Interview

Richard Kenny went from negotiating multimillion-dollar Air Force contracts to taking over his family’s small appraisal shop and transforming it into a high-level valuation firm specializing in the complex assets most appraisers avoid. But his real disruption began when he built proprietary technology that compresses commercial appraisal timelines from days to hours — and generates reliable valuation ranges in under ten minutes. In this interview with George Wright III, Richard breaks down how he’s reshaping the commercial real estate valuation industry and building toward a billion-dollar exit.

Q: Walk us through your background and how you ended up owning and scaling a real estate appraisal business.

I graduated from the Air Force Academy and served seven years on active duty, mostly on the business side, negotiating large government contracts, base support, and major weapons programs. I loved the structure the military provided, but the bureaucracy and slow decision-making wore me down.

Growing up, my dad ran a solo real estate appraisal practice, a classic mom-and-pop operation. After the Air Force, my brother (a Georgia Tech grad) and I saw an opportunity. The direction of my military career wasn’t fulfilling, so we bought Dad out and took over the firm together.

The appraisal industry is wild: the national average firm is 1.5 people. Even the big names (CBRE, JLL) are outliers. Most are one-person shops or a husband-wife team. It’s very apprenticeship-driven and hard to break into, but once you’re certified and have relationships, it’s easy to go independent.

Q: How did you turn a traditional mom-and-pop appraisal shop into something bigger?

My brother and I brought structure and process that the industry usually lacks. We diversified beyond standard commercial and residential work into niche valuations, subsurface minerals, mines, historic properties, diminution-in-value cases, and the complex, high-fee stuff that law firms, family offices, and private clients need.

We became the go-to firm for unique assets. Today, we rarely market; clients come to us and happily pay our fees because almost nobody else can do what we do at our level. From there, we launched a real estate investment company in 2019–2020 — multifamily at first, now development and even data-center deals.

“Speed is everything—the market is moving fast, and nothing comparable exists yet.”

Q: You mentioned your main focus right now is something completely different. Tell us about that.

We built proprietary appraisal and valuation technology because we kept hitting the same bottleneck: turning complex commercial appraisals around fast without destroying margins.

We now take what used to be a three-day commercial appraisal and finish it in five hours internally (targeting three hours soon) using automation and AI. More importantly, we created an evaluation engine that delivers an accurate commercial property value in under 10 minutes—no human appraiser signature required.

We’re patent-pending on the process that crawls external markets, pulls true comps (sales and leases), combines them with our internal data set, and spits out a reliable value range.

Q: Who is this built for?

We originally thought appraisers, but that’s a tiny market.

The real need is upstream: banks, real estate funds, private equity, family offices, and investors. They spend roughly $50,000 in pursuit costs before they even order a formal appraisal. If the value comes in wrong, they’re out six figures and months of work.

Our tool lets them plug in an address at the very beginning, get an instant range, and decide immediately whether the deal fits their parameters. It de-risks the entire pipeline and collapses timelines from months to minutes.

Q: Where do you want to take this company?

We’re building toward $500M–$1B in annual revenue and plan to exit in about four years.

Residential may come later, but commercial is the beachhead. Eventually, international.

Q: What do you need right now to hit that trajectory?

We’ve bootstrapped most of it and raised ~$600K on a SAFE. We’re looking for another million to accelerate model training and hire the first dedicated sales and marketing team to execute our go-to-market plan. Speed is everything— the market is moving fast, and nothing comparable exists yet.

Q: Last question — what’s your unique talent, the thing you’re both world-class at and love doing?

Orchestrating deals and connecting people. Whether it’s bringing investors into data-center projects I’m part of or linking the right capital with the right opportunity, I love being in the middle of it — structuring, negotiating, and making big things happen through relationships.