HE BUILT AN APP THAT COULD REVOLUTIONIZE HIS INDUSTRY. THEN A SERIES OF DOUBLE-CROSSES AND BETRAYALS LEADS TO SCANDAL, DASHED DREAMS, AND A NEAR-BILLION-DOLLAR DAVID VS. GOLIATH LEGAL BATTLE.

MARK LINNÉ had never seen a sight like this in his tiny hometown of Bailey, Colorado: Two mysterious men stepping out of a dark sedan wearing black suits and sunglasses. Nobody wore suits in Bailey. Mark sometimes wore a sports coat to his Chamber of Commerce meetings, and his friends razzed him for it. But these guys looked like characters from Men in Black, and they were walking straight toward him.

It was a warm fall day on October 28, 2018, so warm Mark was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and sandals. He was working with a contractor to put some last-minute finishes on his drive-through coffee and mini donut shop, Mudslingers, across from the Loaf and Jug convenience store on the side of the highway just outside Bailey, 45 miles west of Denver with a population of 8,000. Mudslingers was set to open in a week and things were getting hectic.

Mark was a spirited 59-year-old with a gentle face that resembled William Shatner of Boston Legal vintage. He had grayish hair and wore rectangular glasses. Mudslingers was an unexpected late-career project for Mark, who had spent decades running his own real estate appraisal firm in the Denver area, as well as a slew of tech side projects also in the appraisal space. But Mark had had mysterious health troubles and some major business setbacks in recent years that had forced him to reassess his future. Unable to get health insurance, Mark decided to open Mudslingers as a source of income for his wife and four kids in case anything unfortunate be fell him. He’d drawn on his retirement funds to do it.

What could these guys possibly be doing here? Mark wondered as the two men approached him.

One of them, the driver of the sedan, took off his sunglasses.

“Are you Mark Linné?”

Mark was dumbfounded. He took a moment to respond. “Yes?”

The man introduced himself as Sam Hanson and said he and his partner were private detectives from Nova Scotia, Canada. Private detectives? From Nova Scotia??

The P.I. saw the confusion on Mark’s face. “Your daughter told me you would be here when we went to your house,” Hanson explained. “I represent Quicken Loans.”

What the hell does Quicken Loans want with me?

“Mark,” Hanson said, “we need to talk.”

FIVE YEARS EARLIER...

On a blizzarding January day sitting in the back seat of a Toyota Sienna minivan driving from Bailey to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, his wife, Marjorie, at the wheel, Mark had a eureka moment.

Mark liked to sit in the back seat on business trips while Marjorie drove so he could work and make calls. He always traveled with a large artist’s notebook where he sketched out ideas generated from his frenetic brain. Today, on the three-and-a-half hour drive to Steamboat Springs, his brain spit out a good one.

Mark had 30 years of experience in the appraisal business. He was also tech-obsessed. He believed that tech could revolutionize the appraisal business, a staid but sprawling $11.3-billion industry. As he scribbled into his notebook in the back of the van, giddily muttering to himself while Marjorie navigated the snowstorm, Mark sensed that the revolution had arrived, sketched right there in the artist’s pad on his lap.

His idea was this: An app. A mobile app driven by enormous amounts of data that a home appraiser could consult and manipulate to accurately determine the value of a house in an instant rather than hours or days. And it could all be done with an iPad while out in the field. No forms, no paperwork, no guesswork.

The U.S. housing market — the total value of every home in the country — is worth a staggering $52 trillion. When a home is sold, mortgage lenders send an appraiser to determine its value. Home appraisals is a field that has hardly evolved since the 1930s, a mostly analog job in an increasingly technological world.

Appraisers received an order, scheduled an inspection, and pulled comparable nearby recent home sales. They still entered a home carrying a tape measure and snapped photos, and then drove out to take a pass at the comp homes. Back at the office, they loaded a software package that generated forms and began to input the data. The whole thing took about a day, but even that was just the start: the time to process the information and deliver an estimate to the bank could take up to four weeks.

For decades, home appraisers like Mark had been under threat from an encroaching force: digital tools called Automated Valuation Models (AVMs), computer programs that used statistical models and databases of existing properties and sales, and other factors like square footage and the number of bathrooms, to determine the rough value of a home. The giant real estate marketplace Zillow, for example, used its own AVM, dubbed The Zestimate.

