Our story is like many founders. We saw a tremendous opportunity to make the world a better place because of pain we experienced first hand.
Since 2010, I've been buying investment properties in South Florida. As a landlord and a property manager, I've been on a mission to improve the placement process and create tools for other landlords to manage their properties.
With a background in real estate as an investor and landlord, I'm passionate about using technology to empower owners to be more successful at finding, placing and servicing a tenant. There is a gap in technology related to landlords and tenants we are ready to bridge.
Miquel has been on engineering teams that have been a part of successful acquisitions as well as has been a leader in technology in the Microsoft, LAMP as well as front end frameworks. His expertise affords him a wide variety of talents from IT to front end development.
Nathan has a deep background as a marketing director and a leader of marketing teams which has afforded him experience from advertising to analytics. As a speaker in many marketing related events, he is a thought leader in many of the new up and coming marketing tactics and tech.
As an entrepreneur, Kobi has been working in prop-tech for over a decade with successful exits and several startups. Currently he is creating efficiencies in the tenant placement activities in property management with his new startup ShowDigs as well as with our team.
Founder of UrbanKey in West Seattle, WA, Ty is a successful real estate broker and property manager. He brings decades of real estate experience to our team to make sure our product fit the customer and market.
Our first careers are in technology. We are good at building companies that leverage the internet to create value. Our founding team has built companies into 200M+ retail brands, launched successful startups in the proptech space, and worked within large real estate companies building technology.
On the side, we acquired properties and became landlords, property managers of small real estate portfolios.
Being a part time landlord is a wonderful way to build wealth. With our technology backgrounds, we found lots of services to make property management easier, addressing almost every aspect of the process.
But there was one big problem we all loathed: placing a new tenant.
With every vacancy there is pain, effort, difficulty. While we found and used many services to make the property management easier, we couldn’t find a single service that handled the whole process of placing a tenant as a stand alone service.
The process is cumbersome, difficult, and happened infrequently enough it wasn’t highly reproducable. We would dust off our listing and refresh it, figure out which sites to list on, field inquiries, communicate with prospects, block off our schedules for showings, perform showings and be there for no shows, negotiate with prospects, schedule more showings, refresh listings, and finally, after weeks of work, find a qualified prospect and draft up a lease.
From this point forward, we enjoyed being landlords! But the tenant placement process was far too difficult. For busy professionals, this was too much. There must be a better way to do this! But the options we could find were either too expensive or inadequate.
There are two ways to rent a property. The traditional route is to use a property management company. They fill a vacancy for you and do ALL the work but there are three big problems with this model. First, you have to forfeit ALL of the first month’s rent. This is expensive! Second, property management companies want an annual contract. Not only do they charge a high price for placement, they also want an annual contract where they retain management of the new tenant and property in exchange for 10% of rent.
In combination, these two line items add up to nearly 20% of revenue for an entire year. For our most properties, and most of our customers, over $4,000!
Third, property management companies don’t offer any control over the process. We found they consistently underperformed, were slow, didn’t pay attention to details, and ultimately created more vacancy and depressed rent potential.
We imagined a better way but it didn’t exist, so we built it!
We built a fresh service that is entirely new. It uses the gig economy and digital technology to create a seamless, end to end solution from advertising, through tours, and to leasing and collecting rent. All with multiple levels of screening and qualifications for everyone involved. We take a vacancy from listing to lease at a fraction of the cost.
There are 30 million landlords out there just like us, who can benefit from our innovation and we can’t wait to share it with an increasingly large number of them.
