The Stack
The Tool Stack We Actually Run
This is the software behind a $125M+ Keller Williams team of 25+ agents across Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati. Not a list of what looks good in a keynote. These are the tools we log into, pay for, and run the business on every day.
Every tool here holds one job. That’s the whole point. When a tool does not have a clear job, it becomes another tab nobody opens and another bill nobody questions. What matters is not which tools you buy, it’s where they hand off to each other.
Trevor Amrein is the Director of Operations for the Gillen Group, a $125M+ Keller Williams team of 25+ agents across Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati. He is a KW Next Gen Instructor and Regional Ambassador for the Ohio Valley Region, and he teaches real estate teams how to run profitable operations, systems, and AI. More about Trevor →
01 — Advertising and Lead Flow
Getting Found, Then Answering Fast
Speed to lead is the whole game at the top of the funnel. A lead that waits twenty minutes is a lead somebody else already called. This part of the stack exists to make sure nobody waits.
Advertising
Google Local Services Ads and Google Ads
Google’s pay-per-lead placement that puts a screened business above the standard search results, charged on calls, messages, and bookings instead of clicks. Real estate agents and brokers are an eligible category, and the screening carries the Google Verified badge.
The job it holds: paid demand. Local Services Ads for intent-driven lead volume, standard Google Ads for the campaigns around it.
Note: Google consolidated Google Screened and Google Guaranteed into one Google Verified badge starting October 2025. If your materials still say Google Screened, they are out of date.
Speed to lead
Ylopo
AI lead engagement and ad management built for real estate. Its AI Text product answers new leads by SMS within seconds, qualifies them, and hands the conversation to the agent with context already attached, and it manages the Google and Meta ad campaigns feeding the database.
The job it holds: instant speed to lead by AI SMS, plus Google ad campaign management. Ylopo is not the CRM and is not trying to be.
Routing
Oncall
Calendar-based lead routing built for real estate teams. Agents submit their availability from their phone, it builds and balances the monthly calendar, flags coverage gaps, handles live day swaps, and keeps Follow Up Boss synced to it. A new lead rings the agent whose day it actually is.
The job it holds: routing new opportunity to a human who is actually available. This is the piece most teams are missing, and it is why their speed-to-lead numbers look good on paper and bad in practice. A round-robin that does not know who is at a closing is just a slower way to lose the lead.
CRM
Follow Up Boss
A real estate CRM built around lead intake, follow-up, and agent accountability. It pulls from more than 200 lead sources, routes automatically, keeps calls, texts, and email in one place, and reports by agent and by source.
The job it holds: the system of record for people. Every lead, every conversation, every follow-up lives here, and every accountability conversation starts from what it shows.
02 — Under Contract to Closed
The Part Where Reputations Get Made
Nobody leaves a five-star review because your ad was clever. They leave it because the transaction was clean and somebody told them what was happening before they had to ask.
Transaction management
ListedKit
AI transaction management that reads the purchase agreement at intake, pulls the dates, parties, and contingencies out of it, and builds the task list and calendar milestones from there. It matches inbound email to the right file and drafts the update emails.
The job it holds: transaction management. Contract-to-close runs on the contract itself instead of on somebody’s memory of the contract.
Reputation
Birdeye
Reputation and local presence management across 200+ review sites and directories, with AI handling review requests, monitoring, responses, and listing accuracy. It also tracks visibility in AI search, not only in Google.
The job it holds: online reputation management. Reviews are the closing output that turns into next year’s lead flow, so we treat them as a system and not as an afterthought.
03 — Financials
Money Moves on Rules, Not on Mood
Commission income is lumpy. A big month feels like a raise and a slow month feels like a crisis, and both feelings make bad decisions. Rules fix that. Three tools here, and they are deliberately not the same tool: one for the business books, one for moving the money, one for where it all lands personally.
Accounting
QuickBooks Online
Cloud accounting for bookkeeping, invoicing, bill pay, and reporting. The features that matter for a team operation are class and location tracking, which let you see profit and loss by agent, by office, and by market instead of one blended number.
The job it holds: the business books. The P&L and the budget the whole operation gets measured against.
Cash routing
Sequence
A financial router. It connects your accounts, shows where money is actually flowing, and applies rules that automatically split and send income the moment it lands, including tax set-aside and debt paydown.
