offers on the side.
What kept happening was we’d find someone in his database he hadn’t talked to in a while, they didn’t know we were the same company and they’d reach out to us instead of him. Sometimes people he was really close with. Like, “Why is my cousin reaching out to this company?”
That was light bulb No. 1. We ran the math and found that basically 10 percent of your database transacts every year. If you have a large database, there are 5x to 10x as many deals you could be doing just sitting there, and you’re missing them.
Light bulb No. 2 is just seeing the economics across all these teams, especially with the commission-sharing components of certain deals. It makes sense as a loss leader to build a business, but from a long-term ownership standpoint, it’s very easy to see why the natural reaction is “I want more leads,” even when you’re not working the database you already have.
Do you think that’s been the attitude for a while — get as many leads as possible but not necessarily do anything with them?
I think it used to work. There’s a book called Who Moved My Cheese? The concept is that once the mice find cheese, they keep returning to the same spot even after it’s been moved.
That old lead strategy worked well in the mid-2010s, maybe into the late 2010s. Then a lot of things changed. Consumer expectations shifted, portal economics changed, the sheer volume of leads increased dramatically. What once worked in commission-share is now under pressure.
The fundamentals of real estate economics have changed, but people are going back to the same playbook, even though there’s a new one that the most profitable teams are already using.
I wanted to ask about the technology itself. One of the most interesting things was listening to the calls Felix was having with prospects, and some of them mistook Felix for a human. Does that concern you from a disclosure or trust standpoint?
From an ethical standpoint, we ensure Felix says it’s a digital assistant. We are not trying to hide that it’s AI.
My fundamental thesis — and I’ve had it for a while — is that people will end up preferring AI for many interactions that don’t require deep trust. If the AI is really good, it’s just easier.
There’s no other agenda. You don’t have to feel bad if you want to hang up or ask a silly question. But when it comes to something like actually selling your home — the emotional, high-trust part — you want a human.
I think you’re going to see a hybrid model across many industries. AI handles the conversations and the work that real estate agents don’t really want to do anyway, like going through 10 rejections to find the hand-raiser.
Then the agent gets to be in someone’s living room having great conversations and building relationships. If you can build a model that lets both become the best versions of themselves, that’s where this is going.
When I wrote about Felix, we talked about this second wave of AI. The first wave was content generation; the second wave is agentic AI products like Felix. Do you think most people in real estate understand the implications of what’s happening right now?
I’ve actually been surprised by how advanced some people are. But I read a stat that only sub-10 percent of AI users are leveraging agentic features. The whole world is just now waking up to the potential.
I’m a glass-half-full person. There’s definitely a doomer version of AI and an optimistic one. The optimistic version I see is that it helps people automate tasks they don’t want to do.
I have this monthly financial update email I have to send to four people, and I hate it. AI just handles it. It thinks for itself. People are waking up to the idea of “I can do more of the things I love while this thing works for me.”
With Felix, we’re seeing that now. People say, “This thing is texting back at 2 a.m. while I’m sleeping. It’s actually working while I sleep — not just as a slogan.”
What do you think the general sentiment in real estate is about AI? Is it as mixed as in the broader world?
Definitely mixed. I personally wrestle with it all the time — feeling doom to feeling like we might be on the edge of abundance.
I think with real estate, the more entrepreneurial people are going to become a lot better and enjoy the work more. People who struggle to adopt are going to have a tougher time.
But I’m confident that if you’re an entrepreneurial single agent, a small team or a medium-sized team, this will give you leverage that wasn’t possible before. Instead of hiring humans for sales, marketing and operations, you’re going to hire an AI agent that’s more consistent.
I also think it’s going to net create more jobs, which is counter to what a lot of people think. More people are just going to be more entrepreneurial and do more things.
What’s something in real estate technology that doesn’t get covered enough?
Where consumer search and information is going. Zillow created this whole category, but with LLMs, that’s going to change dramatically. If you’re searching for your next home a year or two from now, what does that process look like?
I don’t think people are going to use the portals the same way. It’s probably going to be more conversational, more personalized. I genuinely don’t know if it’ll be apps built on LLMs or something else. I just know the experience will be very different.
Inman created this advisory council in part because of how quickly the industry’s media consumption habits are evolving. What’s most important for real estate news organizations to get right?
I would say trust. We built an internal LLM-SEO tool at Fello that can pump out unlimited articles, and a lot of it is slop.
The news organizations that win will be the ones that reinforce their status as trusted gatekeepers. If you go there, you’re getting a curated answer. That’s going to be really big going forward, because it’s very hard to know what to trust right now.
You have a background across many industries, including healthcare. What brought you into real estate? And what do you think makes the real estate industry unique?
Ryan [Young] and I are childhood friends. I came off my last company with a nice exit and wasn’t sure what to do next. The one thing I knew was that I wanted to work with people I really enjoy working with. I didn’t care what industry. And I’ve always loved real estate. So Ryan and I started the company together and built it from there.
What’s helped me across industries is seeing the first principles. Being an outsider at first can be an advantage. You get to ask dumb questions — “Why do you do it this way?” — because you’re not locked into how it’s always worked. I’ve always found that to be an advantage. An innocent lens, silly questions nobody else is willing to ask.
What are you most excited about serving on the Inman Advisory Council?
I said to [Inman CEO] Tom [Bohn], and it’s not lip service, that I think they have a really cool opportunity. There’s no other major organization that could bring the industry together the way Inman could. We’re in a transition moment, and helping people get to the other side of that by creating more community and resources — that’s right up my alley.
