Downtown Austin High-Rise Specialist Kelton Finley Combines Personal Drive with AI Innovation
by David Hay
August 2026
When Kelton Finley arrived in Austin, Tex., five years ago, after moving from College Station at the height of the pandemic, he had no experience in real estate or contacts in the industry. He also had no shortage of drive and determination to make sure that neither would hold him back. Five years on, Finley is now among the top 20% of agents at Douglas Elliman, where he has established himself as a specialist in the Texas capital’s downtown high-rise residential market.
And with a penchant for innovation and all things tech, he is also a leading advocate at Elliman for incorporating AI into agents’ workflow and the brokerage’s operations. The brokerage, which recently announced the launch of a company-wide technology-infrastructure transformation with AI at the core, invited Finley to join its AI task force.
“I will be involved in beta testing as their development and use of AI is rolled out,” he says.
Finley is already combining his expertise in Austin’s vertical living boom with his experiments in AI-driven marketing at 44 East Avenue. While his business now spans various residential categories in such desirable neighborhoods as Zilker, Bouldin and Travis Heights, this 48-story condominium tower on the eastern bank of Lady Bird Lake is, Finley says, where he first broke through.
Since making his first sale at 44 East Avenue back in 2023, a year after the building was completed, Finley has gone on to broker seventeen more transactions there. He is now developing a comprehensive, engaging interface for dynamically quantifying the building’s market value using AI tools, including Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex and Visual Studio, and aerial photos from his drone camera, a tool he often relies on to capture unique views of his properties. After completing an initial draft, he spent considerable time reworking the text and images.
The resulting Owner's Market Report, which Finley intends to update monthly, provides prospective buyers and sellers, with an extraordinarily detailed breakdown of 44 East Avenue’s recent sales activity and current position in the overall market.
“Once upon a time, I spent thousands of dollars having a website built,” he says. “Now I can do this easily — and so much better — myself.”
Finley created the product not only to bring in new clients but also to demonstrate how new AI-powered information gathering systems can add to an agent’s knowledge base and, in turn, help them promote listings — and themselves. For someone living in these luxury apartments or thinking about buying in, the 44 East Avenue Market Report promises to be an indispensable tool.
Finley is hopeful that Elliman’s investment in AI, among other technology from Google Cloud, will only make it easier for his fellow agents to take advantage of these tools and learn how to master them. The upside, as he sees it, will be spending less time with the tech and more time connecting with clients out in the field — just as he did when he was first starting out as an agent and hosted one open house after another.
When we spoke, Finley was juggling new listings in Austin’s increasingly popular east side and recently sold a two-bed, two-bath home for just under $2.2 million at the Saint Cecilia Residences, a boutique condo collection he calls “Austin’s best kept secret.”
“I like to meet people and have them see what I’m doing, see how knowledgeable I am about a property,” he says.
David Hay is a well-known architectural writer and playwright. His stories have been featured in The New York Times, Dwell and New York.
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