Podcast appearances and mentions of gary beasley

Sometimes the most innovative business concepts are born from immense industry stress. Today's guest created a ground-breaking platform in response to the economic pressure cooker of the 2000's.On this episode, we're sitting down with Gary Beasley, who is a co-founder and CEO of Roofstock, an award winning real estate investment as a service platform for the 4 trillion dollar single family rental sector. The company is backed by Blue Chip roster investors, including Cosla Ventures, Light Speed Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and SoftBank. Roofstock has completed over $6 billion worth of transactions since its founding in 2015.Previously, Gary was the co-CEO of publicly traded Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust, now part of Invitation Homes, and is known as a pioneer in the development of the single-family rental sector as an institutional and asset class. Gary also served as CEO of boutique hotel company Joie De Vivre Hospitality, and award-winning solar technology startup GreenVolts.Between 2001 and 2007, Gary was the CFO of Zip Realty where he led the internet-based residential brokerage through its IPO before eventually being named its President. Gary also spent six years with KSL resorts where he was instrumental in acquiring and integrating over 800 million worth of resort properties.Gary earned a BA in economics from Northwestern University and an MBA from Stanford University Graduate School of Business where he serves as a regular guest lecturer.Highlights: What inspired Gary to follow his educational path into business (3:22) Gary's first role in the business sector, and how it influenced his outlook (4:23) Gary describes what interested him in Stanford University, and his journey to getting there (5:38) Gary's first job after business school (6:57) Waypoint Homes and how Gary was introduced to the real estate sector (8:47) Technology to facilitate the business, and how the industry has become an asset class (10:34) Where Gary and his partner saw value in the market, and their approach to starting the business (13:20) Roofstock's business model, and how it has changed over time (14:48) How Roofstock works together with brokers and agents (17:41) Gary explains their proprietary asset management software (19:28) How COVID impacted Roofstock's business and business model (21:10) How the current economy is influencing their approach to business at Roofstock (22:54) Gary explains what drew their impressive group of backers to Roofstock (24:20) Gary's thoughts on the company's future market opportunities and the possibilities of going public (27:16) Incorporating AI and staying attuned to new tech in real estate (28:30) Links:Gary Beasley on LinkedInRoofstock on LinkedInRoofstock WebsiteICR LinkedInICR TwitterICR WebsiteFeedback:If you have questions about the show, or have a topic in mind you'd like discussed in future episodes, email our producer, marion@lowerstreet.co.

Ignore the naysayers. trust your gut.  Take risks, make quick decisions and stay true to your mission.  Many times the best entrepreneurs are people that don't play by the rules.  In this fascinating episode Ilana speaks with Gary Beasley, CEO & co-founder of Roofstock about his journey starting and growing a successful company.  Watch this episode on YouTube - https://youtu.be/21ARHuLLiNo More about Garyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-beasley-956647/ About Ilana Golan & Leap Academy:Website - https://www.leapacademy.com/Follow Ilana on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilanagolan/YouTube Channel - https://www.youtube.com/@ilanagolan-leap-academy

I'm very excited about today's interview with Gary Beasley, CEO & Co-Founder of Roofstock. He was just a regular guy when I met him years ago. Today, he's a leader in the institutional investment space and a true disrupter within the single-family rental asset class.   In this episode, you'll hear his thoughts on how the housing market has evolved since the 2008 meltdown, how he has transitioned his own real estate investing strategy over the years, and why he thinks that the single-family rental space is an asset class that will remain in high demand.   Before Roofstock, Gary was CFO of ZipRealty and Co-CEO of Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust which is now part of Invitation Homes, leading both through successful IPOs. In addition, he's been instrumental in acquiring and integrating more than $800 million in resort properties for KSL Resorts and has served as CEO for boutique hotel management company Joie De Vivre Hospitality.   Gary earned his BA in Economics from Northwestern and holds an MBA from Stanford. He now leads Roofstock with a valuable perspective on the use of technology in the real estate industry and challenges the way things have been done with the question: “What's next?”   You can follow him at these social media sites: LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/gary-beasley-956647 Twitter - @garybeas2013   To find out more about how you can benefit from real estate, sign up as a RealWealth member. It's free to join and will give you access to our private investor portal, hundreds of webinars, sample pro-formas, help with the acquisition process, referrals to our highly recommended real estate professionals, and a free session with one of our experienced investment counselors.    And don't forget to hit the subscribe button for this podcast and leave a review!    Thanks for listening, Kathy Fettke   Follow Kathy on Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/kathyfettke/ Purchase Kathy's audiobook on Audible at: https://tinyurl.com/retirerichaudible

In this episode of the Top of Mind podcast, Mike Simonsen sits down with Gary Beasley, CEO and co-founder of Roofstock, to talk about today's biggest trends and opportunities in real estate investing. Gary shares his experience leading two fast-growing real estate technology companies through IPOs, offers a deep-dive into what's happening with institutional real estate investors right now, and talks about what to expect with mortgage rates, inflation and recession for the coming year. He also tells us why he continues to be bullish on housing for the foreseeable future. About Gary Beasley Gary is the driving force behind Roofstock's goal to power the future of real estate investing. Gary brings a valuable perspective on using technology to disrupt incumbents through his deep industry expertise leading various real estate, hospitality, and tech companies. Gary has a proven track record of starting and launching successful companies, having led two companies through IPOs: ZipRealty as CFO and Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust (now a part of Invitation Homes, the largest single-family rental home REIT in the United States) as co-CEO. In addition, Gary was instrumental in acquiring and integrating more than $800 million of resort properties for KSL Resorts and also served as CEO of Joie De Vivre Hospitality, then the second-largest boutique hotel management company in the United States. Gary was named a 2019 Top 50 Fintech CEO by Financial Technology Report and HousingWire's 2018 HW Vanguard. He earned his BA in Economics from Northwestern and holds an MBA from Stanford, where he regularly participates as a guest speaker. Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn:  Gary Beasley on LinkedIn Roofstock Mike Simonsen on LinkedIn Altos Research Featuring Mike Simonsen, President of Altos Research A true data geek, Mike founded Altos Research in 2006 to bring data and insight on the U.S. housing market to those who need it most. The company now serves the largest Wall Street investment firms, banks, and tens of thousands of real estate professionals around the country. Mike's insights on the market have been featured in Forbes, New York Times, Bloomberg, Dallas Morning News, Seattle PI, and many other national media outlets. Follow us on Twitter for more data analysis and insights: Altos on Twitter Mike on Twitter

In this episode, Henry speaks with the CEO of Roofstock, Gary Beasly. Roofstock is a leading online marketplace for investors in the single-family rental (SFR) home sector. They have helped support more than $5 billion in total transactions, and that number continues to grow.In this episode, Gary discusses:How he made his way into real estate.The current state of the real estate market.The different ways you can interact with Roofstock from an investor standpointHow they are scaling property management for investors.Vertical stack capabilities Roofstock supports.and more!

Today's Guest: Gary Beasley In this episode, I have the opportunity to interview Roofstock CEO, Gary Beasley. Roofstock is a leading real estate investment marketplace that he co-founded in 2015. Gary caught the entrepreneurial bug while earning an MBA at Stanford, and spent most of his career building businesses in the real estate, hospitality, and tech sectors. Highlights From The Show: We began as we often do by diving into Gary's background. He talked about growing up in small midwestern towns learning a bit about the business from his dad who owned a commercial real estate brokerage firm. Gary said things really changed for him when he went to school at Northwestern and how the environment really opened his eyes to the different possibilities available to him. He decided to go to business school after working a couple of years in real estate, thinking that he wanted to do something different but ended up right back in real estate after earning his MBA from Stanford. Gary talked about his early work experience and his different roles. He talked about how much he learned and how his confidence grew when he was able to perform duties that he had not done previously. After several years as a CFO and president for ZipRealty, he decided to take a year off to work on various projects. He took some time to teach some entrepreneur courses at Stanford and ended up making a proposal to a solar panel technology company that led to another leadership role. Gary took some time to explain the circumstances that led him to start Roofstock and the advantages of their platform. Some of these include fast sales, costs associated with selling homes are lower than through traditional means, there is no downtime for the investment and very little disruption to the tenant. As part of this discussion, I talked a lot about why using Roofstock is desirable for an investor in my situation. Gary outlined several of the benefits and guarantees that are integral to the Roofstock marketplace. We then discussed where Gary thinks the housing market is headed. He said that it is so hard to predict the future because there are so many variables, but it is very interesting that the housing market is still so hot after several months of the pandemic. He stressed that because of the pandemic, people are valuing their homesteads more than ever and that is having an interesting impact on the market. Gary has an incredibly interesting background and was a great guest, so please join us for this uber-informative episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast! Notable Quotes: “One of the best things about college is how it expands your horizons and your viewpoint of what is possible.” Mike Simmons “I encourage people to view college as a time of exploration and not necessarily as a practical, pre-professional period.” Gary Beasley “College really teaches you how to think.” Gary Beasley “Early in your career, do things for the experience, not for the money.” Gary Beasley “The more difficult the decision, the less it matters what you decide.” Gary Beasley “You lean on experts that can help you.” Gary Beasley “Make sure you are surrounded by the right people.” Gary Beasley “Embrace the process and everything will be okay.” Gary Beasley “If you stay where you are comfortable, I hope you are comfortable where you currently are because that is where you will remain.” Mike Simmons “We are trying to break down the geographic barriers to real estate investing.” Gary Beasley “When you are building a marketplace, it has to be on a foundation of trust.” Gary Beasley “It has to be trust first, then growth, and then profitability.” Gary Beasley Thank You for Listening! Connect with Mike on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Linkedin, Facebook Help Out the Show: Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help, and I read each one. Subscribe on iTunes. Resources and Links From Today's Show: Roofstock More Resources From Mike: Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months WINNING DIRECT MAIL - How to CRUSH IT with direct mail! 7 Figure Investor Video Course - Scale your business to 7 figures. I'll show you how!

