Browne Cooper was a moniker made for real estate. She was named for her grandfather, Ashley Browne, reflecting the tendency of Southern families to bestow oldest daughters some vestige of the family patriarch, just in case no male heirs were in the cards. ABC was also a fun monogram for towels and stationery, not that anyone wrote letters or thank you notes anymore.
Driving down Nassau Street, she noticed with envy a slew of real estate signs flaunting friends’ names and faces. Why couldn’t she hang a shingle and make a bundle? Taking the real estate exam was why. She despised exams, haunted by dreams that she forgot to drop a class, never attended it and had to take the final, even though she graduated a decade ago.
“It’s not that hard,” her best friend Julia insisted, having recently aced the exam. Julia was outgoing, had good taste and a knack for networking, so real estate was a natural fit.
They met at The Meeting House, a neighborhood haunt, to brainstorm how to pass the exam in the fastest and most painless way possible. Browne was low on cash, her rent was going up, her parents done with supporting their adult daughter, and her current “tech” receptionist job was boring and dead-end.
A tall, 30-something guy approached their high top and offered to buy them drinks. Browne grinned back. “We don’t accept drinks from strangers,” she replied.
“I’m Russ, so now I’m not a stranger,” he quipped. “And who are you lovely ladies?”
Julia looked at Browne and rolled her eyes. “I’m Julia and this is Browne. I’ll have a Margarita, rocks, no salt, and Browne will have an Aperol Spritz.”
Russ flagged a passing waiter to pass along their order, then pulled up a spare stool from a neighboring table to join J and B.
“Is Russ your real name or just your handle for pickups?”
Russ laughed, pulled out his wallet and proudly flashed his Real ID. “Russell Mayhew Phillips at your service. Born and bred in Birmingham, Bama, Roll Tide. Just moved to the Garden State for work. Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, what brings you to mine?”
A Casablanca fan, Browne beamed and replied, “Real estate.”
“Now you are speaking my language. Do tell.”
Browne and Julia laid their cards on the table, sharing their real names and their conundrum: how to afford a nice lifestyle when one’s means are totally stretched, without having to resort to cannabiz.
“Real estate is where it’s at,” Russ shared. “Interesting clientele, entertaining colleagues, good pay if you hit it big, and you control your own destiny.”
“What makes you an expert?” Julia asked.
“I watch Selling Sunset? Well, I also follow real estate, as an industry. I’m an analyst at Prudential. Real estate is revolutionizing in a big way,” he shared conspiratorially. “Anyone on top of that will be the real estate king.”
“I think you mean real estate Queens,” Browne replied.
“That too! So, wannabe-queens, care to learn more?” Russ asked, downing the remains of his gin and tonic in two gulps.
“Sure,” Julia said.
Russ waved for another round, even though the girls had barely started their first drinks, and shared the future of real estate: technology, AI, and specifically, DRONES.
Just a few NJ Transit stops north, a scrum of Rutgers computer geeks hunched over the shoulder of Professor Adrian Yi, resident guru of real estate data science.
“How is the machine learning project for the Atlantic Highlands tech buildout?” Dr. Yi asked no one in particular.
“We’re about done with estimating occupancy and revenue per unit,” replied one of the minions in his midst.
“What does ‘about done’ mean exactly?” Yi asked of the apparently clueless minion.
“Python had an update and slowed us down, but it’s almost done,” replied the short, dark haired pimply guy wearing a FanDuel shirt (free bling from the Rutgers Tech Career Fair).
“Python thrives in open source — no updates needed. You are off of this project. Who else can move this forward, and quickly?” Yi barked.
A slight red-head stepped forward, raising their hand. “I’d be happy to.”
“And who are you?” Yi asked, exhausted from the tiresome exchange.
“Mason Sullivan, sir. But you can call me May.”
May was a freshman genius from Edison who had turned down a full ride at MIT to stay closer to home. They had been coding almost since birth, had programmed one of the first drones in their neighborhood, and their mother was the top producing real estate salesperson in Belle Meade. They had the trifecta background for a project like this.
Dr. Li stared at May, then shook his head, got up and steered them back to their workstation.
“We’ll get you share drives in a few. Check out this paper and give me your thoughts in asap.”
“Yes sir!” May replied, excited for their first big break.
May holed up in an empty conference room, its surrounding white board walls jammed with stochastic calculus equations and code. She pored over the paper from the Data & Society Research Institute on Housing & Civil Rights, sadly an oxymoron:
As a metric for identifying good and bad data practices, participants discussed access and transparency as important characteristics. For example, the Census is transparent about their data collection methods and makes their data available publicly. Third-party datasets rarely provide this level of access and transparency, and so it is difficult to know whether their data collection and analysis practices might violate civil rights. It was noted that while the Census has tended to undercount communities of color, they provided those error rates to the public and worked to address those issues transparently.
“Excuse me, Dr. Yi.”
Dr. Yi strolled over to May’s cubicle and stood hovering over their workstation. “What?”