What had saved flesh and blood appraisers was that AVMs weren’t very accurate; the margin of error could be as much as twenty percent in either direction because they didn’t take into account things such as view, renovations, or if a house sits in a flood zone. For that, mortgage lenders needed the expertise of a human appraiser.

As AVMs improved, though, the threat to appraisers grew. Mark believed the only way to survive was to evolve. Instead of eschewing tech, they needed to embrace it — to become more accurate, faster, and even more trusted than AVMs. It was that or extinction. The status quo was almost comical, Mark thought: a multi-trillion-dollar financial industry that determined value based on just a few comp sales and basic calculations on rudimentary forms.

Mark had had the idea for an advanced AVM build especially for appraisers for years, but he’d always been thwarted by technological hurdles or the lack of imagination on the part of firms in the industry. He’d spent a million dollars of his own money building an AVM called STAT. More recently, he had consulted with San Jose-based Bradford Technologies, the smallest of the country’s “big three” developers of forms used by appraisers. He’d helped the company’s CEO Jeff Bradford develop a product called CompCruncher — a name Mark hated and wouldn’t hesitate to tell anyone who would listen — which provided analytics to appraisers. Then Bradford lost interest and the money dried up, and Mark was back at square one.

But he’d recently found new partners in California and together launched a company called ValueScape with a mission to modernize the industry. And now, the idea they’d been looking for was coming out of him onto the page — how it would work, what it would look like, the specific steps an appraiser would take to get the most accurate value of a home — ever. An appraiser could arrive at a home, consult with an iPad in his palm an enormous amount of nationwide housing data, use tools within the app to manipulate data to account for factors he saw with his own eyes (a gorgeous mountain view; a newly renovated basement), and, in seconds, generate a precise value of the home to deliver to mortgage lenders.

It was ambitious, but there was nothing like this on the market. Nothing even close.

Mark drew all the features he wanted for the app into the notebook. He pictured Tom Cruise manipulating data on a transparent screen in Minority Report. “Oh, this so cool,” he said to himself while Marjorie looked at him curiously in the rearview mirror. “This could work!”

“What are you doing?” Marjorie asked.

“Building the future!” Mark replied.

A WEEK LATER,

Mark flew to San Marcos, a suburb of San Diego, to present his vision to his business partners at ValueScape: William Leveson-Gower, an engineer and computer scientist from Mexico with a guileless smile, sharp mind, and a ton of energy who went by the name Guillermo among his friends; and Shashi Rivankar, a brilliant software developer from India who had decades of experience creating technology for the real estate industry.

Guillermo and Shashi had worked as partners in the real estate tech space for years and had once landed a big contract to design appraisal tech for Wells Fargo. Mark met Guillermo during his Bradford days, and they both shared the same passion for technology and an ambition to revolutionize home appraisals. When they partnered up, their original plan had been to reimagine CompCruncher. But now they decided to scrap it altogether and build their ideal app from scratch.

Mark spent the next few weeks in San Diego brainstorming the idea. They started early in the morning in Guillermo’s conference room, sketching diagrams on a wall of whiteboards with erasable markers. Mark was the ideas guy and the one with actual on-the-ground experience as an appraiser. Guillermo was the traffic cop, keeping Mark within the realm of reality. Sashi was the tech wizard, the one who had to make it all work in an iPad app. The energy was frenetic — they knew they were onto something good.

They gave the app a name — Valuation Navigator — and, over the next few months, built a wire-frame, a low fi mockup that shows how the app will look and work, and then a basic working prototype. They met with lawyers to start the patent application and valuation process, and by May 2013 they had put together a 70-page document. They raised some seed money and Guillermo put in one million of his own cash.

It was all coming together. Now they only needed a client, and Mark had just the guy in mind.

JORDAN PETKOVSKI TWO MONTHS LATER, vice president and chief appraiser at TitleSource, a QuickenLoans subsidiary and one of the country’s leading appraisal firms, had a problem and needed a solution. A heavy-set man with a trimmed goatee and nice suits, Jordan was smart, charismatic, and loved to bloviate.

Mark had met Jordan at the Mortgage Bankers Association Conference & Expo in Chicago in the fall of 2012, and the two had instantly clicked. They talked about tech and the future of appraisals and Jordan painted Mark a picture of his dilemma as an executive at Title Source. The company provided 55,000 valuations a month for QuickenLoans bankers. They were strained — QuickenLoans was losing 30% of its leads because it couldn’t get valuations done fast enough. He needed to find ways to make them faster and more efficient.

