About

Why this team, and why this asset class.

DealNgn is not a product someone built for brokers. It is the system a working brokerage built to run itself, by people who had already spent a decade shipping enterprise software before they ever carried a license. This page is the long version of why that matters.

Michael Salafia, founder and principal broker of STAX Real Estate
Co-founder · COO
Joe Tomaszewski

Co-founder alongside Michael. STAX is not a one-person company, and DealNgn is not a one-person codebase.

Founders
Michael Salafia
Founder · Principal Broker

He did not learn to code after becoming a broker. He spent a decade leading strategy, design and development for enterprise clients, then went into commercial real estate on purpose — because it was the largest industry he could find still running on stale data and manual work, with almost nobody inside it who could build.

  • FOUNDATION
    Finance undergrad. MBA in high-tech entrepreneurship.

    Then ad sales at AOL — the commercial education that made the software career a business career rather than a technical one.

  • SOFTWARE
    A decade at a New York digital agency. Strategy, design, development.

    Digital Director at Digimix, leading engagements for JetBlue and the City of New York, among others. Ten years of shipping enterprise systems for organizations that could not afford for them to be wrong.

  • THE DELIBERATE MOVE
    Into commercial real estate — to change it from the inside.

    Marcus & Millichap, national retail and net lease. Not a career accident: a technologist picking the industry with the widest gap between the size of the money and the quality of the tooling, and going to get a license so he could work on it from inside the transaction rather than selling software at it.

  • HIS OWN BOOK
    Founded STAX. Built the first iterations of DealNgn to run it.

    $525M+ in CRE sales volume, 250+ stations and c-stores sold or leased. Published in NAIOP Development Magazine on net-lease strategy; a bylined voice on applying AI to real estate investment decisions since 2023.

  • OPERATOR
    Opened and operated 43 gas station businesses. Sold the opco.

    Re-Up — including autonomous robotic kitchens deployed into live stores, covered by Chain Store Age, The Robot Report, C-Store Dive, Convenience Store News and CStore Decisions. He does not underwrite this asset class from a spreadsheet. He has run 43 of them, and sold the operating company.

  • NOW
    Back at STAX, building DealNgn.

    Software career, operating history, and a principal broker's license — pointed at the same problem. That combination is why the platform does what brokerage actually requires instead of what software people assume it requires.

Ten years building enterprise software. Forty-three gas station businesses opened and operated. A principal broker's license and $525M+ in closings.

The case for DealNgn is that almost nobody has all three — and you need all three to know what to build.
The team behind the platform
Why we started here

We began with the hardest asset class on purpose.

STAX is a retail and net-lease brokerage. Gas stations and c-stores are a subcategory of that — and they are where we started, for two reasons.

The first is commercial: it's the category the founder already dominates, so the platform had a real book to prove itself against from day one.

The second is architectural. A fuel and convenience asset is the most complex underwrite in retail — real estate, a business, fuel volumes, brand agreements, environmental liability and regulatory records all in one deal. Build the model that handles that, and every simpler net-lease type is a subset of it, not a rebuild. The gas-station-specific inputs are a handful of fields on a general model, not the model itself.

Expanding into single-tenant QSR, auto service, dollar stores, medical retail or general NNN is a configuration exercise. That was the design intent from the first line.

Underwriting complexity — retail asset types
Fuel + c-store Built
Auto service Subset
QSR / drive-thru Subset
Medical retail Subset
Dollar / discount Subset
General NNN retail Subset
Why it holds

The advantage compounds in four directions.

01 — Data

The corpus grows with every deal.

Thousands of sites, resolved owner entities, validated contacts, stated buy-boxes, offers made and refused, and every underwrite we've ever run. None of it is licensed from a vendor and none of it can be bought. A competitor starting today starts at zero and cannot catch up by spending.

02 — Origin

Built by the operator, not sold to one.

Most CRE software is built by people who have never had a seller threaten to walk — and most brokerages that want software have to describe it to someone who has never closed a deal. Here the same people do both. Every feature earned its place by surviving a transaction, because the people who wrote it are the ones who lose the listing when it's wrong. That is a materially different development loop than building for a customer you never have to be.

03 — Depth

Span is harder to copy than any single feature.

A competitor can rebuild any one surface in a quarter. Rebuilding eight stages on a single data model — with the marketing, compliance, confidentiality and closing logic that a licensed brokerage actually requires — is a multi-year project against a moving target that is already in production.

04 — Distribution

The first customer is already profitable.

The platform is validated by a revenue-generating brokerage rather than a pilot program. That means product decisions are disciplined by transaction economics, not by a roadmap written to raise the next round — and it means the go-to-market can be sequenced deliberately instead of desperately.

Where this goes

The platform is the argument.
This page is only the evidence behind it.

We are not raising publicly and this page is not an offering. If you want to see what the system actually spans — eight transaction stages on one data model, running a licensed brokerage's live book every day — that is the product page.

← See what the platform does