How to Build a Brokerage Where Agents Only Have To Do 3 Things

This week's conversation is with Landan Dory, founder and CEO of North Star, a brokerage specializing in outdoor hospitality assets (RV parks, mobile home parks, marinas, campgrounds, and storage facilities). Since starting North Star in January 2025, Landan has built one of the largest market shares for these property types in Texas—and he's just getting started.

We talked for 45 minutes about building a brokerage from scratch, the 1031 exchange business model, and scaling with automation.

Here’s what we covered:

• How he achieved a 100% success rate on 1031 exchanges (vs. the industry standard of 60%)

• Why he left a stable firm to start his own brokerage

• The automation strategy that lets his brokers focus on only 3 things: finding deals, negotiating, and solving problems

• Why content creation became his #1 recruiting tool (3 of his last 4 hires came from social media)

Most brokers focus on one side of a transaction: helping clients sell their property. Landan saw the massive opportunity everyone to help sellers find new assets as well.

"There's about 30 trillion dollars worth of wealth that is going to transfer from the baby boomer generation to the next generation. A lot of that wealth is held in real estate. When that real estate is sold, there's going to be a huge check that all those individual owners are gonna have to write to the IRS."

His pitch was simple: Help owners sell their appreciated properties AND help them exchange into better assets that defer their tax bill.

The problem? Most brokers were matching clients into terrible replacement properties.

"I was working a lot of 1031 exchanges, specifically working for someone who was selling whatever type of property—multifamily, land, industrial—and then doing a 1031 exchange into net lease retail. I started seeing investors exiting multifamily in LA at a 3% cap rate who were buying a $150,000 a year net lease deal, like a Burger King deal in Nebraska, just making bad investment decisions with their hard earned equity that they built up over 20 years."

So he specialized. He became the guy who could walk clients through the entire process—sell high, exchange smart, and actually improve their cash flow while deferring taxes.

His track record? 100% success rate on 1031 exchanges. Compare that to IPX (the biggest 1031 accommodator) who told him their success rate is only 60%.

The difference? Strategy over speed.

"We try not to use hardly any of the 45 day identification window and the 180 day closing windows. When we're under contract selling the down-leg property, we are simultaneously identifying, negotiating and contracting on replacement properties and trying to put those in a position where they're closing within days of the down-leg sale."

Why He Started North Star Instead of Staying Put

After identifying the opportunity in outdoor hospitality (RV parks, mobile home parks, marinas, campgrounds, storage), Landan faced a choice: build this inside his existing firm or go out on his own.

He chose to build.

"We were two years into our last company and we just realized—we can do this on our own. We needed to and wanted to invest in our own business so that we could have better tools, resources, staff, personnel, data, marketing, so that we could go gobble up what we felt like was a pretty big market that no one was really attacking."

The window was closing. Either more competition would enter the space or market conditions would shift. They had to move fast.

"We started North Star in January of 2025. I gave my notice at my last company, put out ads that I was looking to hire brokers, and fortunately for me, every single person that I was working with basically said, 'We don't want to stay here if Landan's not here.' They asked if they could come with me and I said, 'Of course you can come with me.'"

Now they're targeting 25 brokers across various markets over the next five years, focusing on building the dominant brand in outdoor hospitality sales.

The North Star philosophy matters here:

"I have a North Star—I want to grow a big brokerage business. It's fun. I like to compete. I like to win. Every single one of my agents has their own North Star. They're trying to start their families, put money in the bank, pay off student loans. And all of our clients have their own unique North Stars."

Building the Machine: Automation, AI & Custom Tools

Most brokerages give you access to CoStar and wish you luck. Landan built something different.

"We've got the single best transaction platform in the business. It's a CRM that is by and large the best tool for our type of business, specific to our business."

Their CRM contains:

• Every single property in their Niche in Texas (quarterly scrapes, automatically inserted)

• A team of VAs in the Philippines constantly researching and refining data

• AI implementations to make data more searchable and usable

• Automations to streamline every process possible

His mandate to agents? Focus on three things only:

1. Finding and winning business

2. Negotiating deals for clients

3. Solving problems that come up

Everything else gets delegated, automated, or AI'd away.

The evolution he's seen:

"When I started in the business, I had to go to the Pizza Hut website, go state by state, copy and paste all the addresses into an Excel spreadsheet. Then look up the property county, look up the county appraisal district website, figure out what legal entity owned that, research that on the SEC website, find out the person's name, and then use LexisNexis to contact that person. Very tedious, very time consuming process."

"Now my process for that is zero. I don't do any of that stuff because I've either got someone else doing it for me or it's AI or automation enhanced."

This philosophy extends to everything:

• In-house marketing team (100% dedicated vs. shared at previous firm)

• Better broker splits (because overhead is lower)

• Specialized tools and knowledge base

• Team of researchers building the data brokers need

The pitch to new recruits:

"I can offer someone better splits to come over and do what they need to do while still providing them specialized CRM, specialized marketing person, specialized assistance, branding, reputation, a knowledge base that actually gets a prospective client's attention."

Content Creation: The Unexpected Recruiting Engine

When Landan started North Star, he didn't post job listings on Indeed and hope for the best. He built in public.

The results surprised even him.

"Three of our last four hires have been people that have reached out to me because they saw what we were doing online. They either saw our listings on Crexi or they saw our closings on LinkedIn or they saw some of our advertising on another channel. So 75% of our hires have been through that versus Indeed or Jobber or whatever else."

He's doubling down on this strategy.

"I'm a believer that content creation is kind of king, or at least it's going to be a major differentiator over the next 10 years. We're seeing more people adopt it. I just got back from the CREI Summit in Palm Springs, and I was continually shocked with how many people had built very successful businesses for themselves on the back of one type of social media channel or content, whether it's YouTube, newsletters, X, Instagram, whatever."

The pitch isn't just about compensation or splits. It's about selling people on the vision.

"Having a good content strategy and being able to reach out to a massive audience and sell people on our vision, this is who we are, this is our culture, this is what it's like to work here, we're gonna continue seeing more people organically reaching out to us."

The best part? These recruits come pre-sold on the company culture and mission. No convincing necessary.

Want to hear the full 45-minute conversation? Stay tuned—we'll be releasing the complete interview next week.