That number — 55,000 appraisals a month —struck Mark. Wow, Mark thought, if we could get five, ten bucks from each of those?

A few months later, in January 2013 at an appraisal industry event in San Francisco, Mark had a chance to pitch Jordan on Valuation Navigator. Sunset light was streaming through the windows of a buzzing restaurant overlooking the water at Fisherman’s Wharf. Mark spotted Jordan sitting at a dining table sipping wine with his wife. He walked over and asked if he could join. “Jordan,” he said, “we need to talk.”

Over dinner and several glasses of wine, Mark pitched Jordan his vision for the app. As waiters placed courses of food before them, Mark sketched images and workflow ideas onto the paper tablecloth that covered the table. Instead of spending five or six hours per appraisal, Mark explained, they could do it all in less than 30 minutes, start to finish.

Jordan’s wife was especially enthusiastic, Mark recalls. “Oh my God, Jordan, this is amazing,” Mark remembers her saying. “Yes,” Jordan agreed. “It is amazing.”

At the end of the night, Jordan folded up the paper tablecloth to take with him. “Next step,” Jordan said, “we got to get you to Detroit.”

TWO MONTHS LATER, Mark, Guillermo, and Sashi walked through the late-winter morning chill in downtown Detroit, watching their breath. They had arrived the night before and they were nervous. Today they would pitch their product to Title Source execs.

Title Source’s headquarters was three blocks from their hotel, in the First National Building on Woodward Ave., a grand, neoclassical skyscraper surrounded by three-story Corinthian columns. The building had been bought by Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert, whose net worth of around $28 billion made him the eighth richest man in the country. Gilbert was born in Detroit and had spent more than $5.6 billion to revitalize the city’s moribund downtown, buying more than 100 office buildings.

Jordan met them in the grand, renovated lobby and took them upstairs, where he set them up in a conference room and told them he’d be back in 15 minutes. The meeting would be with Jordan, VP of Business Development David Majewski, and Title Source’s CEO Jeff Eisenshtadt.

As they unpacked their computers and tried to set up the PowerPoint presentation, Guillermo was having difficulties connecting to the projector. The clock was ticking and the troubleshooting efforts weren’t working. Guillermo was losing his mind. Oh God, we’re going to fail, Mark thought. Here we are making a tech pitch and we can’t get the tech working.

Just as they heard footsteps down the hall, Guillermo figured it out. Moments later they were all shaking hands and Mark was thrust directly into the pitch.

He walked the executives through the PowerPoint presentation, highlighting the needs of the industry, and demonstrating how the app would work and how they would monetize it. One of the key components in the app would be a color-coded “heat map” appraisers could use to look at relevant data on nearby comp properties. Jordan cooed at the feature. The presentation was crisp and focused, and the TitleSource execs paid close attention.

At the end of the pitch, CEO Jeff Eisenshtadt stood, and, as Mark recalls, said, “We want to partner with you. We want to invest in this product. We’re sold.”

Jordan walked the men through the three floors of Tile Source’s office. Mark marveled at how it thrived. People were working at standing desks, with rollers moving documents along in something like a Domino’s pizza box and a big board with a lit-up screen listing loans in progress. There was a large kitchen with free, catered food.

As he escorted them out, Mark remembers Jordan saying, “Welcome to the family.”

MARK AND MARJORIE were barefoot and knee-deep in a Taro field in Kauai, Hawaii, listening to a tour guide explain the farming techniques of early Islanders. They were on a much-needed vacation, a foodie tour of Hawaii. But Mark was distracted, almost dizzily excited for a call from Jordan to tell him that the deal with Title Source had been approved by the board. It was a gorgeous day, with a bright sun, light breeze, and ruffling palms surrounding him. Perfect.

It had been a whirlwind few months. A week after the Detroit meeting, Title Source came to the team with an unexpected offer: They wanted to buy ValueScape outright for $5 million. However, the ValueScape team in San Diego felt the number was too low considering the potential of the app and they passed. So Title Source came back with a new proposal: They would invest $2 million in ValueScape for 20% of the company, and the team would develop the app in coordination with Title Source. Later, the primary partners would be bought out for $5 million to $6 million apiece. This time, the guys agreed.