Today's guest is Gary Beasley, CEO and Co-Founder at Roofstock in Oakland, CA. Founded in 2015, Roofstock is building the world's leading real estate investment marketplace. Their mission is to make ownership of investment real estate radically accessible, cost-effective and simple. Roofstock's platform lets everyone from first-time investors to global asset managers evaluate, purchase and own residential investment properties with confidence, from anywhere in the world. Roofstock are combining highly-experienced people in the business with the power of AI and the efficiencies of institutional scale, knocking down the traditional barriers to real estate investing. They are building a vibrant and proactive marketplace for real estate investing where the accessibility to information is matched only by the ease of transaction. It's a new model where everyone can participate, from anywhere, at any time. Roofstock believe that building wealth through real estate should be nothing short of radically simple. In the episode, Gary will discuss: The motivation for setting up Roofstock, The impact they are making in the real estate industry, The role of AI, ML and new technology within their platform, An insight into the current Data Science and engineering team, Why Roofstock is a great place to work and What the future holds for Roofstock

In this episode, Shashank talks to Gary Beasley, Co-founder and CEO of Roofstock, a $2B proptech company. Gary talks about building tech, creating an ecosystem, fund raising, and lessons on entrepreneurship. Welcome back to Shashank Redemption! Fan of the show? Leaving a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify is a great way to give back. Connect with Shashank on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/thisisshashank/ Learn more about Shashank by visiting ShashankRedemption.com

The yield curve has inverted, inflation is way up, interest rates are rising, the geopolitical environment is tense, the talking heads warn of hard times ahead. What are you doing to prepare? In today's episode, Emil and Michael share what they think about our current moment and what they are doing to prepare.   -- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Emil: Hey, everyone, welcome back for another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. My name is Emil Shour, and I am joined by…   Michael: Michael Albaum   Emil: …and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about what we're personally doing to prepare during these uncertain times. So let's hop into this episode.   What's up, Mike, are you are you on the road again?   Michael: I am on the road again, we accidentally rented out our bottom unit of our house hack, which is the one we live in. So we're like, well, let's just go on the road for a month and a half. So we're back in the van hanging out on the Central Coast and headed up to Oregon to hopefully get some spring skiing in.   Emil: I love how you use the word accidentally rented our place, like totally accident.   Michael: I mean, it was a total accident, total accident.   Emil: We just woke up one morning and our places rented and here we are.   Michael: I mean, that's kind of how it happened. Our upstairs tenant was like, hey, I want to stay longer and we said, oh, we will rent I mean, your units rented out 20 minutes after you leave not really that soon, but a couple hours after for cleaning and stuff and she goes well, what if, what if you just rented your space out to these new people? You think they would want it and so and my wife's pointing at me, she's like, it was my idea, Michael. So she was like, my wife, Claire suggested, why don't we rent out the bottom unit to these new people. I'm giving our upstairs tenant way too much credit and I FaceTime with new people and they're like, oh my god, that actually works out way better for us. Our daughter wanted to come with us. So having an extra bedroom or two would be fantastic. So we said okay, great. So we said we'll get out of town. Got back in the van and now we're on the road again. So we've got both units rented out now and they are cash flowing in California Bay Area, which everyone said was not possible to do.   Emil: Boom, baby there it is…   Michael: Yeah. What about you? What do you got going on?   Emil: I'm freshly shaven. I feel like I'm never freshly shaven on our podcast.   Michael: It's looking good.     Emil: Thanks, man. Very smooth. For our YouTube viewers and nothing just dropped my daughter off at preschool. So yeah, just mela morning for me.   Michael: Nice. Well, I'm super curious to get your insights into this episode.   Emil: Yeah, I feel like you and I are doing different things right now. But hopefully there's some overlap and I think it's I think it'd be fun to just see what you and I are, are doing as things are a little uncertain. Do you feel like that's the right term to use right now, just uncertain, hard to say where we're headed? What's going on? What could happen in the next six to 12 months?   Michael: Yeah, I think so. But I mean, in taking a step back and thinking about just like the economy at large and the past couple years, I feel like things are like always uncertain. No one predicted the pandemic, no one predicted that the pandemic would have this effect on real estate. So we turned back the clock, you know, 24 months, 28 months. People like oh, yes, things are certain, like, no, they weren't. You may have thought that they were but they totally weren't. So, like life happens and stuff happens. So I think that we're always kind of in uncertain times. But I feel like for sure, right now it's extra, extra uncertain.   Emil: Yeah, exactly and I think that's the right word to use, just because it couldn't be more like bullish, it could be good things come in for the next harm right? Or it could it could not be I mean, you know, we're in. It's about to be April 2022, interest rates are starting to tick up quickly. The stock market, it was on a heater for a long time, it's cooled down a lot, especially you look at Tech growth stocks that a lot of people were speculating and investing in. So it just feels like this weird time, like, what do you what do you do with your money because all these things are changing and happening?   Michael: Well, I think I think part of the uniqueness of the situation is and we just recorded an episode with Gary Beasley the Roofstock co-founder and CEO and John Burns, CEO of the John Burns company, and they were talking about how interest rates going up 10 to cool the economy. But we also have this lack of supply and massive demand that's continuing to force prices upward. So it's just this really unique, unique time.   Emil: Right. Not a lot of precedent to be like, oh…   Michael: A lot of things going on.   Emil: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So let's get into the meat. What are you, what are you personally doing right now and what are you doing over like, let's just call the next 12 months?   Michael: Yep. So right now I spent the last six months, because everyone's everyone talked about the Fed raising interest rate. I mean, this, this is not a surprise to many people for those folks who were paying attention and listening, so I knew this was coming and so I said, I gotta lock in as much long term, fixed debt as I possibly can and so I've spent the last six months, getting five refinances, five cash out refinances lined up on one's a 10 year fixed over 27 year and commercial loan, and then the others are actually all 30 year fixed commercial loans. So it's a pretty interesting product, I paid a little bit more for it, but I just locked in rates at four and a quarter, maybe 4.3%, for a 30 year fixed on multifamily commercial properties for 30 years and so, you know, who knows where rates are going to be in the next five or 10 years and so I didn't want to be in a position where I had to go refinance, or I had to go take on new debt at a much higher rate and so I said, I'll lock it in, I'm comfortable. Because over that 30 year time horizon, I'm sure that I'm going to look back and say, hey, four and a quarter is a killer rate.   So people might look at that and say, yeah, but you're probably going to refinance or take some cash out over the life of that loan and that might be the case, but I'm really planning on for these multifamily properties, setting it and forgetting it and so locking in that debt is a was a big, big lift that I've been working on and then on top of that, I'm actually 10-30 wanting a property in Southern California single family home, it's done really, really well via appreciation and so I said, let's take a couple chips off the table, lock in that equity and then I'm gonna turn 10-31 into a short term rental because I see that market has done super well during the pandemic, and even pre pandemic and I think that it's going to continue to do well. So I'm going to jump in with my second toe, I've dipped one toe into the water, and I like the space I'm dipping in my second toe. So I'm going to lock in lock in some, hopefully, a little bit more debt and again, long term fixed low interest rate before things tend to skyrocket.   Emil: Nice. What are you, Ifeel like you're more plugged in these days than I am. I feel like I've heard you know, interest rates, like three months ago for a rental property was like, low to mid threes and now it's I'm hearing like fives and sixes throwing being thrown out there. Is that what you're seeing too right now?   Michael: Yeah, that's also what I'm hearing. So private lenders and your nontraditional lenders, I would say, are definitely up in there with a five sixes even approaching seven. I've heard in some cases, if you go the conventional route, just your investment property, you know, you're still maybe in the high fours, low fives. But that's kind of easy, like low fives. So and that's a big change but granted, I was I posted about it on Twitter the other day, and someone's like, yeah, dude, but like, look at pre pandemic levels, we're right back to where we were previously, which is true and funny how quickly we all forget, we get so used to the twos, the threes, the low fours at kind of get hooked on that and then as soon as things go up, we'll be like, oh, crap, interest rates are insane and like they are compared to where they were. But if you look at you have take a bigger time horizon than that, I think.   Emil: Yeah. Well, the only difference is, prices are way higher than they were last time interest rates were in the fours and fives. So now you're looking at, you know, just a more expensive place. But on the positive side, we've also seen rent grow during that time as well.   Michael: Yes, but I think I'm curious to get your thoughts and no, but I think rent is a lagging indicator we've seen prices go up way faster than rent growth would you agree?   Emil: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel like homes in my area are like we bought this home three, four months ago and I feel like it's already five to 10%.   Michael: Your current primary?   Emil: Yeah, our current primary is probably five to 10%. If we sold it today, we'd get five to 10% more in four months, like, it's crazy how quickly things have gone up and rent doesn't go up that quickly and people's wages don't go up that quickly. But you're right, I think it's a lagging indicator and still seeing rent go up in a lot of places.   Michael: Yes. But you make such a good point that yes, while interest rates might be at the same level, they were previously pre pandemic prices are nowhere near where they were. I mean, a lot of markets are saying 15 to 20% year over year appreciation. So when you think about that, and compound that it's insane.   Emil: Yeah, yeah.   Michael: Well, so tell me and tell our listeners, you know, what are you doing to prepare, or to get ready during these uncertain times?   Emil: Yes, so I am, I'm being I'm a little more comfortable holding more cash than I normally would like usually, I'm at a level right now where I'd be like, really antsy to put that money to work somewhere. I'm just trying to be a little bit more patient and being okay with being in cash, you know, everyone's like, cash is trash right now, inflation is burning your money in a savings account or checking you can't right now and that couldn't be true. But it could also be that everyone's hearing that and going crazy and investing in things that I get to quickly have a clip. So I'm trying to, you know, not always follow the crowd and think for myself and holding on to a little bit more cash than I normally would is, is what I'm doing. In terms of real estate, I'm actually selling one of my single family properties, the one in Jacksonville, not because I think prices, I think you and I have talked, I think prices are going to stay flat, or maybe inch up a little bit. I don't think they're gonna keep going like they have been. I'm only selling that property just because of things you know, I've mentioned in the past just being spread across a lot of markets, families growing, I just feel like I have, I just want to simplify my life like I'm this is not an investment decision, this is a simplify my life a little bit decision just spread out into many markets. So those are the things I'm actively doing with my money, trying to simplify things and being holding a little more cash than I would normally be comfortable with.   Michael: Yeah, so two questions for you.   Emil: Yeah.   Michael: One, are you okay, accepting a negative 7% return on the cash that you're holding?   Emil: Yeah, I'm okay with that.   Michael: All right. And I mean, I love that like you're doing what other people aren't doing. I think it was Warren Buffett, who's like be greedy, when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy kind of a thing.   Emil: And it's not holding cash, the whole cash, it's holding cash to invest smart, right? There's a lot of just again, it's a lot of like people telling you, you got to put your money to work and what does that do? It creates this like anxiety and haste to just put your money somewhere, right? That's not cash, so I'm not saying I'm just holding on to cash, the whole cash, it's like, I'm just gonna try to be cool it down, have a little extra cash on the side. You know, again, uncertainty, right? People talking about maybe after we've been so hot for a while you maybe you have a little bit of a recession, just given all the things going on, you know, I run a business, good to have cash in case there's months where, you know, business isn't as good. So those are kind of the things I'm just weighing in my head and why I'm more comfortable holding on to some cash right now.   