by G. Sax, Director of Growth Management, RESO
For this installment of RESO’s Three Questions series, we spoke with Hayden Rieveschl, the CEO of Ocusell. We got into the importance of RESO conferences, the appeal of solving real estate data issues and American football history. Enjoy!
Q1: Looking at some of the business partners listed on your website, is it safe to say that RESO has been a useful backdrop for finding like-minded companies that can help advance your efforts at Ocusell? If yes, can you elaborate on what RESO means for early-stage companies like your own?
Hayden: The answer is an emphatic yes. In fact, RESO is where we met all of our integration partners.
And here’s why: It is a tight-knit, collaborative environment. Other conferences don’t really have the same feel. It becomes more about buying and selling than true collaboration.
This spirit of working together is critically important to the industry as it moves forward. Real estate could choose to be stodgy and stuffy, especially in the face of legal and tech adoption challenges, but it absolutely should not. There are a lot of things to be excited about.
What you guys have done over the past few years is working. RESO has been single-handedly important to Ocusell – not only for providing guidance on what not to do, but for getting us in touch with like-minded tech companies, founders, MLSs, etc.
I’ll say it again. It’s a huge collaboration space. Everyone is thoughtful. The attitude is much more open. We have great conversations at RESO events.
Q2: You have spent many formative years working in a product vertical that literally moves people around the world. How does an oil and gas guy find his way to AI-driven real estate marketing?
Hayden: The common thread is that I like solving big problems. I’ve been an entrepreneur since I was 22.
I worked for a hedge fund in Houston around then, establishing a well-organized mineral fund. Private equity folks copied it years later, and now there are multiple funds in the energy and mineral sector.
After a decade of doing that, I started to look elsewhere. My grandmother was a top broker in the area, so I was familiar with the terminology and space.
There was a visual media company that I made an investment in on the side, and as I worked with the owner there, I became more knowledgeable in that space. One of the things that we did there was to centralize visual media – photography, videography – for real estate.
One of the brokers we were working with wondered if our media principles could be applied to the listing process. I was intrigued.
So he showed me the process, and I watched as five admins were involved in putting a single listing online. This broker was a member of six MLSs, and the admins had to separately put listings into each system. I was floored.
These admins had about a month of training. They had to be quick, but they also had to know what they were doing. Anyone involved in real estate data knows that there are complexities and no two systems are the same. In addition, these systems don’t necessarily communicate with each other.
I was instantly fascinated, so I put in 18 months of due diligence on the topic starting in 2018, learning about real estate data while closing my last fund. I wanted to work on something new, and this just happened to be it.
I didn’t put my hands on a keyboard for digging into the data until 2020. That’s how much time I felt it would take to really understand what I was doing. Ocusell officially launched in 2021, and I’m very much enjoying it.
Q3: In 2024, your alma mater, Southern Methodist University, joined the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), a bold move that immediately resulted in a 2025 College Football Playoff berth, signaling exciting days ahead and a return to past glory when they nearly won the national championship before a 1987 recruiting scandal derailed the program.
Speaking to those glory years, do you know which two running backs made up SMU’s “Pony Express” from 1979 to 1982 and which one of them holds the all-time NFL single-season rushing mark at 2,105 yards?
Hayden: Oh, no. This is annoying, because I should know this. And I hope that no SMU grads read this, because I can’t remember off the top of my head.
RESO: The “Pony Express” was made up of Eric Dickerson and Craig James, and Eric Dickerson ran for 2,105 yards in 1984 while playing for the Los Angeles Rams, a record that Saquon Barkley of the Philadelphia Eagles could have made a run for in the last game of the 2024–2025 season but instead elected to rest for the playoffs.
Hayden: I’m a little embarrassed that I didn’t know that, and that’s all well and good, but I am a New Orleans Saints fan.
RESO (G. Sax, a Minnesota Vikings fan): Oof. Who dat? Now that is embarrassing.
Three Questions is an interview series that features real estate industry professionals, their businesses and how they interact with real estate standards in a fun way.
