Serial entrepreneur Wade Micoley is reimagining real estate in Northeast Wisconsin.
The Oconto Falls native is the founder and CEO of Tycore Built, a Green Bay-based construction company specializing in middle-income housing development, and the founder and owner of RealtyHive, a global portal for time-limited-events and a marketing platform for real estate listings. His most recent venture, The Cottages Senior Living & Memory Care, has campuses in Oconto Falls, Marinette and Shawano.
Insight caught up with Micoley to discuss tech-driven real estate marketing, the impact of AI and his take on addressing the persistent housing shortage.
You’ve been in real estate for more than 30 years. What drew you to the industry?
Micoley: I started in real estate in my early 20s because it seemed like something I could do, and I did really well with it. I was helping builders and I said, “I think I could do it better so I’m just going to go do it myself.” That led to Tycore and RealtyHive. What I really loved about it was the idea that there was no ceiling. You have to fight every day to get out there and create stuff, but the only ceiling that there is in any of my businesses is what I decide the ceiling is — is building 50 houses a lot or is building 350 houses a lot? You have to decide.
Speaking of a lot, Tycore Built currently is building more than 650 homes and condos in nine Northeast Wisconsin markets. Why did you choose to focus on middle-income housing?
There’s a zillion builders that’ll build you a house for $450,000 with all the bells and whistles, but there’s a lot of people that want a $350,000 house and don’t need the bells and whistles. The key is quality at an affordable price. That starts with buying the land and working with the municipalities to create workforce housing, or what we call the “missing middle.” In these nine marketplaces where we’re doing it, eight of them have that component where we’ve worked with those municipalities. Then forming relationships with quality subcontractors. Some of our subcontractors have been with us for 20 years. We’re trying to meet this really niche market. By doing what we’re going to do in that mid-$300,000 range, it’s going to open up more housing stock in that $250,000 to $300,000 range. A lot of people will move up and buy those houses, and that opens up the market for first-time or early-entry buyers.
What’s the biggest challenge in housing right now?
There’s such a shortage of housing that came about from the 2008 financial crisis and restrictive zoning regulations. Right now, it’s estimated that the U.S. needs 4 million new construction units just to keep up with demand. They’re estimating it could take up to seven years of building at that rate, which we’re nowhere close to, just to take care of the demand right now. It’s a big problem, but you can’t solve it by just saying, “Well, build more houses,” because the prices have gone up so much that people can’t afford them. However, the big challenge is not only to bridge the gap but also ease restrictions in zoning, speed up approval processes and, in some areas, to assist in improving affordability. Some areas that we go into we can get everything approved in 60 days. Some it takes a year and a half. Things have to change on the zoning level, the process level, the engineering level, all of that. Not to say anybody should not do what the city codes are or what is needed to make sure it’s a good, solid development, but there’s a lot of overdoing stuff that could be cut out.
You started RealtyHive in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. How has it evolved since?
RealtyHive started as an online auction company for real estate, much like Ebay. We worked with financial institutions all over the U.S. to sell assets in a highly promoted format, which included local, regional and global real estate. We have even done work for the federal government. We have now built RealtyHive into a global portal for our time-limited-events and a marketing platform for listings worldwide. We have over 1.3 million listings from over 120 countries, and have buyer traffic from 195 countries. This gives agents around the globe access to buyers from anywhere to view their properties and a direct connection to that agent. In the U.S., you think about Zillow and Realtor.com, but there isn’t a big site that’s global. And that’s what we’re building. We’re not trying to do what Zillow does — we’re trying to do what no one is doing.
How is the real estate industry being impacted by AI?
AI is really going to be crucial going forward in real estate. First of all, I think agents are always going to be needed — people need someone to be their advocate and to really guide them through that buying and selling process — but agents are going to need to provide a way higher level of service for the fees they charge. It is almost impossible for a single agent or even a real estate company to keep up with what’s changing in marketing, with everything that’s happening online and with AI. We built RealtyHive so that we are the answer for those agents to not have to worry about keeping up. That’s what we do every single day. We’re taking in between 25 and 30 million bits of information every day into our system. That system is looking for updates, because somebody might change the price of a listing in Italy and they’re not going to call us and tell us that. We built an AI model that takes the headline from every listing and converts it in half a second to the language that’s needed based on where you are and then in between three and four seconds, it converts the description and all the details of that listing into your language. That is automated. If you think back a couple of years what that would have taken from a personnel standpoint, it would have been massive. If you’re trying to grow a company and you’re not looking at AI, you’re behind the times.
Is there a thread that ties all your business ventures together?
To me, it’s all about people. Anyone can build an assisted living facility. Anybody can build a portal website. Anybody can build houses. What makes those companies really exceptional is the people who are there every day with you trying to build it.
