FirstTeam Real Estate, one of California’s and the nation’s leading independent brokerages, is standardizing its entire tech stack on Purlin, an artificial intelligence operating layer for real estate that already counts more than 40,000 agents, teams, loan officers and brokerages as users across North America.
Lauren Henss, VP of marketing and strategic initiatives at FirstTeam, told Inman the platform launches in October.
The rollout covers three Purlin products: PurlinOS, the operational core; Purlin Close; and Purlin Offer & Negotiate. FirstTeam’s agents will be able to work the system by voice, text, email or chatbot, including calling a phone number and talking to an AI assistant the same way they’d call a colleague.
“Real estate is undergoing a seismic shift, and the brokerages that will succeed are those focused on creating an integrated technology ecosystem, not just adding additional software features,” Henss said in a statement. “This isn’t about adding another piece of AI technology. It’s about creating a seamless experience for everyone involved in a transaction.”
‘What’s going to help them close more deals?’
In an interview at Inman Connect San Diego, Henss said the search for a partner started with an audit that mapped what an agent actually needs to do, hour by hour, across an entire deal, not just bolting on the newest AI feature.
“I was looking for something that would increase the level of adoption across all my platforms and all the different software we had,” Henss told Inman. “From a recruitment angle, what’s going to draw agents into the technology platform? And what’s going to help them close more deals in less time?”
Michele Harrington | First Team
FirstTeam’s executives, including CEO Michele Harrington and the brokerage’s director of IT operations, Jim Loges, evaluated several out-of-the-box platforms. They found that each one covered maybe 60 percent to 70 percent of that lifecycle before requiring agents to bounce back into other, disconnected software.
“What I realized is nothing out there exists for what we wanted to do,” Henss said. “We were going to have to build it, but we needed the right partner.”
FirstTeam landed on Purlin, she said, because the company was willing to build custom functionality alongside FirstTeam rather than hand over a fixed menu of features.
Customization was key
When asked why FirstTeam chose to partner with Purlin rather than go with one of the all-in-one AI-powered real estate tech platforms on the market today, Henss was blunt.
“They’re not good,” she said. “Are they good at launching a marketing buy-in across Spotify and Prime? No. I’m thinking about how to meet agents where they are in their brand, but also launch to the consumer within this platform. Those are two very different things. They feed on each other, and you need both, but that’s the difference. None of these platforms do that well.”
Henss said FirstTeam did evaluate other vendors for a partnership, but they were all out-of-the-box.
“I’d say, ‘I want to add these marketing buy-ins,’ or ‘I want this AI compliance feature,’ and they’d say, ‘Great, you can do it this way.’ But there wasn’t room to build with them,” she said. “It was, ‘This is what you get.’ So it was the customizable piece.”
Henss said a key factor was also being able to build for the full agent lifecycle.
Lauren Henss
“A lot of these platforms could get you part of the way, but you’d still have to plug in other software. It didn’t talk to everything else, and it wasn’t going to operate as the hub and nucleus communicating with all the other platforms,” she said.
Henss added that when you look at the history of digital transformation in the real estate industry, more than 70 percent of brokerage technology projects fail.
“That’s because you don’t have an entire ecosystem connecting everything together. It just relies on one platform,” she said. “Typically there’s a launch, a training, and then everyone forgets about it, and they wonder why there’s no adoption. They’re not monitoring metrics. They don’t have an in-house team to support and grow it. There are no KPIs tied to company goals.”
Henss said FirstTeam’s approach is different. “What we’re building lets me see utilization of every single product across our agents. That’s extremely powerful from a brokerage’s operating point of view,” she said.
A cohesive experience
FirstTeam Chief Revenue Officer Tim Quirk pointed out that most brokerages own five, six, sometimes a dozen-plus separate software tools, and none of them talk to each other.
Quirk said there are “maybe two or three brokerages in the country with the resources” to build this type of all-in-one system themselves, and they’ve spent a decade or more doing it.
“They’re just starting to see that vision come to fruition,” Quirk told Inman. “But how do all the independents and boutiques compete with that? It’s really hard.”
The AI component matters for FirstTeam, Quirk said, because an agent picking up the phone and calling a number to interact with the system is something every agent already knows how to do.
“They use their phone all day. They don’t want to email, don’t want to read email. They’ll text,” he said. “But if they’re in the car and can pick up the phone, ask a question, get work done, instead of logging into some other system they can’t remember their password for, that’s gold. That’s what Purlin OS is about: connecting the brokerage’s technology, and even the agent’s own technology, into one cohesive experience.”
Access to ‘absolutely everything’
FirstTeam’s strategy to drive agent adoption leans on an agent-ambassador model: Give a cohort of agents early access, let them break the product and provide feedback, then have them train their peers rather than corporate.
“I want [our agents] to teach it, because it’s their everyday reality, and that drives adoption,” Henss said. “Agents like learning from other agents they want to emulate. If we can get that peer-to-peer connection going, they’ll love it.”
Quirk said agent adoption among newer and veteran agents will likely be about the same and high across the board because agents get access to their financials and their commissions. “That’s what they care about most,” he said.
He said to imagine a new agent joins FirstTeam and gets a text that gives them access to “absolutely everything,” their AI assistant that can help them through the first days and a way to let FirstTeam know if they need anything.
“There are about 1.6 million agents in the U.S. right now, and only a small percentage are actually doing deals,” Quirk said. “Empowering them is a huge lever. Personalization can run through whatever channel the agent prefers — email, ChatGPT-style notifications, text. That’s advanced personalization at scale, which is rare to build.”
A signal for where the industry is heading
Giorgi Chigogidze
Quirk added that the data underlying the system can give agents more opportunities to help their buyers and sellers transact. One of the features FirstTeam is rolling out is called Final Offer.
“Say there’s a property in California that matches five of your buyer’s criteria, and it already has four offers. Two came in yesterday, two today,” Quirk explained. “Your AI assistant calls you this morning and tells you: your buyers might want to see this now, because it’s about to go off the market.”
For a buyer’s agent, he said that’s a much faster path to making an offer and getting a deal done. Buyers get more information than they’ve ever had, and they trust it because they can see it.
“For the listing agent, it drives demand for the property,” Quirk continued. “It’s about putting data in front of agents in a way that’s actionable, whether they’re brand new or highly seasoned. It moves the ball forward.”
Purlin CEO Giorgi Chigogidze cast the FirstTeam deal as a signal for where the industry is headed, not just a single brokerage’s tech refresh.
“Most brokerages and teams are not yet built for a market where AI touches every part of the transaction,” Chigogidze said. “FirstTeam is choosing its footing early. By standardizing operations, contracts and negotiations on a single platform, the brokerage is creating a competitive advantage for agents who want to work with modern infrastructure rather than adapt to it later.”