Michael: Yeah, it makes sense and I'm doing I'm doing something similar as well. Curious, Emil, you're talking about selling your Jacksonville property because it simplifies your life, it's not an investment decision. It's really more of an emotional one and we always talked about on the show how emotions should be void of the decision making process. So talk to me a little bit about, you know, why that makes sense for you and how you came to that conclusion and how you kind of blend in emotion decision making into your investment life?   Emil: So there's there is also some logic, I like to hope in my decision, right? It's…   Michael: No, no, it's totally illogical.   Emil: It's totally illogical. No, it's, I can see in the next, let's call it 5 to 10 years, new Age back, new water heater, maybe new roof. I don't like this property has cashflow very nicely. It's done very well, it's appreciated 50-60 grand more than when I bought it. I only you know, I've done a small cash out refi, so I only have like, I think like 15 grand of capital in the property left. So it's like, I'm going to take some chips off the table, while things are doing well, why not, right? There's a first property I bought. It was kind of turnkey when I bought it and it's been five, six years, just had some wear and tear. Maybe it's time for someone else to to get the upside, right, lLike I'm not like, ridiculous about my price, I'm trying to sell it at something that I think is fair and just let someone else kind of see the opportunity there and run with it. I've hit my investment end on this property, I think.   Michael: Yeah, love it. And are you going to 1031 into something else, are you just going to take the cash and hold on to it?   Emil: I'm going to just take the cash, it's not enough, I think where it makes sense, 10-31 you know, you're doing the California property which is probably if I had to guess hundreds of 1000s, this is like my capital gains on this is like, you know, after paying everything closing all that stuff, let's call it 50 maybe 60 grand. I don't I don't think that's enough to like you know, 10-31 you have to move quickly make a decision quickly. I'd rather all pay the tax man hold on to that cash and figure out what to do with it.   Michael: It's such a good like, I'm so glad we're having this conversation now because I think there are so many people listening who have been told you have 10-31 and you have 10-30 when you have 10-31 now you know never pay taxes, deferred taxes, swapped till you drop and here's a perfect example of someone you being like, no, like, I'll pay the taxes. That's an easier path for me and that just makes more sense for me right now, where I am in my investment journey and where I am in my life cycle to do that. So I think that that's awesome and I applaud you for doing it.   Emil: Thanks, man and I think you just have to look at you have to look at the actual, like, how much tax am I going to pay, right? Is that an amount, I'm okay with, right? Again, the more money you have on the line, like you're doing couple 100 grand that's gonna get taxed, that that is meaningful versus like 50 grand of capital gains. Yeah, not that crazy. Yeah, I'm okay paying tax on that.   Michael: Yep, no, I'm right there with you and then I mean, the other thing that people should be thinking about, and you should be too, is like, you have passive losses, I'm guessing from your other real estate activity. So if every property you own yield, you call it 3000 and passive losses. Well, this year, you that six grand for those two properties you're keeping, and so that six grand is gonna go likely offset your 50 grand in capital gains. So you might only be have a true capital gain of 44 grand, right? To talk to their CPA and tax professional about how they calculate their tax liability, but just be thinking about that too, like and talk to your CPA before making a decision one way or the other because it might be that you don't even have to 10-31 and you don't have to worry about the taxes.   Emil: Yeah, that's a really good point, right. If you have a passive losses, or maybe you have an expensive year, right, like maybe that year offsets those capital gains, and you're fine and then you don't need to like worry about the hassle of that 10-31, it wouldn't have mattered anyway.   Michael: Yeah or maybe you think about doing a massive rehab in the same year that you're going to be selling a property that you have some capital gains on like, there are ways to play this, this game of chess, so to speak, and do really well. Something else I wanted to ask you is have you ever thought about and calculated what your time spent on this property is costing you or rather is, is paying you because you're making cash flow every single month on this property, you're doing quite well, like you've said, but the amount of time that you spend thinking about it actually doing things related to the property, have you figured out how much you're paying yourself on an hourly basis?   Emil: No, no, I don't get that crazy with the numbers. I just know it's…   Michael: Woo, woowoo, crazy, crazy. Throwing words around here now.   Emil: Look, man, I got I got children, I don't have time to be spending in a spreadsheet all day calculating my down to the minute return on properties. No, I'm kidding but seriously, bo, I've never even thought to do that nor do you do that?   Michael: No, I don't. But I'm thinking about anyone listening who's in a similar situation and they're contemplating, hey, I've got this property, it's performing well, it's doing well for me. But it's just kind of taking up a lot of mental bandwidth. How do I calculate the ROI, so to speak, on on, on this property, like my time ROI and that's totally an exercise you could do if it if it pays you 300 bucks a month, and it takes you spend three hours in the property, that's 100 bucks an hour. Is that worth it, right and so I think, I think, again, I'm applauding you for making that decision of realizing like, hey, this is just not aligning with my life's goals right now and my life situation right now. So let me just get rid of this distraction, so that I can focus on other things because I think, again, too many of us are like, no, no, no, we can never sell we can never sell we can never sell because it's cash flowing! Well, well, no, you can if it makes sense.   Emil: And you know, you're talking about the time component. I think that's, that's an important factor. You know, when I was buying a lot of rental properties, a lot, I'll use quotes, buying rental properties. At the time that that was like my main side hustle, right? And now there are some areas where I see like, my active time could be more long term valuable to me, so like, that's kind of part of it as well. Do I focus on, so I keep doing rental properties, buying rental properties or do I focus on, you know, there's opportunities, other opportunities now that I have in front of me that didn't have a couple of years ago, when I was buying rental properties that I can focus on instead? That's kind of part of it as well.   Michael: Emil, you come on this show the remote real estate investor and talk about things other than real estate for shame? No, I think that's awesome, too and, you know, you and I have talked offline at length about that stuff and I think our listeners should be thinking about that for themselves too, like, yes, we are passionate about real estate. Yes, we think it's one of the greatest wealth creators out there but one of the greatest, like, you have also found some amazing niches for yourself, where you're active, active engagement, your active work is going to be paying you down the road and so it's a little bit different. It's, it's digital real estate we talked about and so I think everyone listening should figure out hey, what is the highest and best use of their time, and it might not be real estate and that's totally okay.   Emil: In my mind, it's like the active versus passive, right now if I can focus on something that's actively making me more that I can later also use in passive arenas like real estate, maybe it's more fruitful for me now to you focus on something that makes more active, and then grow that pot and then later use that bigger pot to go back and you know, buy things that require less time like real estate and things like that, that's kind of just the thoughts going on in my head all the time is this.   Michael: Yep. It makes no sense as opposed to trying to squeeze out as much as you can from the passive right now spending all your time there hope hoping that that grows over time and I think it makes total sense, right. I'm sure people are tired of hearing us blab on, should we get out of here?   Emil: Let's do it.   Alright, everyone, thanks for tuning in. Hope you got some value out of that and we will catch you on the next episode of investing. Happy investing   Michael: Happy investing.

John Burns co-authored Big Shifts Ahead: Demographic Clarity for Businesses, a book written to help make demographic trends easier to understand, quantify, and anticipate. Before founding John Burns Real Estate Consulting in 2001, John worked for 10 years at KPMG Peat Marwick—2 as a CPA and 8 in their Real Estate Consulting practice. John Burns founded the company to help business executives make informed housing industry investment decisions. The company's research subscribers receive the most accurate analysis possible to inform their macro investment decisions, the company's consulting clients receive specific property and portfolio investment advice designed to maximize profits. Gary Beasley is CEO and Co-Founder of Roofstock, the leading online marketplace for buying, selling and owning single-family rental investment homes. Recognized as a leader in the future of real estate, Roofstock was featured on Forbes' 2019 Fintech 50 list. Gary has spent most of his career building businesses in the real estate, hospitality and tech sectors. After earning his BA in economics from Northwestern, Gary ventured west to earn his MBA from Stanford, where he caught the entrepreneurial bug and still serves as a regular guest lecturer. Immediately before starting Roofstock, Gary led one of the largest single-family rental platforms in the U.S. through its IPO as co-CEO of Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust, now part of Colony Starwood Homes. In this episode, we discuss the current state of the real estate market and the economy more broadly. Gary and John share their thoughts on what has been happening year over year in the housing market; what 40-year highs of inflation, rising interest rates, and geopolitical unrest mean for real estate investors; and highlight some of the risks that investors are faced with today.    Episode Links: https://www.realestateconsulting.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/john-burns-real-estate-consulting/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-beasley-956647/ https://www.roofstock.com/ --- Transcript Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Michael: Hey, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Remote Real Estate Investor. I'm Michael Albaum and today with me I have two very heavy hitters in the real estate space. John Burns, CEO of John Burn's real estate consulting, and Gary Beasley, co-founder and CEO of Roofstock. So without further ado, let's jump into hearing their thoughts and opinions around what's been going on in today's real estate market.   John Burns and Gary Beasley so happy and excited to have you both back on the podcast. Thank you for taking the time to hang out with me today.   John: You bet.   Gary: Hey, Michael, great to see you.   Michael: So I of course, know a little bit about both of your backgrounds and who you are. But for those of our listeners that might not be familiar with who you both are, if you could give us a quick two minute, two second intro of who you are, where you come from, and what it is you're doing in real estate and John, if you want to go ahead and start, that'd be great.   John: Okay, I'm the CEO of John Burn's real estate consulting, I founded it back in 2001, to figure out what's going on the housing market for a lot of people, mostly big companies and that's what we do.   Michael: Love it and Gary?   Gary: Sure, I am Gary Beasley, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Roofstock and we've been at this for about six and a half years now. Building out really the complete ecosystem for single family rental investors and I've known John now, I think, John, since about when you started the company, it feels like we've known each other for a while we when we I think when we met we we both had dark hair. Remember that?   John: It's been a very long time.   Michael: That's great. Well, I wanted to chat with you both around a lot of things that I've been getting questions about, and I'm sure that the two of you have as well and that's just kind of what's been going on with the housing, market and economy over the last couple years since the pandemic started. So I would love to just jump into things get into the meat and potatoes and get both of your thoughts on really year over year, what's been going on at the macro level in the housing market.   John: Well, I guess I go first, if you let me go back maybe three years, so but pre the pandemic because I think it's relevant. The housing market was extremely hot. We have a different view than a lot of people on on how undersupplied the market was, we don't think it was I just applied at all actually until about 2019, then it started to be under supplied and with interest rates. So damn low everywhere in the world, people had figured out that single family rental housing was a great investment just to get some yield and we were seeing a lot of investors come in to the market, then COVID hit so you know investors are very volatile. They stopped for a few months, and then they came back very strong and probably the biggest difference in the last year is the fear of inflation has piled in on top of the need for yield and it's double the reason to invest in rental homes. So we're seeing money from all over the world focused on housing in America.   Gary: I would agree that clearly the residential market has been booming and I would say despite a number of factors that you would have thought might have slowed it down. We went through a global pandemic, and housing chugged right on through and we could talk later perhaps about why some of those things happen. But the reality is really kind of across price points and geographies. You've seen robust demand for housing and if you look at price increases year over year, John, I know you track the SFR space really closely and it kind of mirrors what's been going on even if you look at owner occupied sales, but home prices have been going up call it 15 plus percent, year over year, pretty consistently. That's a big number, when you think about historically, it's been about 4%. If you go back 40 years on a compounded basis. That's how it had been up until fairly recently.   