Today we’d like to introduce you to Travis Greer.
Hi Travis, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Chris and I have always joked that entrepreneurship seems to follow us around. We are first cousins, lifelong best friends, and have been finding ways to work together since we were kids. From selling homemade popcorn door-to-door for charity, to starting a children’s birthday party business together in our late teens, we have always enjoyed building something together.
Real estate, however, was never part of the original plan.
In 2023, we were both working in the restaurant industry and had reached a point where we knew we wanted something different for our lives. Chris stumbled across real estate almost by accident while watching HGTV in a doctor’s office waiting room. He went home and started researching what it would take to become a Realtor. When I got home from work that night and he told me what he was thinking, it didn’t take much convincing. By the next day, we were both enrolled in real estate school.
We initially entered the industry as individual agents, but it did not take long for us to realize we were better together. After helping one of our closest friends purchase her first home as a team, the idea behind The Property Cousins began to take shape. We saw how much value there was in giving a client two agents, two perspectives, and twice the availability, while still providing a very personal experience. On October 1, 2024, we officially launched The Property Cousins Real Estate Team.
When VoyageSTL first shared our story earlier this year, we were coming off an incredible first full year in business. We had helped 16 families buy or sell homes, closed more than $4 million in real estate, launched our free monthly homebuyer workshops, and had been voted Best Real Estate Team in Jefferson County for the first time.
What has been really exciting is how much our story has continued to evolve since then.
2026 has been a year of growth for us, but also a year of becoming much more intentional about what we are building. We have now been voted Best Real Estate Team in Jefferson County for the second consecutive year, expanded our community involvement, continued growing our educational efforts for first-time buyers, and developed a much clearer vision for what we want The Property Cousins to become long-term.
I think one of the biggest shifts has been realizing that we are not simply trying to build successful careers in real estate. We are trying to build a company and a brand that can genuinely mean something to the community around us.
We are still relatively early in our story, which is probably the most exciting part. We have accomplished things in our first couple of years that we never expected when we signed up for those real estate classes in 2023, but we also feel like we have barely scratched the surface of what The Property Cousins can become.
At the end of the day, the foundation is still incredibly simple. It is two cousins who grew up together, became best friends, and discovered that we are pretty dang good at building things together. Now we get to find out just how far we can take it.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It definitely has not always been a smooth road. I think one of the things I have learned about entrepreneurship is that growth can be incredibly exciting and incredibly uncomfortable at the same time.
When you look at The Property Cousins from the outside, it is easy to see the exciting parts. The awards, closings, new clients, community fun, and all of the milestones we get to celebrate. What people don’t always see are the periods where the phone isn’t ringing as much as you want it to, the deals that fall apart after weeks or months worth of work, the ideas you pour time and money into that don’t work how you’d hoped, or the moments when you start questioning whether you’re making the right decision about this, that, or the other.
Real estate has forced both of us to become comfortable with uncertainty. There is no guaranteed paycheck and there is no guarantee that the work you put in today will produce a result tomorrow. We have had months where everything seemed to happen at once and others where we wondered where the next closing was going to come from. Learning not to let either extreme dictate our confidence has probably been one of our biggest areas of growth.
There has also been a learning curve in figuring out how to be cousins, best friends, roommates, and business partners all at the same time. Chris and I have known each other almost our entire lives, but building a company together has challenged our relationship in completely new ways. We don’t always agree. We have had difficult conversations, gotten frustrated with each other, and had to learn when to push one another and when to give each other space. I know we have both become better communicators and better friends because of it.
Personally, one of my biggest struggles has been learning that not every idea has to happen immediately. I am naturally someone who gets excited about the next opportunity and wants to run with it. Chris is often the person asking, “Okay, but how are we actually going to do this?” Earlier in our business, I sometimes saw that as him slowing me down. Now I realize that balance is one of our greatest strengths. He has taught me that sustainable growth sometimes means saying “not yet” to a good idea.
We have made plenty of mistakes along the way, and I am certain we will make plenty more. I actually think I am less afraid of that now than I was when we started. We have learned that very few mistakes are fatal if you are willing to own them, learn from them, and adjust.
The road hasn’t been smooth, but I don’t think I would want it to have been. Some of the moments that felt like setbacks at the time ended up forcing us to become more intentional about our business, our partnership, and the people we want to be while building it. I am proud of what we have accomplished, but I am probably even more proud of how much we have grown as people along the way.
As you know, we’re big fans of The Property Cousins Real Estate Team. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
At the simplest level, The Property Cousins is a real estate team serving Jefferson County and the Greater St. Louis area, but I think what we are building goes quite a bit deeper than that.
Chris and I help people buy and sell homes, and we work with everyone from first-time buyers to longtime homeowners, investors, and families navigating major life changes. We are especially passionate about first-time homebuyers because we remember how overwhelming the process seemed before we entered the industry ourselves. There are so many terms, decisions, expenses, and moving pieces that people are somehow expected to understand without ever really being taught any of it.
