Greg Anderson is a California REALTOR® with Keller Williams Executive who spent twenty years as a custom home builder before real estate became his full time work. He serves the architecturally significant neighborhoods of the San Gabriel Valley and built Sell Odds, a probability engine that measures the empirical likelihood a home will sell at a given price.
The builder years (1978 to 1998)
I started straight out of high school in 1978 with a small homebuilder in Northern California. It was the kind of outfit where one crew did every trade from the dirt up. I learned how to dig and pour a foundation, frame a house from the ground up, and run every trade in between. That apprenticeship made the difference. Instead of specializing in one trade and outsourcing the rest, I came up reading a house as a whole, craftsman and tradesman both, and that perspective carried me through the next twenty years.
By 1993 I was running my own outfit. Anderson Construction held a general contractor’s license in Summit County, Colorado from 1993 to 1998. The work spanned custom homes, subdivision tracts, ranch builds across Wyoming and Northern Colorado, and mountain townhomes in Breckenridge and Frisco. I built my own spec homes along the way.
My specialty was finish carpentry and high-end interiors. The crews I ran averaged eight or nine craftsmen, doing hand-cut joinery, period millwork, the kinds of details most production builders won’t touch because the labor doesn’t pencil. That part of the trade is exactly what is at stake in a Pasadena Craftsman bungalow or a San Marino Mediterranean. I know what original hand-planed oak looks like next to a flip job. I know what a real cove ceiling costs to restore. I know which interior details are original to a house and which got dropped in during a 1980s remodel.
I earned my California real estate license in 1990, while I was still building. That is where the long license tenure comes from. An old license, kept active across two different careers.
The marketing years (1998 to 2024)
I left construction in 1998 and spent the next twenty-five years in brand marketing and high-end content production for major film studios and television networks. The work was full 360 campaigns end to end. Print, key art, theatrical and broadcast promos, behind-the-scenes director and producer walkthroughs, internal and external marketing, licensing assets, and the post-production chain that ties it all together. Among the studios and networks: Lucasfilm, Disney, ABC, the Oprah Winfrey Network, A&E, AMC, Bravo, CBS Films, Warner Bros. Discovery, plus a long bench of boutique post-production houses across Los Angeles.
That practice carries directly into how I market a property today. I produce my own documentaries, and when I list an architecturally significant home in the San Gabriel Valley I bring a full cinematic video workflow with me. Composition, lighting, perspective, the cut, the score, voiceover. A 1925 Pasadena Craftsman or a Wallace Neff Mediterranean is a piece of architecture, and it deserves to be filmed the way the architecture was designed to be experienced. That is what twenty-five years on the studio side actually buys a seller when it shows up in the listing.
The return to real estate (2024)
I reactivated my California real estate practice full-time in 2024 and focused it on the San Gabriel Valley. The decision was deliberate. SGV has the deepest residential architecture inventory in Los Angeles County. Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino, Sierra Madre, La Cañada Flintridge, plus the named-architect work (Greene & Greene, Wallace Neff, Sylvanus Marston, Roland Coate, Myron Hunt, Elmer Grey) that doesn’t exist in this kind of concentration anywhere else on the West Coast. And the buyers and sellers who care about these homes are looking for someone who can talk about them substantively.
Why the builder credential matters
This is the part most agent bios skip. Here is what twenty years of custom home construction actually gives a client who is buying or selling a pre-1940 architectural home in the San Gabriel Valley.
Authenticity assessment. I can walk a Craftsman bungalow and tell you what is original, what is a sympathetic restoration, what is a 1990s flip dressed up as restoration, and what is recoverable. Most agents can tell you the listing date. I can tell you whether the trim was hand-cut, whether the original built-ins were preserved or replaced, and what it would cost to put back what has been ripped out.
Restoration math. When a buyer is looking at a beautifully presented Mediterranean and the listing makes it sound move-in ready, the question they need answered is what the next ten years actually cost. That is a contractor’s question. I answer it from twenty years on the other side of that table.
Vendor judgment. I know which trades are real and which are not. Which finish carpenters will preserve original detail and which will paint over it. Which roofing crews understand clay tile. Which masons can hand-tuck a Batchelder hearth without cracking it. That knowledge is local now, and I am building the SGV vendor roster city by city. The pattern recognition for what good work looks like came from running my own crews for two decades.
Sell Odds, a Probabilistic Marketing Analysis
When an agent walks into your home to win your listing, what they hand you is a Comparative Market Analysis. A few photos of houses down the street with similar bedrooms and bathrooms, presented as analysis. Most CMAs are cherry-picked to win the listing. They tell you what you want to hear.
I could not stand watching that anymore. So I spent a year building Sell Odds, a probability engine that asks a different question. Not what is the property worth, but the empirical likelihood it will actually sell at a given price, measured against the actual record of what comparable properties in the area have closed for and what they have not. The intellectual lineage is Edward O. Thorp, who used the same probabilistic discipline to break blackjack in 1962 and then to run Princeton/Newport Partners for nineteen years, compounding at 19.1% annualized without a single losing year. The first quant in finance. There is no reason the same approach cannot be brought to residential real estate. Until now, nobody had bothered.
What I bring is not a CMA. It is a PMA, a Probabilistic Marketing Analysis. The eight filtering gates, the 201-point price elasticity curve, the live CRMLS connection. The full technical breakdown lives at sellodds.com. What runs on Arroyo Casa is the same engine, calibrated to the cities I serve in the San Gabriel Valley.
How to reach me
Email is best: greg@arroyocasa.com. The structured contact options on the main Arroyo Casa site work as well. I take consultations on architectural assessments for buyers, listing strategy conversations for sellers, and the occasional “what is this house I am walking past in Pasadena” question from people who just want to know.
The goal of this site is for you to have the answer before you call. The conversation starts where this writing ends.
One more thing, because verification is the whole point of this site. The identity behind these pages is a public record. Greg Anderson is Wikidata entity Q140357439, and holds California DRE license 01071792, verifiable at the California Department of Real Estate.