So a lot of you know in rents have lagged that a bit but you've seen high single digit to low double digit rent increases as well in a lot of these markets and so in oftentimes, I feel rents are a little bit of a lagging metric because especially a lot of the mom and pop owners don't raise rents every year don't raise them, really even to market so we're seeing a lot of homes come to market today that have rents that are 10 or 20%, below where the markets are today. So, so you've got just a lot of demand for the product and, you know, we're at an interesting time now, and I'm sure we'll talk about, you know, some of the current dynamics in the market, interest rates have moved up quite a bit in the last, you know, month to six weeks, we've got a lot of interesting things going on geopolitically, we're not yet seeing that impact, demand or pricing. One would think that those factors should that have an impact over time. But for now, I think just the supply demand dynamics very, very much in the favor of demand over supply.   Michael: Okay. Interesting and I'm curious to get both of your opinions on this, I mean, we are at such a unique time, kind of in history and curious to know your guys's thoughts on do you think that real estate investing fundamentals have it all shifted because of where we find ourselves today? John, I'll let you go first on this one.   John: I don't know if the fundamentals have shifted, because I've seen this game before. But what is different is that by investing in rental homes has become a very easy thing to do, thanks to Roofstock and others. I mean, prior to 2012, you couldn't get on your computer and figure out exactly how much a home was worth and how much it could rent it for in about five minutes, you can now there's all sorts of vehicles where you can invest in funds and completely passively invest in housing and I think it's become an asset class that really was very illiquid, and pretty lumpy before that now has become more liquid and I think that is a permanent change in the market, doesn't mean things can't go down. But I think it's actually had a permanent positive increase permanently on home prices.   Gary: I would agree with John, I don't think the fundamentals, I don't think the fundamentals of real estate investing have changed. But I would say perhaps some of our maybe preconceptions or assumptions about how it would perform is I kind of mentioned earlier, or maybe a little bit challenged, and that there's just so much demand for the product and in the pandemic. You know, it was almost counterintuitive that home prices would go up and rents would go up. But when you think about the fact that people really demanded shelter, safe shelter, and there was an exodus of from a lot of the coastal cities to secondary and tertiary markets drove a lot of that demand. So but I think still, the fundamentals of real estate are very much about location and supply and demand. Those things, those fundamentals I think are true. I think one of the things we're seeing though is perhaps there are different things get that can drive, demand and pricing for different types of real estate assets. So if you look at for example, housing, and industrial, which have done quite well, throughout the throughout the pandemic and the aftermath, and then you had some real estate asset classes that really suffered, because you look at office and retail and and REIT in hotels, things like that. So it's it. I think real estate broadly can be influenced by different things. The fundamentals of each have to be examined, but certainly for housing. It's been it's been very strong, despite what might you might have considered some some headwinds.   Michael: Okay, interesting and you both touched on inflation in the conversation thus far and so I'm curious to know, how much of the demand do you think is being really driven by inflation? And do you think that folks are right or wrong to be considering real estate investing as a hedge or as a defense against inflation?   John: People's expenses are going up and your investments should beat inflation and nothing in the treasury market does it in fact, nothing in the high yield bond market pretty much does it now too, I don't know how you earn returns. But this was going on pre COVID and that's why I mean that there was a surge of money coming into the market pre COVID. We at our conference at the end of 2019, we had Bruce flat, the CEO of Brookfield asset management, who at the time manage more than $500 billion was fundraising all over the world and he literally said that this is the most significant thing he seen in the last 15 years, is everything that produces cash is gonna go up in value, and that was pre COVID and so that this this has just got even more accelerated because inflation wasn't even part of the equation. Now if you're now if you need to beat inflation in your return and inflation is right now the latest print is seven 8% where you're going to get seven or 8%? And so housing, if wages go up which they are, you can raise rents, if the cost of the structure going up is going up, which it definitely is, every single component in the house has gone up, their cost of construction has gone up at least 10% in the last year. That's an inflation hedge too, because nobody's gonna replicate what you own for the same amount of money. It's very much an inflation hedge.   Gary: Everything points toward continued inflation, in my view in the housing market. Now, that being said, interest rates going up, you would think should moderate that. That's an offsetting influence, but the cost of the inputs, the labor and the materials, clearly upward pressure, everything that's going on in the world, disrupting the global supply chain, and the cost of transport and all that putting upward pressure, Pete wage inflation to keep people in their seats, and to hire people. That's allowing people to have more and more money to spend on housing that's also pulling pricing up. It's hard to see how much that's going to, in an absolute basis reduce the price of housing, I do think that we will see some moderating of the rate of inflation of homes over the upcoming quarters and years, I think that 15% is gonna come down naturally. But I don't see, I don't see it coming down to the point where it actually reverses and you see absolute price declines, like we saw in that really unusual time in the Great Recession, which was, arguably a once in a generation adjustment to housing prices there. I think, a lot of fundamental differences between what we're seeing today and and what we saw back then this is not a credit bubble.   John: So I agree with everything you said until this is not a credit bubble. I mean, maybe you meant a credit bubble on housing, because I agree with you.   Gary: That's what I mean, I mean that there's a lot of embedded equity, as opposed to people, you know, having 3% or less equity in their homes, they've got 20 plus percent equity. Now, you can talk about the I wasn't speaking to the global kind of free money, credit bubble, but…   John: Well, that's a I think there's a credit bubble going on in the world on pretty much everything else. I mean, Dodd Frank, made it impossible to do it on a mortgage going through a bank. But people are lending against crypto, it's the highest borrowing and stock prices ever. We're seeing deals even in single family rental that well, I would say are being done with pretty much no due diligence, because it's a mess piece. So there's a little bit of equity in front of me and what I worry about is a recession caused by a credit bubble outside of the housing market, which impacts housing demand and you know, that's when housing was struggle, but I think everything else in the world would struggle at the same time, maybe even more, so. So I'm not, I'm not saying get into stocks or bonds, because it's just that, that that's what caused the great financial crisis, and it was housing last time. I think it's other stuff this time. We were seeing flip flipper loans are being securitized on Wall Street. I mean, there's, you know, I see that in my business, one of my clients is lending against crypto balances. You know, I think another famous person just came out and said, if you've got if you can put up crypto, I'll give you the value of your crypto to make a down payment for a house, that there's some different stuff going on. That concerns me but not on buying rental homes or Roofstock more concerning on the economy.   Michael: Okay and so curious, John, just, you know, personal thoughts. What's a good defense?   John: You know, normally it would be cash, but holding on to cash it goes down 7% in a year. So I think Howard Marks who's a famous investors calls this an everything bubble. We're in an everything bubble right now and how do you invest in an everything bubble? I have no idea. That's why I run it…   Gary: Maybe maybe negative interest rate German bonds don't seem so crazy.   Michael: Yeah.   John: Well, no, exactly. So, so if you're, if you know, in the coming world, losing 3% is probably a good deal relative to everybody else if that's if that's how that plays out.   Michael: All right, well, keep both you keeping your eyes and ears peeled and let me know if you hear something great for hedge against the everything bubble, I'd appreciate it.   John: Well, it's it's still specific. I mean, that that's what the smart people aren't doing. They're just, they aren't going to do just a sector. They're looking at everything carefully and in this industry, if you don't have a lot of competition going around where you're making investments, that's a far safer place to be if there's some great job growth in your conference. In a job growth because those employers are profitable and making money and going to be there all the time, that's a different story than the job growth being in a sector that's currently losing money, for example.   Michael: That makes total sense, that makes total sense. I'm curious if we could take a step back and understanding that neither of you work for the Federal Reserve, but I'm curious to know your thoughts and kind of get some insight into? I mean, you talked about the wage growth going up, and then the cost of goods and services going up? How do we not get into this upward death spiral? And I know, Gary, you mentioned, you know, raising interest rates could curtail that, but it seems like there's just so much money out there how to, how do we kind of ease down from this?   Gary: Yeah, well, I think there's it I don't know, if there's been a tougher, it's never easy being involved with setting Fed policy, but you have a lot of things to balance here. This is a tightrope act. So you want to slow the economy here, enough to curtail inflation, yet, not necessarily throw it into a big recession, you've got a lot of things going on overseas, that should you could argue are already going to cause things maybe to slow a bit because of what's going on over there. So do they need to pump the brakes as much here. So maybe that means that the Fed doesn't raise as aggressively here and what that may mean is, you know, rates grow a little bit more slowly and maybe the economy tends to overheat despite the global weakness. So it's a really, really challenging balancing act, I think that the Fed is under enormous pressure to curtail inflation and so I think, despite that, we'll probably err on the side of pumping the brakes a little bit heavier, even though that may mean we're risking recession. That would be I'd be curious, John, if you have a view. But if I had to, like on the continuum of what they're more worried about right now, normally, they're, you know, I would say that they've been historically more worried about not wanting to put us in the recession. But we've never, in a long time had these sort of inflationary pressures and in particular, where I think people feel it, it seems to be at the gas pump, right? We're always talking about fuel prices people feel that very deeply and there's a lot of political pressure, even though the feds, in theory, a political, political pressures tend to work their way into those decisions.   John: Yeah and my 30 plus years of paying attention to this, I've never seen the Fed more politically tied than they are right now. They frankly, they seem to me to be puppets of elected officials. I mean, the fact that Powell had to announce for months and months and months, they were going to raise rates, but never raised them once until he got reappointed will tell you something. So I mean, I always honestly think it seems to me like elected officials are calling the shots right now and I think the ultimate fear is a recession or we want to get inflation down, because inflation isn't good either and then, you know, the way I think about this, too, is there's, if you really talk about people's true costs, there's a huge variation in inflation. So if you're a homeowner who owns your car, you know, your your housing costs haven't gone up at all, maybe you got a little bit of a property tax reassessment, you haven't had to go back and purchase a car or release a car and if you are close to work or working from home, frankly, your cost of living might be down over the last year or two.   If you're somebody who's commuting to work, Rance had to you know, really your lease was up had to get another car. I mean, your cost of living can be up to 15 to 20% and the Fed seems to be focused on those people, rightly or wrongly. But that that's how I'm thinking about this is it's a huge difference in what's actually happening depending on what you are, and then the wage growth. You know, if you're in the hospitality sector, you haven't seen anything. But if you're a construction worker or a truck driver, your wages are up dramatically. So and those are the ones I that we're seeing that are buying homes, renting homes, people that are affluent, able to work from home, hey, I can I can now go out to the suburbs and rent a really nice house and my housing costs are gonna go down, not up because my boss says I only need to come into work twice a week. So it's it's very complicated story on picture painting here, but that's exactly I think how the Fed is looking at it.   Gary: Yeah. And then you also have, obviously those who own assets versus not I mean, this is similar to what John was talking about, but not only can you have the cost of living impacted a lot, a lot less if you own your assets. But in fact, John, you may know this figure I read it, I think last week, some fairly sizable percentage of the US population made more off of their homes this year than they did from their jobs. The power, the power in an inflationary environment of owning assets, it's kind of hard to overstate it. That I think one of the reasons, I think we're seeing more and more kind of first timers wanting to own their first investment property, even if they aren't in a position to own the home they're living in right now. Going to some of these lower price markets, and getting on the ownership bandwagon and just writing that asset appreciation. It's, you know, it's a powerful force.   