Healthcare Veteran Tackles Real Estate's Referral Problem with New Platform Realay

After multiple successful exits in the healthcare industry, entrepreneur John LeRoy noticed something peculiar about real estate referrals: they were stuck in the past. Drawing from his 30-year experience as a property investor and his background in healthcare’s efficient referral systems, LeRoy founded Realay, a platform modernizing how real estate professionals handle referrals across markets.

“In the healthcare space, referrals are all automated,” LeRoy explains. “In the real estate space, I couldn’t believe there was no automation when I started looking at how referrals were done. Agents were faxing referral forms to one another to capture commission shares and negotiating commission. It was so paper-heavy and task-heavy that it was ripe for somebody to come in from an adjacent category.”

LeRoy, whose daughter’s career as a realtor gave him additional insight into the industry’s challenges, launched Realay as a SaaS platform that simplifies the entire referral process. The platform is brand-agnostic, allowing agents from any brokerage to send and receive referrals in just 15 seconds. More importantly, it provides comprehensive tracking and management capabilities that were previously missing in the industry.

“Nobody has a really good way of keeping track of the referrals that they send to another agent or the referrals that they receive,” LeRoy notes. “If you’re a broker and you’ve got a team of 20 people or 50 people working for you, it’s very problematic to keep track of referrals.”

The company’s approach to product design emphasizes simplicity. “We have a tendency to make things too complicated,” LeRoy reflects. “We have too much information nowadays, and so our approach was to keep it simple.” This philosophy stems from LeRoy’s understanding that while agents and brokers are the platform’s users, the ultimate beneficiary needs to be the end client – the buyer or seller.

Unlike other platforms that might share a lead with multiple agents, Realay’s referrals are strictly one-to-one. “There are some other resources that will take a client and give it to five different agents,” LeRoy explains. “That’s not a good experience for anybody except that company. They’re bombarding that consumer, with agents fighting to get that one listing or that one buyer to work with them.”

Quality control is paramount for the platform. Realay vets potential agents through a thorough process that includes examining market tenure, transaction volume, and administrative support. The company even conducts individual meetings with prospective agents, with LeRoy noting that about 70% of candidates are excluded simply for failing to show up for their scheduled interview.

“If you don’t have the integrity and organization to set up an appointment and attend that appointment, odds are that behavior is going to carry over to other events with clients,” LeRoy observes.

After a soft launch in November 2023, the company took a decisive step to refine its platform. “We realized there were a couple wrinkles, a couple cracks in the platform,” LeRoy recalls. “We didn’t just patch the crack. We knocked the wall down, rebuilt the foundation and then built the wall back up.” The platform relaunched in May 2024 and has seen strong adoption since.

Looking ahead, Realay’s focus is on building awareness and trust within the real estate community. “So many people don’t even think of making a referral. They’ll get a listing, but they don’t even think of helping that client that’s moving, because it’s just so arduous to help that client go to a market that they themselves don’t even know,” LeRoy says.

For LeRoy, the platform’s success ultimately comes down to trust. “Everybody wants to take that client that’s a friend of theirs and give them a positive experience, but they don’t know how to do it,” he explains. “It’s building the trust that people can rely on the Realay platform, so that when they put that referral on the platform, they can, with confidence, know that the client’s going to get handed off to a great agent.”