The job it holds: financial rule routing. Every commission check gets split by rule on arrival, so the tax money is gone before anyone can spend it. Sequence complements QuickBooks, it does not replace it.
Personal side
CFO Silvia
An AI personal CFO. It connects banking, brokerage, and crypto accounts, tracks real estate and other held assets alongside them, and gives you one net worth picture with portfolio monitoring and scenario modeling on top.
The job it holds: the personal side of the money. This is a personal finance tool, not business accounting, and that is on purpose. In this business your commission income is your personal income, so if you only ever look at the company P&L you are watching half the scoreboard.
04 — Knowledge and Communication
If It Only Lives in Someone’s Head, You Don’t Have a System
Every operation has one person who knows how everything works. That person is a single point of failure until the knowledge gets written down and the conversations get captured.
Knowledge library
Notion
A connected workspace for documents, wikis, and databases, with team spaces, permissions, and AI search across everything in it.
The job it holds: the knowledge library. Every SOP, every process, every training doc, in one searchable place agents can actually find.
Fyxer
An AI layer over email and calendar. It triages the inbox down to what actually needs a human, drafts replies in your own voice, and takes meeting notes.
The job it holds: email management and response. Worth knowing that it drafts, it does not send. A person still hits Send, which is exactly how it should be.
Capture
Transcription and AI summaries that turn spoken conversation into notes and action items, including in-person conversation, not only video calls.
The job it holds: transcription, AI summaries, and syncing what came out of a meeting into Google Calendar and Google Tasks so commitments do not evaporate.
05 — Reporting and Automation
The Glue Layer
Most of what people call an operations problem is a handoff problem. Two systems that do not talk, and a person in the middle copying between them. This layer removes that person from the middle.
Reporting surface
Google Sheets
The collaborative spreadsheet everything reports into. Real-time editing, version history, permissions, and scripting when a workflow needs it.
The job it holds: the scoreboard layer. Where numbers from every other system land and get looked at together.
Live data
Coefficient
Live connections that pull business data into Google Sheets on a schedule, from CRMs, accounting, and databases, with alerts when a number crosses a threshold.
The job it holds: keeping the scoreboard current without anyone exporting a CSV. A report nobody has to build is a report that actually gets read.
Automation
Zapier
Automation between apps across a catalog of thousands of integrations, plus tables and intake forms that can start a workflow.
The job it holds: automations. The connective tissue between everything above when two systems need to hand off and there is no native integration.
06 — AI and Time
Where AI Actually Belongs
AI is not a strategy. It is leverage applied to a process you already understand. Point it at a broken process and you get a broken process running faster.
Day to day AI
Claude
Anthropic’s AI assistant, used for analysis, writing, and multi-step work, with connectors into the tools where the work already lives.
The job it holds: AI day to day. Drafting, analysis, building the systems and specs the rest of the operation runs on.
Video
HeyGen
AI video generation from a script, using a custom avatar and voice, with translation and captioning built in.
The job it holds: producing training and market-update video at volume without booking a shoot for every single one.
Time
Existence
A time intelligence platform that turns how you actually spend your hours into data, scoring each block for energy and for the gap between intended and actual time use.
The job it holds: designing your life through time management. Every time study I have ever run with an agent shows the same thing, which is that where they think their hours go and where their hours actually go are two different stories.
Note: Existence is not generally available yet. Public access is by application. I am in early.
The Point
Buy the Handoffs, Not the Logos
Eighteen tools sounds like a lot until you look at what each one is doing. Then it looks like one system with eighteen parts.
01
Start With the Job, Not the Tool
Name the job first, out loud, in one sentence. If you cannot say what job a tool holds without using the vendor’s marketing words, you do not need the tool yet.
02
One Job Per Tool
Overlap is where money and clarity both go to die. Two tools that each half-do the same job means nobody trusts either one, so people go back to a spreadsheet on their desktop.
03
The Handoff Is the Whole Thing
Ad to lead, lead to routing, routing to CRM, CRM to contract, contract to close, close to review. Every one of those arrows is a place a deal can quietly die, and every one of them can be built to be automatic.
04
Build It in the Right Order
You do not need all of this on day one, and copying someone else’s stack in the wrong order is how teams end up paying for tools they never turned on. Sequence matters more than selection.
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No affiliate relationships, no sponsorships, and no referral fees on anything listed here. This is what we pay for. Product names, features, and pricing change constantly, so verify current details with each vendor before you buy. Last reviewed September 2026.