Michael: Yeah, absolutely.   John: I think you were going to say, it's a powerful drug.   Gary: Well, some people do become addicted to it…   John: We're starting to see that. So people are taking the $200,000 in price appreciation of their house with a refi out of their investment, and then using it to buy three or four more homes, right, that that's what's going on right now. So it is it is addictive.   Michael: Yeah. That makes total sense.   Gary: Yeah. Well, it's been it's been a, a tried and true, a tried and true way for real estate investors to make money, right is to buy that first property, refinance it, take that money, buy more properties and build. But I think, John, to your point, what's happening is, a lot of people are doing that with their primary home equity to get started, as opposed to being more of the intentional investor who just started to do that, I think more and more people are doing it with, you know, equity in their homes, which I think in many ways makes a lot of sense from a diversification standpoint, rather than having so much of your wealth, personally tied up in a single property address, where you happen to live, where you're really subject to the vagaries of your local real estate market, local job market, all that kind of stuff, because that's where you tend to work to diversify into other markets and other assets, I think does make a lot of sense.   Michael: John, would you agree?   John: Yeah, no, diversification makes a lot of sense. I just, I also think it makes a lot of sense to watch how much leverage you've got and to make sure you've got the cash flow, you know, just in case something bad goes wrong. And I think people that are investing like that, and doing exactly what you're saying, are going to be great. But last time, what we saw was, people just were ignoring that and then you lose your job, and then you lose your tenant, and you're your host. So you got you got to be careful here and I think the more I'm a generalized a little bit here, but the more mature people that have seen this before doing that, and I'm sensing the younger people only think home prices only go up and I are more willing to take more risk than I would recommend.   Michael: John, kind of to that point. I'm curious to get both your guys' thoughts if someone is taking out equity their home, because interest rates are so low, and they've seen the value go through the roof and they're going to go buy investment properties. What's the harm? What's the risk there? I mean, and how does someone know if they are over leveraged? If their cash flow is covering their mortgage payments? I mean, if the value dips, nothing really changes for them from a payment standpoint. So how should people think be thinking about being over leveraged or how much risk is too much?   John: I mean, that's a very personal decision for folks. You know, confidence in your employment situation is probably the most important thing and depends on what you do.   Gary: Yeah, I think, Michael, I mean, to your point, as long as they think it is an important point, in a rental home portfolio. Yeah, even if prices drop of that home and you've got a fixed mortgage, your payments don't change, right and unless rents come down, which they traditionally have not, they tend to be more sticky in single family rentals than say in apartments. We followed a lot of that data over time. So you should be okay. Even if on paper, the value of your home, your rental home has gone down. But I think in the primary residence, which is where John I think was going is if you let's say you have you know, 60% equity in your home and you lever it up to 90 through various means, then all of a sudden, you may be at a point where if you lose your job, and you don't have the reserves, you may be in a little bit of a tougher spot because you don't have that home equity to tap, which historically has just been a really nice thing to have as as a safety net and so when that if that were to happen you might have to sell some of your other properties or you have your equity elsewhere and it's not like you can't necessarily get at it.   But I do think in times where you do have some uncertainty, some global uncertainty and some things like that, having some reserves, make sense, not being over levered, make sense, play the long game, I think that's one of the things that we talk to people a lot about is, this is not a, you know, get rich, quick fix and flip, you know, strategy when you're buying investment properties?   Michael: Are you serious?     Gary: So over the long run, Michael, you're going to do just fine. But you have to be patient. So no, but there's plenty of there's plenty of ways you could make bats to win quickly win or lose quickly. But that's generally not what people are doing with us and I think there's times when people are more risk on is a lot of confidence to maybe lever up and things like that, I think this is a time to be more a little bit more thoughtful about all about leverage ratios and so yes, you give up some levered return, potentially. But if you're in a, I would argue if you're in a place where home prices are going up at such an extraordinary rate, you don't need as much leverage to get a phenomenal return. Even if you're only 50% levered, and your home's going up seven or 8% a year, that asset level, you know, obviously, you're doing much better than that, and the return on equity level, so I would say just don't get greedy. It's a long game and you know, make sure you're, you're around to, you know, fight another day, in case there's any sort of corrections.   Michael: To play the end of the game.   John: I mean, that that's the perfect, that's how I see it, too, is cut the long game. And that's how everybody who's been doing this for decades will all tell you that that's exactly the way to play it. I am I am seeing and hearing and running into 20 somethings who aren't listening to Gary's advice and I have no idea if that's 1% of the market or 40. But they're out there and fortunately, they're not getting loans from banks that 90% LTV, at least that I can find, so that's, that's good.   Gary: I mean, Michael, you talk to a lot of people all the time, what is what is your assessment are people do you think people are thoughtful about this? Do you think that is? Do you agree with John, that people who might not have seen a down cycle might be overly optimistic or do you think that they're better informed?   Michael: Yeah, you know, I think it's really a mix of the two, I think that there are two big camps. One camp says this is going to go on forever and that tends to be the folks that haven't seen a recession before and then there's the folks that say, you know, we're it's got to come down at some point and so let's just kind of see what happens and those tend to be the more seasoned folks. So I'm curious, I'm curious to get your guys's thoughts on for those two camps and someone who's just trying to get started trying to get their foot in the door? How should they be thinking about that, is this something that they can kind of catch on the upswing or is do they really need to be a bit more timid and reserved and say things are maybe a little bit too hot right, now let me let me just take a seat on the sidelines and see how this all plays out?   John: So we've been calling this the high risk high reward the part of the cycle now for 13 months. So I would have told you 13 months ago to be cautious and the person who would have taken a lot of risk what I made far more money than the person who listened to me so but that's how these things play out at the end at the end of the cycle. When you take a lot of risk you should make a lot of reward right? But you know, you also need to know when to take some chips off the table you know, unless you believe we're never going to have a recession again which I don't believe that and then also what Gary said has been very true for single family rental rents. The rents have been very stable over time compared to apartments because there's basically been very little construction of rental homes forever and there's always been a ton of construction in apartments and that's when you get hurt killed is when you know three huge apartment complexes open up down the store down the street totally empty and have to lease up 500 units you're done that even though billed for rent is growing pretty significantly in Phoenix right now it's still a lot smaller level of supply than apartments. So this is a more stable investment than comparative some other rental classes for sure.   Gary: Yeah, it's it's really we like to say it's a lot easier to go up then sideways because if you could you go vertical with apartments and it takes a lot more land and it's typically much more difficult to add the single family rental supply and then over time, you also have more than one on exit on the on the rental homes because you could you could exit to a yield investor or ultimately, an owner occupant. So that's I think one of the things that I've always liked about single family rentals is you've got built in optionality. It's very rare in a real estate investment, to have two very distinct buyer sets on the back end, right. You have an office building, you're going to sell it to an office investor. Same with a hotel, they would, but so this is, you know, I think a unique aspect of single family rentals, which gives, you know, it kind of gives investors a bit of a of a hedge.   Michael: Yeah, that makes total sense. Curious, what do you tell investors who come to you and say, John, Gary, you know, I can't seem to break in, all my offers are getting outbid by all cash offers that are 10 to 15% above asking, I can't go that hi, how can I get my foot in the door? What should I be doing? What tactics should I be using?   John: I mean, I might be the wrong person to ask because my clients tend to be very large companies, and this is for their capital partners, this is less than 10%, or maybe of what they're investing in the spectrum of certainly less than 20%. So they may be all in in this industry. But it's it's not, what you're alluding to, is maybe somebody with 100% of their net worth or 80% of their net worth getting in. That's, I don't advise on that, I mean, people are building rental homes, with the appropriate amount of leverage in good locations. That's where we're coaching people to go, there's also people building rental homes, with a lot of leverage in tertiary locations, right, where there's a lot of other construction going on and that that would be to me a higher risk scenario. I think I think there's room for 100 unit rental community, brand new built in every city in America of size, because you can pull it there's 1000s of people that rent ratty old homes with lousy landlords, and there's a percentage of them that would really love to rent something new. Well, and what's your biggest fear is the tenant that said, they're going to sell the house you live in it, you're gonna have to move out? Well, you know, if you're in a rental community that's owned by a public REIT, they're not selling the house, you know that that fear is gone. They may charge you a little more, because it comes with better service and other things. But I think that's a tremendous long term opportunities to build rental homes.   Michael: Interesting perspective, Gary?   Gary: Yeah, well, I would say, people should do their research, and be patient, be opportunistic, but but not be afraid to act with conviction when they find things that make sense for them and so I think, what we find is, on Roofstock, a lot of times people will come and they will look at properties for months and months and months and talk to people and kind of develop their strategy and eventually, something is going to hit your radar, that's going to check most of the boxes and in this market when that happens, as long as you've done enough work to kind of know this, then be ready to act, you know, I wouldn't recommend somebody come and buy the first home they see because then you're not you just don't have enough data. But when you see where these things are trading and all that, and so that's why I say you know, be disciplined, but also act with conviction, when you find something that does work if you do want to get exposure.   Otherwise, you could sit back and just sort of watch things. But you can also wait a lot of times with stock market, also people want to buy on a dip and just wait, maybe there is a little bit of a correction and that could be a time for people to want to wade back in. The challenge with waiting for a dip is, as John pointed out, there just hasn't been even throughout COVID there's been no dip, it's just, you know, been up into the right and, and so, you know, I don't recommend people just, you just buy because of the momentum, right? You want to, again, you want to feel good about the markets you're buying in and the home that you're buying. But also, it's really hard to time a market. It's just it's almost impossible. So heard that that's why overtime, we recommend people not, you know, even if you're only in a position to buy a home now once but, you know, have a design to own a portfolio of them over time and buy them at different points in the cycle and over time you get that market exposure. It's just, it's hard to time your ins and outs perfectly.   Michael: Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Well, I'm curious now to get your guys' thoughts and opinions looking forward, which I know is always a dangerous thing to do, but I'm going to ask you both take out your crystal ball and in talking, John, you mentioned about new newly built homes built to rent communities and so I'm curious to hear your opinions around, if the housing starts that we're seeing, since COVID, are going to have an impact, you know, several years down the road 8-10, you know, 5-10, eight years down the road, kind of like we're seeing now, as a result from the 2008, lack of home starts.   