Jerry Mooty and Christie's Luxury Real Estate In Texas

Jerry Mooty Wakes Up Before Dallas Does

At 4:45 a.m., when most of Dallas is still dark and quiet, Jerry Mooty is already tapping out texts to his team. By 7 a.m., the CEO and principal broker of @properties Lone Star | Christie’s International Real Estate is at his desk, preparing for the Monday Mindset Zoom call that sets the tone for nearly 300 agents spread across five Texas offices.

“I’m usually the first one texting at five in the morning and the last one at night,” he tells Building Dallas. Work, for Mooty, is less about grind for grind’s sake, and more about something he repeats often: culture eats strategy for lunch.

That idea now powers one of North Texas’s fastest-growing real estate brokerages. In just five years, Jerry Mooty has taken @properties Lone Star | Christie’s International Real Estate from a startup Dallas office to a billion-dollar production engine spanning Dallas, Fort Worth, Southlake and Austin, even as interest rates cooled the broader Dallas housing market.

From Springfield to SMU to the Heart of the Dallas Housing Market

“It was a strong learning time in my life on how to handle people,”

Mooty’s road to the Dallas luxury real estate market didn’t start in a boardroom; it started with a phone call from a teenager in Missouri.

He grew up in Springfield, the only child in a family that expected him to follow relatives to the University of Arkansas. Instead, he saw a short newspaper item: SMU was bringing back its football program from the NCAA “death penalty.” At 18, he dialed 4-1-1, asked for the SMU athletic department, reached new head coach Forrest Gregg and within days had an application in hand. That decision in 1988 pulled him to Dallas and planted him in the city he now helps sell.

The business instincts came earlier. His grandfather, Pat Jones, ran a small-town grocery store in England, Arkansas, where Mooty’s mother and uncle helped customers push carts through the aisles as kids. Later, Jones sold life insurance by car, calling on families around southwest Missouri while a young Jerry watched from the passenger seat. “It was a strong learning time in my life on how to handle people,” Mooty recalls.

Those lessons — that business is face-to-face and rooted in trust — resonate in a city now transformed by data centers, gleaming towers and corporate relocations. From 2018 to 2024, Dallas–Fort Worth attracted more corporate headquarters than any other U.S. metro, drawing 100 new head offices and the executive talent that comes with them.CultureMap Dallas

For a broker running Christie's International Real Estate’s Texas affiliates, that migration is both opportunity and obligation. High-earning newcomers want a guide, not just a salesperson, to navigate neighborhoods from Preston Hollow to Southlake, and to understand everything from schools to skyrocketing home-insurance premiums.

Risk, Recession and the Price of a Pivot

“If you haven’t had financial stress, it’s probably the worst you can go through,”

Before he was a Dallas real estate name, Jerry Mooty was a young lawyer who hated practicing law.

Fresh out of law school, he landed at a 300-lawyer Dallas firm and quickly realized the life of drafting briefs at a desk wasn’t for him. Instead of changing professions outright, he found a partner who loved the legal craft — Levi McCathern — and together they launched McCathern | Mooty in 1998.

For the first several years, Mooty carried a caseload, tried cases and built a reputation. But the real calling was deals. As the firm became one of the fastest-growing in DFW, he spun up side businesses: a real estate development company, a homebuilding division, a commercial arm, even a litigation support company.

Then the recession hit. He had started building homes in 2005. By 2009, it was, as he puts it, “a bad time to be in home building and anything kind of real estate or mortgage related.” Personally guaranteed loans turned from leverage into a weight. Some banks worked with him; others did not. Eventually, he made a decision most entrepreneurs fear: he declared personal bankruptcy to unwind the development business and exit the firm he’d helped create.

“If you haven’t had financial stress, it’s probably the worst you can go through,” he says now. There’s no quick fix — no crucial conversation that can rewrite a balance sheet. The memory still surfaces whenever he evaluates a major financial risk.