“The Census database has been hacked.”
“Impossible. That dataset is impenetrable.”
May bit their bottom lip and scrolled down. “I guess I misread it. Let me take another look.”
“Good idea. We haven’t got a lot of time. If you want to just move on to the next paper, I’d let this go.”
Russ woke in a haze, the afterglow of Bombay Sapphire pounding in his temples. He blinked, groaned, sat up and reflected on the previous night’s progress. He had scored big. It was time to reap the rewards.
“Zup?” he texted his new besties J&B.
A minute passed and then his phone dinged.
“Russ is a bad influence” Browne replied.
“I need coffee” Julia chimed in.
They all agreed to meet at Small World at 11. His plan was in motion.
“What do you mean you don’t have to get your real estate license to work in real estate?” Browne asked, incredulous.
“Homes.com is hiring a marketing assistant, no experience needed,” Russ shared. “A friend sent me the LinkedIn posting in case I knew of anyone.”
Browne followed up, applied, sailed through the interview with flying colors and started her new job a week later.
Eight miles south, the nondescript industrial complex lurked on a side road off of 295 west of Trenton. Convenient to the highways and the airport with cheap rent and expansive power sources, it was the perfect front for Russ’s newest endeavor. A fintech entrepreneur friend had unloaded crypto GPUs for pennies on the dollar during a recent Bitcoin crash, so all Russ had to do was find some coders for this project. He had considered a remote operation, but having everyone together made more sense, keeping the firewall intact and escape routes narrow if not nonexistent.
He advertised the venture the cryptic way most start-ups did – “Angel-funded Seed B tech startup seeking advanced coders in Python Java AWS and/or C++ all welcome. Must be available asap and entrepreneurial in spirit.”
(As in, unemployed and hungry and willing to work for next to nothing). He was surprised at how many qualified candidates fit the criteria. His fake email box was full of resumes and Github links and even a few earnest cover letters likely written by career advisors or Chat GPT.
It had taken only a few Google Meet interviews to find what he was looking for. Crafty, creative, but not so snoopy that they ever asked who their real employer was and what would happen to all that data they were mining.
And not a single candidate made eye contact. These techies were WAY on the spectrum, the perfect profile for online poker players, wearing baseball hats and mirrored sunglasses, blocking out the windows to their souls and/or card hands. These tech gurus were ripe for the picking, given not many other options available to them. If they interviewed at Meta, Microsoft, or a crypto trading firm, AI HR would reject them after their first Hirevue interview.
They showed up when they were told to, albeit unshaven and jittery from living off of expresso. And they could code. Game on.
Russ gazed over the warehouse of coders and pondered his escape plan, once things were underway. Costa Rica was at the top of his list, a lovely spot that welcomed Americans (and their strong dollars) and required little or no Spanish to get by. He had already started shopping for a jungle villa for the day he would cash in. Maybe he could launch a similar venture down South, say in neighboring Panama.
Another Happy Hour was definitely the fastest way to move his project forward. After a series of drinks nights, Russ learned the ins and outs of Homes.com, the firm’s intranet site, properties, marketing plans, and most importantly, the weaknesses in the firm’s security wall.
“I have an idea,” Russ shared, spinning his stool at the Mediterra bar.
“You and your ideas!” Julia balked.
“Let’s go to Browne’s office and house shop.”
“Who wants to go to an office after work? I spend too much time there as it is,” Browne replied.
“Come on, it’ll be fun, come on, I’ll drive and save you your Uber fare and get you home safely.”
Lured by the Uber savings, they headed to the Palmer Square garage and his newly detailed black Tesla. Purring down Witherspoon, they pulled into the firm’s parking lot off 206, and headed to Browne’s office floor.
Browne showed Julia the conference room and kitchen with free food and drink, while Russ snuck into Browne’s cubicle area.
After dropping off the girls, Russ made a quick call. “We’re set,” he said, pocketing the thumb drive now loaded with petabytes of data from the firm’s share drive. Floor plans, home security codes, Internet of Things appliance timing instructions, calendars of showings, all in the palm of his hand.
Monitoring the grid in the Rutgers datalab, May Li noticed an awry power surge and pondered its source. Hacking pharma and finance would be tricky given the firewalls, but real estate data was up for grabs for the highest bidder. May shared their concerns with Dr. Li, whose research would greatly benefit from a CoStar real estate conglomerate grant should billions of dollars be saved by avoiding a critical data breach.
Afew months later, Russ was lounging at a poolbar on the Atlantic coast of Costa Rica when a group of suits walked in. He looked around for escape routes but found none.
“Russell Phillips, you are under arrest for corporate espionage.”
Russ choked on his mojito, his sunburned face drained of color.
Back in Princeton, Julia and Browne met for their weekly happy hour and wondered whether their old friend Russ would figure out who turned him in.
Wendell Wood Collins works at The College of New Jersey in development and alumni engagement and lives in Ewing. She has been an active member of the Princeton writing community including Room at the Table and Princeton Writes.