John: Yeah, we've done more research on that than anybody else. There's a couple people with some very simple analysis that says we're short, about five to 6 million homes. I think we're short about 1,000,007, which is still a lot of homes and that's not the same shortage in Buffalo as it is in Dallas. So you know, this is we've got the numbers by market. But at a high level, if we're short, 1,000,007 homes, there's 1,000,007 homes that have brand new homes that have paid for our permit that haven't been finished yet. So we've got all of that under construction and it's taking about nine weeks longer to build a house for the best production builders in the country. So this is taking a very long time, so it's going to be at least a year before we satisfy that, because there will be some growth along the way, too. So I'm not what is different about this cycle is the lack of construction. But what I want to point out is there's this notion that the low level of supply just means that this is almost a sure thing and I think the most important thing for housing has always been job growth always, even rates can go up dramatically. But if everybody's got their job, okay, we're, you know, maybe prices will be flat for a while, but we'll be fine. It's when you see massive job losses that we cycle down hard.   So that's why I was I was bringing up earlier the whole credit cycle issues. You know, know, if we if we knew exactly how much debt every company had in every industry had and how much they could cover their cash flow, I think I'd have more certainty. Some analysis I've seen is there's quite a few publicly traded companies that aren't currently generating enough cash to pay their debt service. That makes me concern they're not in the housing industry. In fact, the homebuilders have never been better capitalized like, they're amazing. They have the lowest debt levels ever and the bonds that oh, yeah, and the bonds they borrowed, they don't mature for like four or five or six years. So I mean, the homebuilt talk about a safe play, in terms of going through the cycle, I think it's the builders. I'm not recommending stocks, because I don't do that for a living, because I think all of this is priced in. But I'm telling you, publicly traded home builders are very, very strong, right now.   Gary: Yeah. You know, it's interesting, because John does such good research. So I have no reason to doubt the million seven. But I have seen, you know, estimates between four and 6 million homes deficit in in. So I don't know what the right number is and I'm sure that the method, there's methodologies that but but it's still, it's a couple of at least a couple million homes. The question is what, you know, what does that mean, going forward? Do we catch up as quickly? Can we catch up in a year or two?   That's, I think, optimistic. I think it'll be interesting to see if we do. One of the things that John mentioned was job growth, and that historically has been a real driver. What I think is so interesting now is jobs are so distributed and because companies are adding jobs doesn't mean the jobs are going to be where the companies are located and that kind of makes everyone's head explode. If you're trying to forecast, what's the impact of job growth, it really comes down, arguably, more to population growth. So local jobs are one thing and some things have to be localized, right? If you're going to work at a hotel, the hotel is in a particular place, if you're going to be a software engineer, working for Apple, you know, maybe you could be anywhere or any of these other places and so it's a it's a different calculus than I think it was 10 years ago of treatment, trying to forecast job growth from companies and then okay, well, people are going to need to live within a 30 minute commute or 45 minute commute it that's all upside down. So I think it does bode well for some of these secondary and tertiary places that have seen disproportionate growth. But then you also have these places like in Austin that continue to explode and arguably housings no longer very affordable but they keep building more houses and people keep buying them and keep renting them and there's plenty of land in a place like Austin and so I think almost looking at where taxes are low, and people can still get relatively affordable housing almost seems to be more powerful than local job growth. But I'd be curious about, you know, John's view of that.     John: No, he's right. There's a there's a large sector of the economy where you can live wherever you want and I mean, we, we've been doing this since before COVID, as I was never, never believed that all the best people to hire on the world, we're always within commuting distance in my office. So we've been hiring in good locations, and but you got to get the right person who can do that and companies have figured that out now. So your it is about a great location, it is about where I can get a lot of house for my money if I'm a tenant, or if I'm a homebuyer or I can pay lower income taxes, or I can have better weather. So it's really the same place as people were moving pre COVID. It's just more people have been given the permission to move. So you're right, the job growth. It's pretty correlated to the metro area. But I would say the more outlying areas should see more price appreciation, and they are seeing more price appreciation right now, because more people are being allowed to go there.   Michael: Okay.   Gary: Yeah and it's almost interesting. It's a little bit like the job, the jobs are almost coming with the people. So you think of a place like Boise, Idaho, where people move there not for jobs, necessarily, but because they could bring their jobs with them and they all had all this embedded equity in their homes for more expensive markets. So now you have all these people moving into a market like Boise, and you get incredible growth in the prices of homes in Boise. But now people are working from Boise. So are those jobs created in Boise are there jobs that now exist in Boise because it was inexpensive, and it's a nice place to live?   Michael: Yeah, I was gonna ask John, does that make it kind of squirrely to nail down that job growth metric because of this new phenomenon?   John: Yes and no, so there's two jobs surveys, there's one where they call the employer and said, how many people did you hire this month? That's based on where the employer is located. But the one where they call people and say, are you looking for work or not, that comes up with the unemployment number, that's where you live. So actually, we always triangulate the two. So I'll use my example. So we perfect example, I'm in Orange County, California, we hired somebody in Boise, but she could live anywhere. She's showing up on my here in Orange County on one survey, and she's showing up in Boise and the other, so you just you need to look at both the sample size on where the company's located is higher and better and the unemployment number at the Metro levels more volatile. So you got to look at a trend over time and not just overreact to a month or two.   Michael: That's super interesting. Okay, and great to know, too. So, the last question I have for you both, and I think I already know the answer. But for everyone listening, I'm gonna ask on their behalf and your guys' opinions, have there been asset classes that have become more valuable and less valuable as a result of the pandemic and if so, what, in your opinion, are they?   John: You can handle crypto, Gary. I am not going to touch that one.   Gary: Why don't you start then?   John: As I as I said earlier, I think new technology which was not around prior to 2012, has allowed the single family rental business to just blossom permanently And it's, it's now gonna be a permanent part of people's portfolio passively investing in real estate And that has already pushed up prices more than it would have been going forward. Whatever price appreciation would have been otherwise, it'll probably push it up a little bit more. The only thing you have to concern to certain yourself where there is, you know, the government doesn't like that And they tend to be pro homeownership. So you gotta watch regulation. I am seeing a lot of our clients tend to avoid California because they're afraid of rent control. So and there was just a Bloomberg article that 12 Different states have had rent control proposed because of all of this. So you just got to keep your antenna up on on that side. But the rent control is being proposed seems to be more reasonable. It's at the rate of inflation or maybe 1% higher than that, that you can raise rents. It's not, you know, zero or something ridiculous.   Michael: Okay and what in your opinion has been devalued or become less valuable, if anything?   John: Um, I can't think of anything that's become a …Cash!   Gary: It's it makes sense, right? I mean, you're you're losing. I mean, John, John mentioned, if you're literally if you have money sitting in your checking account, right now it's point 001% and we've got 678 percent inflation, that's how much you're losing by sitting in cash and so that does create a risk incentive to put it somewhere. And you know, I would say, Michael, I mentioned this earlier, but I think housing and industrial, which is driven a lot by distribution for E commerce, a lot of those have been really darlings of, of, for investors, they've become very much in favor and I do think you're still seeing some challenges with in some questions about office space demand and you know, not that there aren't always office investors, and there are always going to be people in offices, but there's probably structurally some percentage of less space that companies are going to utilize and so that puts maybe some uncertainty into the minds of investors, if there's another I think, I think a lens people investors are looking at today is okay, there's going to be another pandemic someday, what are the likely implications of this and, you know, office, retail, traditional retail was hurt by the pandemic, but it was also being crushed just by Amazon, right, and so you, so that's, I think, got its own challenges. And then hospitalities is very cyclical anyway, if people stopped traveling, you know, they didn't travel for a while.   So those those I think are, you know, maybe a little slightly more challenged than housing, which is, which has proven to be much more resilient than, than I think most people thought and, as a consequence, you have a lot of a lot of investors, not just, you know, traditional or not just individual investors or institutions from here. But yet people from all over the world saying, well, US housing looks pretty interesting, relative to other places that they could invest.   Michael: Yeah.   John: There's something we take for granted here called Title laws that don't exist in other countries. I mean, people in other countries don't want to buy real estate there, because the government could take it away from them. You know, and I hear that from foreign investors. That's one of the things that they love about investing in America.   Michael: Pretty scary notion if you had to be overseas   John: …Or get I should have mentioned everything that Gary said to I mean, there's a lot of huge funds, pension funds, who like to put a percentage of their assets a 10% in real estate all the time, and it would traditionally go into retail and office and hotel. Do you think they're ever going to go back to the same percentage of retail hotel and office? Probably not, it's going to be far more in this business. Because retail is now industrial. I mean, it's a warehouse and in line, you know, the best retail centers are all going to be fine in the best locations, but they're in line space is dead. So, so you're right, that's gonna push more money into our business.   Michael: Okay, well, guys, this was super informative. I know I had a lot of fun. Hopefully our listeners did, too. If people want to learn a little bit more about each of you, where's the best place for them to do that?   John: Oh, we've got a website https://www.realestateconsulting.com/ I post pretty regularly on LinkedIn. So you can look up John Burns on LinkedIn and get some free stuff every day.   Gary: I love the free hoodie that you got right there, Michael. John, I know you've got a Roofstock hoodie as well. I don't know if you ever wear it.   John: I do, I should have bought it today, I'm sorry about that I should.       Gary: So yeah, I think I would just encourage people, if they want to learn more about what we're doing at Roofstock just come to https://www.roofstock.com/ you could also follow me or hit me up on LinkedIn, I post pretty regularly there as well. But yeah, and keep checking out the podcast I know Michael's been doing a great job along with Pierre and the rest of the team here trying to get they couldn't get any interesting guests this this time so they got John and me but I know they've been otherwise doing getting some pretty interesting folks and doing a great job.   John: Well I saw that you're then the one of the top 1% of podcasters in the world. Hopefully we didn't push it down to 2%.   Michael: A filler episode though this this was great you guys. Thank you so much for taking the time and I very much looking forward to chatting again as we continue along this crazy trajectory that we're on.   Alright, everyone that was our episode, a big thank you to John and Gary for taking the time out of their extremely busy schedules to hang out with me and chat about what's been going on in the real estate market and where we might be headed going forward. As always, if you liked the episode, feel free to leave us a rating or review wherever it is you get your podcast, and we look forward to seeing on the next one. Happy investing…

Real estate is the largest asset class in the world, so it's surprising that this industry has been slow to change, but this is not the case anymore. The proptech industry is on fire. According to the Wall Street Journal, last year over $9.5B was invested into the proptech industry from VC firms and other investors. It's proof that there is a tremendous amount of disruption happening in this sector through the use of technology to solve an incredible amount of business challenges and improving operational efficiencies. After building a very successful career in the real estate and tech industry, Gary saw an opportunity to build on his knowledge to launch Roofstock, the leading end-to-end online platform for single family rental investing. Its marketplace makes the process of investing in single-family properties accessible, cost-effective, and just simple. The company just announced a $240M Series E funding at a $1.94B valuation. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * A discussion about the proptech market and what's going on within this industry. * A walk through Gary's background and all the great companies that he's been involved throughout his career. * All the details on Roofstock in terms of how the marketplace works and growth plans ahead. * Three real estate markets that Gary is the most bullish on. * Gary's point of view on the current state of real estate market and how economic factors play into the overall puzzle. * And so much more. If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.