Then they hit a snag: Title Source’s attorneys were concerned about the work Mark had done with Bradford on CompCruncher. They worried that Jeff Bradford might consider Mark’s work to be his own company’s intellectual property. Mark assured Title Source attorneys that this app was completely different. About the only thing in common between CompCruncher and Valuation Navigator was that they both used math. “You can’t patent math,” Mark told them in a call.

In Hawaii, Mark’s phone rang. It was Jordan. “I’m afraid I don’t have good news,” he said.

Jordan explained that the lawyers couldn’t get past the Bradford overlap and had advised Jeff Eisenshtadt to not move forward with the deal. Eisenshtadt had said to Jordan, who relayed the message to Mark, “’If I see a pile of shit in a room, I shouldn’t go out of my way to step in it’.”

Mark hung up and looked at Marjorie. “It’s dead,” he said. “No deal.”

Mark was silent on the drive back from the north part of Kuai to Poipu Beach. It was a week before Christmas, and now he was going to have to call his partners and tell them the whole thing was off.

Back at the condo, Mark opened a bottle of wine and started drafting an email to the group. By the next morning, two bottles were drained and he was halfway through a third. In his various drafts, he tried to be both honest and hopeful, but the truth was he had no idea what to do.

THEN, AN IDEA came to him. Mark thought back to his original meeting with Jordan at the conference in Chicago, and the figure Jordan mentioned — 55,000 appraisals completed each month. Mark figured that if the app could generate a commission from each of those sales, the company could earn about $9 million a year. Tech companies sell for three to four times gross. That’s a good number, he thought.

He approached Jordan with a solution: Forget Title Source’s $2 million investment. ValueScape would develop the app themselves — although they had no clue where they would get the money — as long as Title Source agreed to deploy the final product and pay ValueScape each time an appraiser used it.

Jordan was on board, and Title Source agreed to sign a letter of intent with ValueScape.

The deal — or at least a form of it — had been salvaged. But now Mark and the team had even more at stake. They were bearing all of the risk, funding the app’s development completely.

Jordan, meanwhile, remained actively involved in the process. Mark had started to consider Jordan more than just a business partner, but a kindred spirit — someone who had the same frustrations with the appraisal business as Mark did, and the same vision for how to change it. Mark trusted Jordan so much that he shared with him a copy of the patent filing — a step-by-step guide on how to build the app, as well as all of its functionality.

Jordan appeared to harbor no doubts about Mark’s vision. In a recorded call with an investment firm, Jordan said that ValueScape’s technology “has the potential to really revolutionize our industry.” He added, “This is going to be a giant leap forward for us in the same sense that it was a giant leap forward for man to leap from an abacus to a calculator. It’s that big of a difference maker compared to what we’ve seen.”

The product was almost finished. And then something changed.

Mark was in Denver, sitting in his car outside of his doctor’s office, when a call with Jordan turned from routine business matters to a heart-to-heart about Jordan’s future. He was frustrated at Title Source, he told Mark. He felt obstructed by another executive who seemed to question his every decision and, Jordan believed, was stopping him from moving up the ranks within the company. He feared that he lacked the support of Eisenshtadt.

Then Jordan dropped a bombshell: “Mark,” he said, “I think I’d like to be the CEO of ValueScape. I think I need to be your CEO.”

Mark suddenly felt like he had stepped into a minefield. For one thing, ValueScape already had a CEO— Guillermo—and, secondly, Jordan was their man inside Title Source. He was the connective tissue between the two entities. There were business and ethical concerns.

“Well,” Mark told him, “O.K., you’re very smart, you have good connections. But… isn’t that kind of a conflict here? You’re the number three guy at the appraisal and titles affiliate of QuickenLoans.”

Jordan dismissed the concerns and insisted that with the right messaging the transition would be fine. They spoke for a few minutes longer and Mark promised to speak with Guillermo and Sashi. But he felt like they were walking down a perilous path, one that could put Valuation Navigator in jeopardy.

When they all met in a boardroom in the San Diego offices a few days later, Guillermo and Sashi agreed. Sashi was concerned that Title Source would be angered if ValueScape hired away one of its executives. Guillermo said he didn’t want to get in the middle of a dispute between a disgruntled executive and his employer.

Jordan arrived in San Diego the next day, and Mark privately delivered the verdict: They would not be offering him a job. Jordan sighed. “I’m obviously disappointed,” he said, “but I understand your position.”

