UPDATE, 10:30 pm: Barbara Corcoran and Mark Cuban totally got it, but in the end Kevin O’Leary and Barbara ended up investing in TOOR: $300K loan, $200K investment. I’ll have a full background story next week!
We couldn’t be more excited and more proud of our own Junior Desinor. That is, Garcia Junior Desinor. We first met when I was editing DallasDirt over at DMagazine, and he was a rookie agent at Keller Williams Turtle Creek, where he landed fresh from Texas tech, where he had already been buying and flipping homes, churning funds from a business he started while still an undergraduate, R&J Party Supply. Next he started his own brokerage on McKinney, Level properties, totally unique with salaried agents and even a company car. Then came Toor, Junior’s uniquely conceived smart lockbox for real estate. Bluetooth- and cellular-enabled, it allows agents and buyers to request home showings with the push of a button on a custom smartphone app/scheduling tool.
Now Junior is headed to the big leagues: from bouncy houses to flips to disrupting the entire real estate industry, you can see him in action tonight on ABC’s Shark Tank, all because of this.
In January, Junior decided to focus totally on Toor and no longer has agents, though he is still buying and selling properties from his McKinney Avenue office.
Desinor launched Toor on Kickstarter in March 2016, and in just over 30 days pre-sold over 500 lockboxes and raised more than $100,000.
“As a real estate broker now for many years, I was always in search for something that not only would make my brand unique but something that could transform the real estate industry as a whole,” Desinor said. “I was in a mindset to figure out solutions to every pain point in the real estate process and the answer always came back to access — so like a light bulb, I was looking at my lockbox and said, ‘Thats it.’ Then the lockbox concept was born.”
Now, he may be raising even more cashola: tonight Junior goes on Shark Tank, producer Mark Burnett’s reality show that gives budding entrepreneurs a chance to make their business dreams comes true as they try to convince one of five business “sharks” to invest money in their idea or business. Bidding wars and arguments sometimes erupt between the Sharks, driving up the investment and certainly the excitement.
Well, Junior has already been on, but we cannot tell you what happened until Monday. Just trust me and tune in tonight. Or record Shark Tank so you can watch Junior Desinor hold his own quite well with Mark Cuban, Lori Greiner, Barbara Corcoran, Robert Herjavek, Kevin O’Leary, Chris Sacca (watch his reaction, who is this guy?) and the rest of the Shark Tank gang.