How do you get started in real estate investing outside of your local area? Are you struggling to get started in a different state? Trying to figure out how to find properties outside the area in which you live? Today, Clint Coons of Anderson Business Advisors talks to Gary Beasley, Co-founder and CEO of Roofstock, a leading real estate investment marketplace. Gary explains how to start investing in real estate that is not in your local area, but in markets where you get higher cap rates and properties without having to put in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Gary has spent most of his career building businesses in the real estate, hospitality, and technology sectors. Before starting Roofstock, Gary led one of the largest single-family rental platforms in the United States through its IPO as Co-CEO of Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust, now part of Invitation Homes. Highlights/Topics: Numbers Game: Sizable portfolio with multiple properties for multiple cash flow streams Roofstock: Unlocks asset class for investors to break down geographic barriers Result: Real estate investors buy homes with tenants to create efficient marketplace Differences between Roofstock, Redfin, and Zillow when it comes to property research Risk-Reward: What returns will be generated and what risks are you willing to take? Where to get properties? Organically, customer acquisition, PR, educational content Rent Ledger: Access data in the system and view tenant payment history Best of Both Worlds: Opportunity to buy it now and all returns are based on that price Roofstock Academy: Sign up and get proprietary access to experts who help you Different Sellers, Motivations. Some want to sell quickly, and some are more patient Resources Gary Beasley on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-beasley-956647 Roofstock https://www.roofstock.com/ Roofstock Academy https://www.roofstockacademy.com/courses The Remote Real Estate Investor https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-remote-real-estate-investor/id1502473360 Great Jones https://www.greatjones.co/ Salesforce https://www.salesforce.com/ Clint Coons https://andersonadvisors.com/clint-coons/ Anderson Advisors https://andersonadvisors.com/ Anderson Advisors on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCX5nh607M8hSBLiMB9MgbIQ  

Over the past year, Roofstock has acquired Stessa, an asset management platform made for real estate investors by real estate investors, and Great Jones a Property management company specifically suited to serve remote real estate investors. This helps make Roofstock a one-stop-shop for remote investors. In this episode we have the cofounders of all three of these companies on to explain the companies, why they joined forces with Roofstock, and their pearls of wisdom for investing and entrepreneurship. --- Transcript   Before we jump into the episode, here's a quick disclaimer about our content. The Remote Real Estate Investor podcast is for informational purposes only, and is not intended as investment advice. The views, opinions and strategies of both the hosts and the guests are their own and should not be considered as guidance from Roofstock. Make sure to always run your own numbers, make your own independent decisions and seek investment advice from licensed professionals.   Tom: Greetings, and welcome to The Remote Real Estate Investor. We have a really fun episode today Michael and I are going to be interviewing the co founders of all the different companies that make up the Rootstock ecosystem. So if you're not aware, over the past six to 12 months, rootstock has acquired an asset management platform called Stessa. A really cool software to manage all of your properties that an asset management layer, as well as a property management company called Great Jones. And altogether it's a it's a really powerful stack of real estate technology tools and operations for investors to have and we brought on the founders from all of these different companies.   So we have Gary Beasley from Roofstock, who was a co founder. We have the two co founders from Stessa in Heath Silverman and Jonah Schwartz. And we have two co founders from great Jones and Jay Goldklang, as well as Abigail Besdin. And we ask them about their company, the fit within the roofstock ecosystem, some pearls of wisdom on investing on starting companies, all of that good stuff. So really excited about the episode we have today. And let's get into it.   Michael: All right, everyone. Well, thank you for taking the time out of your very, very, very busy schedule. We've got a lot of heavy hitters on the line here. So I would love if you could all introduce yourselves to our listeners. One by one. Gary, you want to kick things off? We'll start with you.   Gary: Sure. Great to be here. I'm Gary Beasley. I'm the co founder and CEO of Roofstock.   Michael: Fantastic. And Abigail.   Abigail: Hi, I'm Abigail Besdin. And I am a co founder of Great Jones.   Michael: Perfect Jay.   Jay: Hi, I'm Jay Goldklang, founder and CEO of Great Jones now a Roofstock company.   Michael: And Heath.   Heath: Hey, I'm Heath Silverman, co-founder of Stessa.   Michael: And last but certainly not least, Jonah.   Jonah: Yeah, I'm Jonah Schwartz, co-founder of Stessa,   Michael: And we've got Tom Schneider on the line as well.   So I would love if you all could share, why Roofstock, Stessa, Great Jones decided to join forces. What was the impetus behind that?   Gary: When we first started Roofstock we knew not only did we want to have a marketplace for transactions, but we wanted to build deeper relationships with owners and build a community. And to do that, we knew that we needed to be relevant to all property owners who own single family rentals, not just those who are looking to trade at any given time. And so from the very early days, we were trying to figure out how to do that. And I met Heath and Jonah was 2017. Yeah, 2017. And we just hit it off right away. And I said, Wow, these guys are building something really cool that it could provide software for every single family rental owner out there. And like a Credit Karma app for real estate owners, it'd be a great way to stitch together community get a lot of data and and invite people into the marketplace at the right time.   So we had a marketplace and no community they had this great community they were building through the software. And so when I knew that it would be quite interesting to try to bring the companies together. Unfortunately, they decided to sell their company to JLL and not to us, JLL at the time was a little bit larger than Roofstock still is. But we'll talk about later life comes full circle very recently we were able to buy the business from gll and bring them into the Rootstock family and so that's worked out really well.   And then with with Jay and Abigail we also knew that we needed to have a relevant connectivity to retail owners and offer property management because that's the biggest pain point for owners is to be able to outsource a lot of those challenging tasks to professionals and and so we've been tracking Jay Abigail and Great Jones for a long time. There was an opportunity this year to get together get to know each other more recently and that was sort of the one missing piece of our fully integrated platform was retail property management. We have institutional grade property management through Streetlane, which was the first company that we purchased a couple of years ago and now with Great Jones and with Stessa we've all kind of come into the the ecosystem together one big happy family under the Rootstock umbrella.   And now we're in the process of integrating the businesses and, and, and growing. So. So why don't we turn it over to maybe Heath or Jonah, maybe you go first and then Jay, Abigail, you could you could chat about how, how this all has worked for you guys.   Heath: Yeah, I mean, I don't know if I have anything additional to add other than I still remember those drinks we had back in 2017, where we got introduced and started sort of as a more casual conversation about what we were doing and turned into a couple hours of just diving deep into both of our businesses. And I think it was just very refreshing and super exciting to meet somebody who had, you know, the same big vision, you know, of how do we bring transparency and accessibility to this asset class, that traditionally was just one that, you know, was hard for a lot of people to get into, and just didn't have great technology to help power investors out there. So, yeah, fantastic, it came full circle, we're super excited to be part of rootstock. And yeah, excited to see what we're gonna do together.   Jay: I think Heath and I, and also Gary and I have talked about how similar some of the visions are, that we've articulated, maybe the starting points have been a little bit different, because there's a lot to do. But sort of, I think each of us are organically as heard from, you know, the owners we work with, and to some extent, the residents that we work with, how many different moments they they'd like to, you know, have our partnership or, or, you know, partnership with like minded folks to think about using technology or operations to sort of remove friction and let them focus on on what they enjoy doing best. And I would say, you know, really, for the last 12 to 18 months, we've felt even more pull to help our customers, you know, buy more assets, dispose of assets, make good decisions. And so, you know, when, when there came an opportunity to come together, you know, not just in a partnership, but but but more than that with Roofstock. And also with the Stessa. Folks, it's been really exciting to get to work together, you know, to take take on the world, but with a with a shared vision.   Jonah: Yeah, we hear that from a lot of our customers as well, that they're, you know, what, what they get from stessa is great, but they'd love for us to do more, they want sort of that one stop shop, full stack solution to a lot of these problems, including transaction, including property management. So, you know, fitting together and putting out one solution for our customer base, or shared customer base makes a lot of sense.   Tom: I think what's so neat about these three companies is just solving, you know, three very different problems, from transactions to ownership to asset management. I think a lot of times as a startup, you know, you can have really big eyes and be like, Oh, you know, we want to do all of this, and it works really wonderfully. When it's able to come together. All together, I'd love to hear kind of the evolution that you guys had kind of originally, you know, was it always kind of to build out this full stack on your own? Or was it you know, more niche, I'd love to hear just kind of the evolution of your thought of the strategy of the business. And you know how that unfolded into where we're at today, which I think is a really nice platform, I'll say.   Abigail: I could take the great John's piece there. But it sounds like we're all describing a different starting point that very quickly led to this broader vision. Because ultimately, that's what we all learned pretty quickly, the customer wanted a no friction, one stop shop for the full puzzle. And on the great john side, you know, we started, we exclusively were serving what we call the retail customer, the mom and pop investor. And we had started to describe ourselves as institutional grade PM, institutional grade property management, which meant a whole host of things around the type of service that you deliver, and what you actually do as the property manager.   But it became clear that to really be institutional grade, you had to give the retail investor access to all the things that institutions have access to, which is really a full stack solution to investing. And so we I mean, I think Jay can correct me, but I think within a matter of months of the business existing had articulated that it's actually a platform vision that property management is this wedge into this much larger space. And it It took us quickly to realize that and then that's a drum that we beat throughout the duration of the business, and continue to hear and in talking to both Gary and Heath and Jonah, it feels like everybody had the same path. It was just a different what is the wedge, but the thesis is the same.   Heath: Yeah, 100% are our wedge, we always believe that financials were sort of the foundation of every real estate investors business. So by starting with the financials, we could become the system of record, we have all this data around the performance of their properties of their portfolio. And with that information, we can start providing you know, insights to help them maximize the value of the portfolio. You know, automate a lot of the you know, by automating the financials, we can save them a lot of time, help them make more money and doing so It would basically get us into a place where we could then long term become that platform. But of course, now that we have Roofstock and Great Jones, we've we've definitely accelerated that vision and are able to move a lot faster.   Jonah: Another thing that we hear from Stessa users is that by using Stessa, it gives them the confidence to expand their portfolio and obviously Roofstock and the Roofstock marketplace is there when our customers are ready to expand.   Gary: Yeah, I think bringing these companies together was a really natural thing. And we could talk about why I think it's working. It's still early, but it's working quite well, relative to I think a lot of business combinations. And I think what you're hearing is a lot of commonality of vision. And as Abigail, I think, probably like aptly, we put, we all just started from a different place, but we're kind of going in the same direction.   And so So for us, I think it just says accelerated kind of the growth and the amount of time it would take, rather than having to build all these things ourselves. By bringing them all together, we could just do it much more quickly. And and that's I think what we're seeing and then by getting the businesses together, then in addition to it's not just a one plus one plus one equals three, there are synergies, and we should each be able to grow our businesses faster and more efficiently. Because we're sharing data, we're sharing talent across the organization.   And there's a reason most mergers fail. And a lot of that is cultural. We have been very, you know, careful as we evaluate any of the transactions that we've done, it's got to be the right cultural fit. And this these clearly have been an honor. And I think one of the reasons that we've we actually ended up doing both of these deals was the people probably the primary reason they both had good tech and good businesses, but being able to attract all the the talent, the energy and the knowledge of the founding teams and their their core leaders around them really, really powerful. It's it's just hard to find that out in the market. So. So there's lots of reasons I think we're seeing early returns being very promising for this.   Abigail: I think that we all started a different entry points, and not randomly, but because those entry points were our strengths. So I see Stessa has like having firsthand financial issues with their portfolios, like really understanding that space very well, coming at it from like a real software sophistication, Jay and I and the team that we've built both come from really heavy hitter operators, you know, operationalizing messy businesses with technology. And then you had Roofstock with really deep real estate expertise, having done more at scale in the transaction space than probably any any other team combined. So it's not that we all just had the shared vision and happen to be coming at it differently, you have these really deep strengths that we're all playing to. And when those come together, I think that's part of the one plus one equals three that Gary's referring to.   Tom: Perfect segue into the next question, Abigail. So we've been talking about this kind of platform of the different layers of asset management, property management transactions, I'd love to hear the different founders talk about what is the special sauce within their layer of the transaction? Maybe technology, technology wise, you can explore the face the space of the question, but what would you say is some of the competitive advantages within that vertical of the company that you've started that has come together to form this this platform? I'd love to hear your guys's thoughts on, you know, what makes your segment that much better than other options out there.   Jay: On the Great Jones side, I think what we saw was, you know, a number of different areas of inspiration, I think, as Abigail mentioned, a lot of our sort of founding team. And I think at the core of what a lot of what we do is, you know, how do you take hard kind of online offline problems, maybe where there hasn't been a tremendous focus on sometimes efficiency or the Cust customer experience and build something better? That's sort of enabled by by technology and maybe enables, you know, higher growth and higher levels of quality?   