Mark couldn’t help but notice that for the rest of the day, Jordan’s demeanor had changed. He acted excited, but that’s exactly how it seemed — an act. He was pretending. He had something on his mind.

MARK WAS SITTING in a hotel restaurant in Cleveland the night before giving the keynote speech at a conference, eating a bowl of tomato soup that would give him food poisoning. He was on the phone with Jordan, who mentioned the name of a man who would soon come to torment Mark’s conscious thoughts: Jeremy Sicklick, CEO of a real estate data and analytics firm called HouseCanary.

In the weeks that followed Jordan’s proposition to become ValueScape’s CEO, he became disengaged and difficult to reach, even as Mark and the ValueScape team continued to hit milestones in Valuation Navigator’s development. Jordan said he was just busy and still committed to the app, but Mark was getting antsy. Jordan had been his champion, and now Mark felt he was doing a kind of hot/cold dance with him.

As Mark slurped the poisoned soup, Jordan said he had someone Mark needed to meet. Sicklick had a Wall Street background and had been referred to by the co-chairman of Quicken, Bill Emerson. Although Sicklick wasn’t in the appraisal space, he had a lot of capital and connections, Jordan said. There might be ways for the two companies to work together. HouseCanary might even invest in ValueScape.

Sicklick had coiffed gray hair, crystal blue eyes framed by glasses, and a pointed nose. He wore open-collared shirts and had an assured smile. Over a series of calls and meetings, Mark came to believe that Sicklick was sharp, but also slick and ill-informed about the appraisal industry. But he trusted Jordan that this could be a beneficial business opportunity, so he shared documents and papers to get Sicklick up to speed on the business. Sicklick was particularly interested in Valuation Navigator, and since Jordan had suggested that Sicklick might invest in ValueScape, Mark freely shared what they were up to.

But Mark’s suspicions of Sicklick soon grew into a genuine dislike. His partners felt the same way when they met for dinner a few months later in Irvine, California. Sicklick showed no interest in investing in ValueScape but continued to ask questions about the app they were building. Something about him made the guys feel uneasy. They didn’t trust him.

Over the next few months, Mark, Guillermo, and Sashi pushed as hard as they could to finish Valuation Navigator. Title Source even sent a tech expert to India to supervise the final stages.

Jordan, however, became even more distant. He rescheduled calls and seemed distracted when Mark could get him on the phone. Jordan urged Mark to be patient.

Then, in March 2015, Guillermo received an alarming Google Alert and showed it to Mark. It led to HouseCanary’s website, which featured testimonials from Jordan touting HouseCanary’s latest technology: a new appraisal app.

Mark left Jordan a panicked voicemail and followed up with an email. An hour later, Jordan called back. He insisted that Mark had nothing to worry about. Title Source was simply pursuing data-related projects with HouseCanary, not an appraisal app.

But Mark’s worry turned to panic when browsing a Facebook group of real estate appraisers and he came across a post by Anthony Roveda, a HouseCanary employee. Mark knew Tony well — they’d worked together with Bradford. Tony was from New York, sharp, entrepreneurial, and always looking for an angle.

In the post, Tony wrote that HouseCanary was about to start field trials on a new appraisal tool — with QuickenLoans. Mark couldn’t believe it: There was another horse in the race, and Jordan had actively lied to him about it. Worse still, Jordan had encouraged him and his partners to turn over key insights to this competitor.

A few weeks later, Mark confronted Jordan in person at a conference in Las Vegas. He was livid. “What the hell is going on here?” Mark said. “Are you just playing me?”

“Oh, no, no, no. Oh, Mark, you’re misreading this,” Jordan replied, according to Mark. “No, Tony has overstated what’s going on here. There’s nothing going on here at all.”

There was no deal with HouseCanary, Jordan said. He had merely held discussions with the company. Yes, HouseCanary was developing an app, and it was his duty as a Title Source VP to explore all options. But Jordan insisted that Mark was the only one developing an appraisal app specifically for Title Source and QuickenLoans. “You don’t need to worry,” Jordan assured him.

Mark believed him. After all, Jordan was his guy — Mark’s “kindred spirit” in the appraisal world. Plus, the two firms had a written agreement, and they’d already come so far together.

Two weeks later, Tony Roveda was fired by HouseCanary.

DR. LAUREN HENLEY is a historian whose research examines youthfulness, race, gender, religion, and crime.

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