Why I Started Find A Black Agent

To understand why I started Find A Black Agent, I have to go a bit into my personal history. FABA did not start as a business plan. It started with a decision about the kind of work I wanted to do, and then with questions from people I knew.

I set my criteria before I had the idea

I was very intentional that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to build something from scratch that could create value and operate at a national, and eventually global, scale. So my criteria was set.

The second thing I wanted was to build something that gave me a competitive advantage based on my background and my skill sets, both personally and professionally. I was not looking for just any business. I was looking for the one that fit what I already knew how to do.

Ten years in corporate technology

I worked in corporate technology from 2014 to 2024. That work introduced me to large sets of data, and to systems and applications that thousands of people were affected by. My hands got to touch things that had to work for a lot of people at once.

At the same time, I was investing in real estate. So for about ten years I had one foot in technology and one foot in property.

Then the questions started coming

Because I was investing, I started to get a lot of questions from friends, colleagues and family. They wanted help along their journey of purchasing their first home or selling their first house.

But many of these people were not in the same geography as me. I grew up in Northern Virginia, and I had moved around from there to Baltimore, to New Orleans, to Houston. I wrote about what it was like to buy in two of those places in Buying in a City You've Never Lived In.

There were limitations on what I could help them with, because I was not licensed in all of these states.

Here is the short version of why that matters. A real estate license is issued by a state. In general, a license in one state does not let you represent a buyer or seller in another state, and the rules on that differ from state to state.

So I did the thing I could do. I referred the business out. A referral is an introduction: you connect someone you know to a licensed agent who works in the market where they are buying or selling.

What ended up happening was I referred a lot of the business out, and I fell in love with the actual business model.

What was missing

What was missing for the people coming to me was a professional they could trust in the place where they were buying or selling. They trusted me, and I could not represent them there. The introduction was the most useful thing I could give them.

That is still the core of FABA. As I said in What Happens After You Fill Out the FABA Form, we put a lot of thought into who we connect you with, because we want you to have a high likelihood to succeed, whether you are buying, selling or investing.

Where my two backgrounds met

Making one introduction for a friend is a favor. Doing it well for people across the country takes data, systems and follow-through, and that is the kind of work I had been doing in technology. Find A Black Agent is where that background and my real estate investing came together.

It also matched the criteria I started with. It is built from scratch. It creates value. It is national. And it pushes and stretches my skill set, which is what I wanted to find.

So here we are today. If you are buying, selling or investing and want to be introduced to a Black real estate agent in your market, start at findablackagent.com.