Welcome to the first episode of our new podcast, Real Leaders Shaping Real Estate! After 400 episodes of Into the Corner Office, we are shifting our focus to having similar deep conversations with the best of the best in the real estate industry, both in the US and the UK.
For our first episode, we are excited to welcome Jonas Bordo, a longtime friend and colleague.
Brandt and Kellie talk with Jonas about his path from management consulting through Bentall Kennedy and Essex Property Trust to founding a rental marketplace that became the industry’s go-to source of real rent data.
They also cover:
– The gap between how renters and landlords see today’s market
– Why housing supply is the only real fix
– Dwellsy’s new partnership with Crexi (an online CRE marketplace and tech platform)
– How AI is changing analysis and hiring
– The one piece of career advice he got in a parking lot that still guides him.
Plus, Newmark Vice Chairman Adam Barry asks Jonas how he knew when to pivot in this episode’s expert guest question.
About Jonas:
Jonas Bordo is the co-founder and CEO of Dwellsy, the venture-backed proptech firm building the data backbone for an AI-native rental market. Under his leadership, Dwellsy has aggregated over 17 million rental units—representing roughly 75% of professionally managed U.S. inventory—transforming a fragmented market into a high-fidelity dataset for enterprise, government, and LLM ecosystems.
Jonas founded Dwellsy on a contrarian insight: traditional lead-gen models create data silos. By pioneering a free-to-list marketplace, he captured the “long tail” of inventory that competitors missed. Today, as AI agents redefine how consumers search and transact, Dwellsy’s dataset serves as the industry’s source of truth. A former senior executive at Essex Property Trust and BGO, Jonas brings decades of experience managing multi-billion-dollar portfolios to the intersection of real estate and technology. He is the author of Everything You Need to Know About Renting, a frequent speaker on AI operating models, and lives in Silicon Valley with his family.
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