Toby Kay

This site is written by Toby Kay, a retired real estate broker who held broker's licenses in Arizona, Nevada and California. Those licenses are retired and no longer active. She is not a lawyer, and nothing on this site is legal advice.

What She Did Before This

She founded and owned Bestway Realty in Arizona and built it into one of the larger independent brokerages in the state, with a full staff of licensed brokers and salespeople. She was its designated broker — in Arizona that is the person the license actually hangs on, and the one answerable for what the office does.

She also founded Kaktus Real Estate Forms, among the first businesses selling real estate forms over the internet. The misspelling was on purpose, a small joke about running a company from the Arizona desert.

Why a Broker Rather Than a Lawyer

It is a fair question to ask of a site about a legal document, and the honest answer has two halves.

What a brokerage career gives you is a long acquaintance with the paperwork ordinary people sign and the particular places it goes wrong. Which blank nobody fills in. Which clause a landlord assumes is enforceable because it was in the last form they used. Which part of a deal people worry about needlessly, and which part they should worry about and do not. That is knowledge you get from watching several hundred transactions rather than from reading about them.

What it does not give you is the authority to tell you what to do about your own situation. A broker is not a lawyer, and this site does not pretend the distinction is a formality. Where a question turns on your particular lease, your dates or your documents, the site says so and points you to somebody who can read them.

Where the Law on This Site Comes From

Her experience decides what gets explained and in what order. It does not decide what Arizona law says. Every rule described here is taken from the statute itself and cited so you can check it, and every page carries the date it was last read against the law. How the information is checked sets out that method in full.

So the two things are doing different jobs. The career is why the site knows which questions matter. The statutes are why the answers are right.

The Part That Is Not on the Site

Kaktus Real Estate Forms launched early enough that there was no practical way to take a credit card — payment processing as it now exists simply did not exist. So it ran on trust. You downloaded the form you needed and mailed a check afterward, and if the form did not work, or an office would not accept it, the money came back.

Two things about that turned out to be true. Most people mailed the check, and almost nobody asked for a refund.

The business had about two good years before better-funded competitors arrived, and revenue fell away after that. Nobody had heard of search engine optimization yet. The domain was eventually sold to a New York clothing company, which still uses it.

What stayed was the observation the whole thing started from: most people deal with a property document once or twice in a lifetime, and what is written for them is written either for lawyers or for nobody. That gap has closed less than you would expect. This site is an attempt at part of it.