Verti Intelligence™ developed in-house by cold caller turned Head of AI, positions firm as a tech leader in Midwest brokerage.
COLUMBUS, OH, UNITED STATES, May 14, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — When Chris Homan and Alexa Lowe founded Verti Commercial Real Estate™ in Columbus, Ohio, they didn’t launch with a marketing campaign. They launched with a system — one refined over a decade and more than 150,000 cold calls annually at Huber Equity Group, the private equity firm where both built their careers across $240 million in Midwest and Sunbelt transactions.
One year later, that system has produced $100 million in closed multifamily transactions. And it has been automated into a proprietary platform — Verti Intelligence™ — that Homan and Lowe say is unlike anything else operating in the commercial real estate industry today.
“We didn’t build Verti Intelligence to impress a demo room,” said Homan. “We built it after 150,000+ cold calls annually for a decade — and it works better than your AI-enabled prospecting method.” — Chris Homan, CEO & Founder, Verti Commercial Real Estate
The distinction Homan draws is deliberate. Commercial real estate has seen a wave of AI adoption in recent years, with brokerages and technology vendors alike racing to attach the label to existing tools. Verti Intelligence takes a different approach: it is built entirely in-house, relies minimally on third-party AI, and produces algorithmic outputs backed by live market data — with no generative AI and no risk of hallucinated results.
The platform serves as the operating system for every Verti advisor. Its capabilities include the Exit Pressure Index™ — a proprietary scoring engine that identifies multifamily owners approaching a transaction decision before they have listed or contacted another broker. Additional modules handle automated underwrites, investor match scoring, customizable OMs, and personalized outreach generation.
The results since deployment are concrete. Before Verti Intelligence, the firm’s prospecting model — still above with industry norms — converted approximately 0.5 percent of outreach contacts into transaction-ready conversations. With the platform, that figure has risen to 2.5 percent: a five-fold improvement driven not by volume, but by precision.
“The commercial real estate industry has been sold a version of AI that amounts to a third-party chatbot and a lot of marketing. Verti Intelligence is a different animal. It’s the operating system our advisors run on every day — built from the inside, by the people who understood the problem firsthand.”— Alexa Lowe, COO & Co-Founder, Verti Commercial Real Estate
The story of how Verti Intelligence came to exist is as notable as the platform itself. Kody Mershon joined Verti in early 2025 as a cold caller with no background in software engineering or platform development. Over the course of the year, he mastered the firm’s Direct-to-Seller System™ — the proprietary broker training method at the core of Verti’s deal flow — and then did something the founders hadn’t anticipated: he began automating it.
What Mershon built became Verti Intelligence. The firm has since promoted him to Head of AI and Intelligent Systems — a role that reflects both the platform’s growing importance to Verti’s operations and the firm’s broader philosophy around developing talent from within.
“Kody’s story is the most honest description of what this company actually is,” said Lowe. “We’re not a brokerage that hired a tech team to build something impressive. We’re a firm where the people closest to the problem built the solution — because they understood it from the inside.”
Verti CRE operates across Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Michigan, with a focus on investment sales. The firm was recognized as #1 Best Places to Work 2025 Micro company by Columbus Business First, and Lowe received the 2025 EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Verti CRE’s founding team brings a combined transactional history exceeding $1 billion. In its first year of independent operation, the firm closed $100 million in multifamily transactions.
Homan says the firm’s near-term focus is on deepening its regional footprint and expanding the advisor team — with Verti Intelligence as the primary recruitment asset.
“The advisors who join Verti don’t just get a job. They get access to a system built by brokers, for brokers — one that’s already delivering results nobody else in this market can match. The platform is real. The results are documented. We’re just getting started.”
— Chris Homan, CEO & Co-Founder, Verti Commercial Real Estate
Alexa Lowe
Verti Commercial Real Estate
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