From Law Firm Founder to Cowboys Deal-Maker

That low point opened a different door. At a Dallas Cowboys training camp, he noticed something missing from the sponsorship banners ringing the practice field: a credit-card processor.

The team already had a relationship with Bank of America, which quietly handled payments inside a larger sponsorship. Mooty pitched the Jones family — his mother is Jerry Jones’s sister — on carving out that processing into an independent sales organization, or ISO. Bank of America would handle the back-end; a new entity, Blue Star Payments, would use the Cowboys brand to win restaurants, merchants and vendors across Texas.

The plan worked. As Blue Star gained traction, a seasoned payments executive approached with a bigger idea: combine the Cowboys-backed processing platform with youth sports technology companies, where every registration ended in a payment screen. They merged concepts, secured the Jones family’s blessing and ultimately drew capital from heavyweights like Bain Capital and Genstar Partners to build Blue Star Sports, a global youth sports platform.

As chief business and legal officer, Mooty led due diligence on roughly 250 tech companies, acquiring about 25 into a single roll-up — and learning how venture capital views businesses as numbers first and personalities second.

“There’s no company they acquire without an exit in mind,” he says. The experience hardened him against sentiment in business decisions and taught him to look at platforms, not one-off wins.

Building Christie's @properties Lone Star in a Boom-and-Bust Market

By the late 2010s, Mooty was ready to chart his own course again — this time in residential real estate. What he found when he first became an agent surprised him: aside from one national rival, the technology around agents felt stuck a decade behind.

So when he discovered Chicago-based @properties and its in-house pl@tform technology — CRM, marketing, document management and gifting tied into a single login — he saw the same kind of system thinking he’d admired in tech. He acquired the Texas franchise, then watched as @properties bought Christie’s International Real Estate’s affiliate network, giving his new brokerage global branding and local control.

Today, Christie's International Real Estate | @properties Lone Star is headquartered on Monticello Avenue in Dallas, with four DFW offices and one in Austin. The Austin office alone has grown from a handful of agents in temporary space to roughly 120 agents in two years, winning “best places to work” and fast-growth honors along the way.

Across Texas, the brokerage is riding a complicated market. Million-dollar and ultra-luxury home sales in DFW have climbed sharply in 2024 and 2025, even as higher interest rates tamp down volume under $2 million. DFW Urban Realty+2WFAA+2 Corporate relocations continue to funnel high-earning buyers into North Texas, supporting luxury prices in neighborhoods like Highland Park, Southlake and Westlake.CultureMap Dallas+1

Mooty divides the current Dallas housing market into two worlds. “Two million and below has been very stagnant,” he says, citing rate-sensitive move-up buyers. “Two million and above… has really still flourished,” buoyed by cash-heavy executives who can work around mortgage math.

“Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch”

If technology is the plumbing of the brokerage, culture is the water.

“I’ve always believed culture eats strategy for lunch,” he says. “If you have the right people working together in a team environment, a collaborative environment, then you’re gonna grow your business.”

That belief plays out in small, consistent rituals. Every Monday at 9 a.m., agents and staff log into a company-wide Monday Mindset Zoom, led by Mooty or his Austin-based managing broker, to reset focus for the week. At 9:30, leadership stays on for a deeper call where marketing, accounting, training and operations all share what they’re working on so no one operates in a silo.

The brokerage’s recruiting filter is cultural, not just financial. In an industry where 1099 agents technically cost a brokerage nothing until a deal closes, it would be easy to say yes to every producer. Instead, Mooty sometimes walks away from agents whose references or attitude don’t fit. “If they’re the wrong culture fit, then I don’t bring them into the equation,” he says.

In interviews, he asks two deceptively simple questions: What time do you wake up? And what do you do to stay healthy? A candidate who rolls out of bed at 10 a.m. is unlikely to thrive under a 4:45-a.m. CEO. Someone without any outlet — running, reading, walking — may struggle with the volatility of a commission-based career.

The Love Hats and the Business Behind Them

Christie’s and @properties may be global brands, but in Dallas, the brokerage is also known for something simpler: a white trucker hat embroidered with a red script word — “love.”