That is where one of the biggest parts of our brand comes in: education that empowers.
We never want a client to make a decision simply because we told them it was the right one. We want them to understand their options well enough to confidently make that decision themselves. That philosophy has grown beyond our transactions through our free homebuyer workshops, educational social media content, community events, and the resources we create for buyers and sellers.
Our dual-agent model is still one of the biggest things that makes us different. When someone hires The Property Cousins, they get both of us. We have different strengths, personalities, and ways of looking at problems, and our clients benefit from both. It also means greater availability and two people who are equally invested in the outcome of their transaction.
The part I am probably most proud of, though, is that The Property Cousins has developed an identity beyond Chris and me simply being two Realtors who happen to be cousins. People recognize the name. They know our logo, our videos, our workshops, our community involvement, and of course our slogan, “The Cousins You Can Count On.” Being voted Best Real Estate Team in Jefferson County two years in a row has been an incredible honor, but what means even more is when someone we have never met tells us they have been following us for a while or that someone they trust told them, “You need to call The Property Cousins.”
We have been very intentional about building a brand that feels like us. We don’t want everything to be overly corporate or perfectly polished. We joke around, we make ridiculous videos, we show our personalities, and sometimes we make fun of ourselves. At the same time, when someone trusts us with what may be the largest financial transaction of their life, we take that responsibility extremely seriously. I think people can feel that balance.
Community is another huge piece of what we are building. Jefferson County isn’t just a market we chose to work in. It is home. We want our success to translate into something positive for the community around us, whether that is supporting local organizations, partnering with other small businesses, providing free education, or simply using the audience we are fortunate enough to have built to bring attention to something worthwhile.
Ultimately, we don’t measure the strength of The Property Cousins solely by how many homes we sell. We want to build the kind of brand where someone can follow us for years before they ever need a Realtor and still receive something valuable from us along the way. Then, when the day eventually comes that they have a real estate question, are ready to buy or sell, or just don’t know where to start, we want The Property Cousins to be the first name that comes to mind.
That is really what “The Cousins You Can Count On” means to us. We aren’t trying to just be someone’s Realtors for a transaction. We want to earn the opportunity to be their Realtors and “Cousins” for life.
Any big plans?
We have some pretty big dreams for The Property Cousins, but as we’ve grown, Chris and I have become much more intentional about what we actually want that growth to look like.
There is a version of success in real estate where you build the biggest team possible, sell hundreds of homes, and have clients interacting with several different people throughout their transaction. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that model, but we have realized it isn’t what we want to build.
We want The Property Cousins Real Estate Team to grow without ever losing the family-like feel of “The Property Cousins”.
Over the next few years, our goal is to continue increasing the number of families we serve throughout Jefferson County and the Greater St. Louis area while building the infrastructure necessary to support that growth. That will eventually mean bringing additional people into the company, but we want to do that carefully. Culture is incredibly important to us, and anyone who eventually joins The Property Cousins needs to genuinely believe in the same things we do about education, relationships, community, and doing the right thing every single time.
Chris and I have also become much clearer about our individual roles within the company. I naturally gravitate toward marketing, education, big ideas, and figuring out where we are going next, while Chris is incredibly talented at operations, numbers, systems, and turning those ideas into something that actually works. As we grow, we want to lean further into those strengths while still remaining directly involved with our clients.
Education is another area we are really excited about expanding. Our homebuyer workshops started as an experiment in 2025 and quickly became one of the things we are most passionate about. We would love to expand the topics we teach, reach more people, and continue creating resources that make real estate and homeownership less intimidating.
We also want our community impact to grow alongside our business. One of our long-term goals is to be in a position where The Property Cousins can give back significantly every year, not just financially, but through our time, our platform, and the relationships we have built throughout the community.
The biggest change, though, is probably in how we think about the future. When we started, we were trying to figure out how to become successful Realtors. Now we are thinking about what The Property Cousins will look like five, ten, and twenty years from now.
We want to build something that lasts. We want a company that provides an incredible life for us and eventually creates opportunities for other people. We want clients who bought their first home with us to call us years later when they are ready for their next one, and hopefully one day have their kids call us too.
There are definitely some ideas and projects we aren’t ready to announce quite yet, but I can confidently say we aren’t short on plans.
For now, our focus is pretty simple: keep getting better, keep serving more people, keep investing in our community, and never grow so much that we lose the things that made people trust The Property Cousins in the first place.
We don’t know exactly what this will look like ten years from now, but that is part of what makes building it so much fun.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thepropertycousins.homes
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/propertycousinsstl/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/The-Property-Cousins-Real-Estate-Team-61565912713909/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-property-cousins/?viewAsMember=true
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@propertycousinsstl
