10/02/2026
Happy belated second “birthday” to The Property Cousins Real Estate Team!! 🥳
It’s hard to believe it’s already been two years...but really, The Property Cousins started long before we sold our first house together.
We have welcomed a lot of new followers in the last couple of months, so I figured that our second birthday was a great opportunity to tell our story for those who don't really know who we are!
We (Chris and Travis) are first cousins, lifelong best friends, and business partners for many, many years.
When we were kids, we went door-to-door selling homemade popcorn and ice cream recipes to raise money for a local organization, Ride on St. Louis.
We spent our summers coming up with random ways to make a few bucks, shoveling driveways together or mowing lawns. Eventually, we started our first real business together, hosting kids’ birthday parties at our family’s ranch.
Then came the restaurant industry - and that is a story for another time...😅
Then, of all things, HGTV changed everything, and I am not even kidding. 😂
In 2023, Chris was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting room when he saw a woman on HGTV talking about leaving her old career and getting into real estate, she talked about her passion for it and the freedom building her real estate career had given her in life. He went home and started researching how to become a REALTOR.
Travis got home from work that night, Chris told him the idea, and the response was basically:
“Alright. Let’s do it.”
We got licensed and joined Exit Elite Realty in Arnold, but believe it or not, The Property Cousins still didn’t exist.
We originally tried doing real estate separately, because we hadn't quite grasped the fact that the trajectory of this career was entirely in our hands, we didn't know that we COULD work together.
Then one of our closest friends decided to buy their first home. We didn't want them to have to choose between the two of us to work with, and we had seen other agents at Exit team up and collaborate before...
That's when something clicked.
They got two agents. Two perspectives. Twice the availability. Two people equally invested in their success. (Thank you Hannah & Thomas for being our guinea pigs!)
What we learned working with them became the idea behind everything we do today.
While we were under contract, we actually did something we had always wanted to do and took a trip to Mexico together, and while we were there we spent a lot of time talking seriously about what it would look like to stop trying to build two separate careers and instead build something together.
By the time we came home, we had a vision.
And on October 1, 2024, The Property Cousins Real Estate Team was officially born. 🎉
We had absolutely no idea where that decision would take us.
Our goal for our first year was to sell $2 million in real estate.
Instead, we helped 16 families and closed more than $4 million.
We started hosting free monthly first-time homebuyer workshops because we realized one of our favorite parts of this job was taking something that feels incredibly confusing and making it feel so much more doable.
Those workshops eventually became From Rent to Ready, and education became one of the foundations of who we are.
We figured out that Travis is the big-idea, marketing, organization and “what if we did THIS?!” cousin...and Chris is the operations, numbers, systems and “okay, but HOW are we actually going to do that?” cousin. 😂
Somewhere along the way, those differences became one of our biggest strengths.
And then things started happening that we NEVER could have imagined when we sat down to take those online real estate classes back in 2023...
🏆 Best Real Estate Team in Jefferson County - 2025
🏆 Best Real Estate Team in Jefferson County - 2026
🏆 St. Louis Post-Dispatch STL Headliner - Best Real Estate Company - 2026
🏆 Travis named STL Headliner Best Real Estate Agent - 2026
🏅 Multiple awards within EXIT Elite Realty
📰 Featured by multiple local magazines and newspapers
📚 Teaching workshops at our local library and holding career days
Of course, all of that is the fun stuff we can look back on, but we will never pretend that is has been all roses and sunshine, and if we did, any other business owner would know that we were full of sh*t. 🤷🏻♂️
There have been deals that fell apart.
Ideas that completely flopped.
Months that made us feel unstoppable and others that made us completely question our sanity.
There have been disagreements, difficult conversations, pivots, late nights, lessons learned the hard way, and plenty of moments where one cousin had to remind the other why we started this whole thing.
But that is just the thing, building a business together has taught us how to be better community partners, better REALTORS, better businessmen...and honestly, more importantly better cousins, friends, and all around people.
Somewhere in these last two years, The Property Cousins became bigger than the two of us.
It became the clients who trusted two relatively new REALTORS before we had the sales, the experience, or the accreditations to put behind our names.
It became the people who attended one of our workshops before they were anywhere close to buying a home, because they trusted us to guide them without the pressure of making a move a moment too soon.
It became the local businesses who partnered with us, the organizations that welcomed us, the people who shared our posts, referred their friends to us, answered our calls, gave us advice, encouraged an idea, voted for us in local contests, celebrated with us, and believed in what we have been building.
The Property Cousins gave us a community.
Two years later, we're still the same two cousins trying to figure out just how far we can take this thing.
Except now, the dream is a whole lot bigger...
We want to build a company that lasts.
We want to help more families.
We want to make homeownership feel less intimidating and more attainable.
We want our success to create opportunities for other people and allow us to give back more and more to the community that built us.
We want the first-time buyers we're helping today to call us when they need their second and third home - and maybe, someday, have their children who were young when we first worked with them, call The Property Cousins too. When that day comes for the first time, it will be so incredibly cool.
Most importantly, no matter how much this company grows, we never want to lose what made it special in the first place:
Family. Education. Community. Doing the right thing. Growing together.
Two years ago, The Property Cousins was an idea between two best friends on a trip to Mexico.
Today, it's our career, our company, our community, and one of the things we're proudest to have built together.
And I'm not going to lie, I STILL feel like we're just getting started. 😅
To every client, friend, family member, business, community partner, mentor, lender, title company, inspector, fellow REALTOR, follower, supporter, and literally every single person who has ever said, “Call The Property Cousins, they will take great care of you."
THANK YOU
You have no idea how much those words mean to two cousins who took a chance on themselves a couple of years ago.
Here’s to Year THREE. 🥂 Woah that feels weird to say. 😮💨
We have a feeling it's going to be a big one.
Thank you for helping The Property Cousins Real Estate Team celebrate our second birthday! 🎉
📸: Our delicious cake that our awesome cousin and one of our biggest supporters, Courtney Mertz, made us last year for our first birthday!