The hats began as an @properties campaign in Chicago. In Texas, Mooty leaned into it, printing custom versions that say “Love Dallas,” “Love Southlake,” or “Love Austin.” They’re not for sale; he hands them out, one by one, in the most analog kind of lead generation. People stop him at Mavericks games or UT events to ask where they can buy one. He trades hat for business card and follows up with a handwritten note. He’s been on “five or six jumbotrons at sporting events” thanks to those hats, he says with a laugh.

It’s a small, human-scale gesture in a company built on big systems. And that balance — between tech and touch — may be why the firm has attracted agents who “eat what they kill” yet still line up for voluntary Monday morning calls.

Tech, AI and the Dallas Homebuyer

Despite his law and development background, Mooty talks about technology like a product manager. Years of evaluating software companies for Blue Star Sports left him impatient with clunky tools. That’s one reason he gravitated to @properties’ pl@tform and why his agents now have a single login for CRM, marketing, documents and client gifting.

He’s realistic — and a little wary — about artificial intelligence. For now, he sees AI as a helper, not a replacement. Agents dictate property details into tools like ChatGPT to generate MLS descriptions. They can take photos of an empty home and have virtual staging dropped in, saving sellers thousands on furniture rentals while still giving buyers a sense of scale.

Where he draws the line is in the relationship. “Buying a home is such an intimate part of someone’s family,” he says. “They may have a hard time relying on artificial intelligence” for the biggest purchase of their lives.

Dallas, Hail and Protecting What You Just Bought

In North Texas, the story doesn’t end when the ink dries on a closing. It ends when the next storm season passes and the roof holds.

Texas has led the nation in major hail events for a decade, with North Texas storms in 2024 alone causing billions in damage to roofs, windows and siding.WFAA+2Roofing Contractor+2 Lightning and hail pushed average Texas homeowners’ insurance claims above $38,000 in 2024, and nearly half of claims statewide were closed with no payment as insurers tightened coverage.III+2Houston Chronicle+2

For buyers entering the Dallas housing market through Christie’s International Real Estate | @properties Lone Star, those risks are no longer abstract. Late in the Building Dallas conversation, host Reese Arrington introduces the Fortified Roofing standard — an approach that tapes roof deck seams, adds fasteners and reinforces edges so that even if shingles blow off, water stays out of the house.

It’s the kind of detail Mooty’s agents increasingly have to understand. A client shopping a $2.5 million home in Southlake cares about schools and commutes — and about whether the roof is a liability in the “hailstorm capital of the United States.”YPA Public Adjusters In a world of rising premiums and stricter exclusions, the roof is no longer just a line item on an inspection; it’s central to insurability and long-term cost of ownership.

That’s where local specialists like Arrington Roofing fit into the story. After 42 years of roofing North Texas homes, Arrington is working with programs like Fortified Roofing to keep interiors dry and insurers confident, giving agents like Mooty one more layer of protection to point to when they hand over the keys.

The Return: Legacy in a City Still Growing

At 56, Jerry Mooty is getting something he didn’t always have during his early career: fun. Running Christie's International Real Estate | @properties Lone Star may not yet match the early law-firm years financially, he says, but “it’s been more fun than anything I’ve ever done,” largely because of the people.

The firm’s awards — from SMU Cox’s Top 100 to the Dallas Business Journal’s Fast 50 — matter less to him than what they represent: proof that a culture-first, tech-forward brokerage can grow even in a choppy market. His sons are carving their own paths in finance and film, and he hopes one day they’ll bring those skills back into the business, echoing the family-centric structure he admires inside the Cowboys organization.

For now, he’s focused on the next office, the next agent, the next Monday Mindset call — and on helping new Dallas residents understand both the opportunities and the risks of planting roots in North Texas.

Culture may eat strategy for lunch. But in Jerry Mooty’s Dallas, it also builds roofs, closes deals and keeps the lights on long after the storm passes.