So, you know, what does that mean, with respect to property management, I think the experience that investors have often had is that it can be run as a local service business. And as with many of those cases, there will be a really wide distribution where some people will be excellent, some some teams won't be. There's not a tremendous amount of consistency, facilitated facilitated by technology. It's heavily reliant on the people.   And I think what we found, you know, both them in prior experiences and that Great Jones is by I think the core, the core of what we're doing is thinking about What are the outcomes we want to deliver at the end of the day that creates, you know, a great customer experience and really solid returns? How do we think about instrumenting processes that haven't been instrumented previously? And what that allows? And how do we build great, you know, really nice interfaces for, you know, our own team members, owners, residents, vendors, anyone who needs to engage to create that great outcome.   And what we find that that then leads to, is a much more consistent and controllable level of performance, where we, where our team has much more transparency into how can we drive those returns? How can we drive that quality. And because we've instrumented things beyond captured, that data that maybe historically wasn't structured or captured, we can create much more visibility for an owner or a resident on the status of something.   And so an example would be, you know, doing a property turnover, where it sort of, if you if you know, from move out to kind of rent ready, that there are, there's a bunch that needs to happen in terms of doing a full inspection, considering the different paths to remediate or improve anything, coordinating the work of many different vendors, managing timelines, managing costs, you know, giving an owner the appropriate level of choice. And so we've built things like workflow tools for our own team, external interfaces, owner approvals flows, to really make that more of ultimately, almost like an e commerce and messaging experience for the owner. And that's what we think people have been accustomed to, you know, in other experiences, and enables the owner maybe to to Jonah's point to feel more comfortable growing their portfolio doing so across a number of markets, because they know, you know, the quality outcomes that can come with that.   And so, when we've done that being one example, but I think we consider a lot of the core of what we've done to think about, you know, how do we infuse maybe more consumer tech into a space that that hasn't necessarily had that to create a more, a higher performing, maybe more digital, more consistent experience?   Tom: That's awesome. transparency, control, all of that good stuff. I love it, Jay. Gary, do you want to want to speak next?   Gary: Sure. You know, one thing that I neglected to talk about at the beginning, and I know you wanted us to talk a little bit about our real estate investing experience. And I guess what, what it brought to mind that I was sort of thinking about this, which I think is sort of relevant to what we're all doing is, I started really, at very large scale on the institutional side buying 1000s and 1000s of homes during the last financial crisis, and really, kind of cut my teeth figuring out how to build institutional grade tools that would be used by institutions. And I think what we're doing here together now is taking a lot of those learnings that that I and my co founders, Gregor and Rich, kind of, were deeply embedded in institutional scale. And I don't want to say dumbing them down at all, because that's that it sounds derogatory. Simplifying them, and, and having a lot of that same power that we developed, you know, for institutions, and putting in the hands of, of retail investors. And, and, which is, by the way, where 98% of the home set.   So when we think about the addressable opportunity, as a platform catering to real estate investors, it just gets me so excited that we can take all those learnings and apply them now through these different business models at real scale to to retail investors, which as well as institutional investors. And I think one of the other I think, I guess, learnings or I would say, observations that might be counterintuitive, as people are out there thinking about building their own businesses, and how it might relate, you know, to what they're doing in their own lives.   But we took a little bit of a different path to building Roofstock, where oftentimes people will say, you got to pick the retail segment, or you got to pick the institutional segment, and then focus ruthlessly on that single customer, and don't try to boil the ocean. Well, we did try to boil the ocean in that we, we took a contrarian view and said, there's, you know, 90 million homes out there about, you know, 17 million of them or so are rentals. But that rental home doesn't know whether it's an institutional home or a retail home, it's a home. So we need to understand the whole market.   And by catering to both types of customers. We get data from all of them. And the market is the market. It could be an institutional buyer, retail buyer could be any of that. So So I guess I would just encourage people as they're thinking about that. Their own entrepreneurial journeys don't necessarily always listen to conventional wisdom. Because we didn't, we came at it differently, perhaps more ambitious than we then might have been wise coming out of the gate, but we felt like it was the right strategy has turned out to be, it's a work. And so you know, a lot of it comes down to execution. And being able to prioritize and ruthlessly prioritize when you're trying to do a lot of ambitious things, you have to figure out which is the most important which are the most important and focus on them.   And then also know when to pivot and when to stick to your strategy. That's just kind of another thing is for entrepreneurs out there. And that would be one of the things maybe that's interesting for everyone else on the call is that we've all had times where we've had to pivot our strategy. And that's one of the hardest things as an entrepreneur, you have to have conviction around what you're doing, until you decide you need to do something differently. And I'd be curious if there if any of you, my or my colleagues here had any, any observations around that, but that is something that as entrepreneurs and as real estate investors, you You are always trying to figure out well shoot, do I need to change my strategy here? Or do I need to stick to my stated goals?   Abigail: We had something similar where a great John's we I mean, almost identical, we were serving the retail customer exclusively. And we had the opportunity to serve an institutional customer, which was so different and clearly frightening because you have your your heart envision set around a certain customer experience but but took the leap and did it and we too ended up finding not just that it works, but that it it benefited both customer segments. So the the wisdom of have a single customer segment we too maybe walked away from, and both customer segments benefited in a way that I think, paid off the courage of that paid off. I had definitely received the advice early in my career, less about Greg Jones and more in previous contests to get great at murdering my darlings, which I believe is a literary phrase around being willing to like, you know, move away from a plotline, if it's, you know, not serving the momentum of the book or whatever piece that you're writing and definitely sticks with me. It's it sounds ruthless, but I think it ultimately pays off ends up being the bolder decision.   Gary: And you thought all that stuff that you learned when you were a writer was not going to be beneficial in your entrepreneurial career.   Abigail: Exactly. Here I am.   Heath: I'll add, you know, with Stessa we actually pivoted pretty early on. So the first customers that we targeted were really mid market investors. So people with, I don't know, 50 to 100 million in assets under management who we go after and provide full service bookkeeping to. And that's kind of how we got started offering and create financial solution. But we quickly learned that the really massive market, as Gary was saying, is really this, you know, retail investor out there. So shortly, I don't know, what was it Jonah, was like a year and a half after, after we started signing up customers paying customers, we basically made a big decision, hey, we're gonna go off to this much bigger market much harder to reach. You know, these are investors who are very hard to identify, often not willing to pay upfront. So with a free self service product, and we had to go back and fire all of our existing paid customers, which was, which was a very painful experience, but put us on really the right track to get to where we are today.   And when we went after those retail investors, one of the things that we learned that was really interesting is that, while technology and data is really you know, there's quite a bit out there, it's very pervasive out there today, many of these investors were just not using anything, we found that most of them, they actually had no clue if they were making or losing money on any of their investments. They kept most of their financial data in a out of date static spreadsheet, and the only time that they knew if they'd made or lost that money, or how their properties were performing was once a year when they got the returns from their accountant.   So that was a pretty big insight, we realized that when we built Stessa, and when we targeted these guys, we really needed to make this an incredibly intuitive, very much a consumer grade offering for these guys. So we built this self service to all, you know, purpose built for investors, built by investors, you know, really based on our own pain points that Jonah and I have had after being investors. For a number of years together.   And one of the one of the wonderful things about that is again, this was very, very painful decision to to make this change. But nowadays, our you know, our biggest, one of our biggest areas of customer acquisition is just investors referring other investors. And when you go into our net promoter score comments and see what people are writing, I actually did this. The other week, I took all the words created a word cloud, and the two biggest, most common words that people use when they describe it that our users use when they describe Stessa is easy and love.   Gary: Great, great question prompt Gary, Michael, go ahead. And yet, you know, feel free guys in move in the conversation in a certain direction you think they'll be more engaged in as we're as we're going through, but this is really great. So far, I love the inflection point question of these businesses, I think people are going to love it. Go ahead, Michael.   Michael: So you all individually have mentioned technology and how your companies have leveraged that. So I'm curious if you can give listeners at a high level, what technology you're giving them access to. So they can compete with some of the big players at the institutional level.   Gary: Fundamentally, when we think about what's different about Roofstock it's it's the data and technology that's foundational to what we're doing. So you're you're you've got really the same data and information analytics at your disposal that the major institutional investors have through our platform. And so the whole idea is to make it simple and intuitive, not not overly complex, to have a nice UI, but very powerful data around valuation underwriting how to evaluate investments on a risk adjusted basis with our neighborhood scores.   So the idea would be if you were an experienced investor, or even a novice investor, you can come and use our tools. And, and, you know, we provide, you know, I don't want to say it's training wheels, but but it kind of is your because it's all sort of teed up there with starting assumptions that you could then play with, you could look at other properties, you can, you can participate in the rootstock Academy and learn, you can join that community and share ideas and notes. So we try to provide this as a platform for investors to learn, we have plenty of people who engage with us who never buy anything, but they're just learning about investing and how to how to get on their own journey. And that's fine. It's, it's totally cool, we love it.   But eventually, we were there in case they, they want to do it. So I think in terms of if you if you're not in this in this, professionally, oftentimes just hard to understand how to value something, or how to think about the trade offs of buying a property in a four star neighborhood versus a two star neighborhood and you're playing with a lot of that stuff in. And that's what we're trying to do is continually make make the site in our, our business, intuitive, not overly complex, but have enough power that people can unlock, when they want to get in and do further and further research.   I know, when we were first raising money, we got some feedback from venture capitalists, it turned out to be very good advice. The first version of our site was way too complicated. We sort of nerded out on a bunch of different calculators and all these kinds of things that as kind of professional investors were like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if we could do this and that and that, and we did. And his feedback was, guys, this is a Frankenstein product, I get why everything is there. And it seems like it was kind of you just kept adding things because they were cool. And that's exactly what we did. We we did not, we didn't edit properly. And so that was a really good forcing function for us.   He said, If you could ever clean this up, you'll have a monster company, but it just, you know, it's gonna, everyone's gonna get lost in this. So we did and we, we simplified it greatly. And we took a lot of that functionality, we buried it a little bit deeper into the sites, you can unlock some of the sales analytics and things like that. But there's a real balance between having a powerful set of tools and a simple set of tools. And while people want choice, complexity can be it could tie you up in knots.   And so it's got to be this balance between, you know, editing and providing curated data and choices for people versus you know, maybe say that, like if you walked into a store and none of the products were organized into sections, it'd be so overwhelming, right? But if you if you could get guided to the right part of the store, and then you have three things to choose from, it's a heck of a lot easier. So that was I think another kind of interesting lesson as we were building just because you can do stuff doesn't mean you should In many cases, simpler is better.   Tom: Gary one thing I've been meaning to hear you articulate a response. This question is, for some investors, there's a perception that Roofstock is more for like an intro investor, they buy a house on roof stock, and then they bought it, the training wheels are off and they go buy somewhere else. What would you say to that comment of thinking of Roofstock as kind of like, exclusively as like, on the retail side, just for the training wheels, like the initial investor, and then you, you know, go somewhere else, I'd love to hear your your kind of thoughts on that stigma?   Gary: Sure. Well, I would say it depends on what you're trying to accomplish, right, we have some of the most sophisticated investors in the world buying homes off Roofstock. So it's not just for novice investors, it but we do have a unique positioning, and that there are very few on ramps for investors to to learn how to do it, and we provide that that guide. And if someone buys a home in a particular market, and they want to buy more homes, I think, you know, there's no obligation to do it through Roofstock, you certainly can can use those those skills that you have developed.   But it's it's certainly a heck of a lot easier. Because we've you've got all those tools already. And so there's no reason not to, it doesn't really cost you much to use our system. It's it's a, we charge a small marketplace fee to buyers, but you get all the data and analytics and all that to go there. So I would say if you want to buy remotely, it's very hard to do it on your own. So Roofstock has that infrastructure where we compare you with property management, financing, all the comps and analytics, that you certainly could go do it. But if you're looking at homes in four or five, six different markets on your own, it's very challenging, you have to travel, you have to find real estate brokers to work with.   And so, you know, I don't think, you know, I guess I really don't think about our platform is catering, certainly exclusively to first time investors, although a lot of people do start with us, I think on average, now we're just under two homes per investor. You know, people were using the site, I think a lot of people are trying to buy a home a year. For our platform, there's certainly no obligation to continue to use this. But I think for the most part, what we're seeing is people kind of continuing to use us and maybe using more and more of the tools over time, as they do get more sophisticated, maybe you do start to think about portfolio construction and think about where you want to own homes and set up little alerts, put yourself on a program to get build a diversified approach.   So I think it's it's a testament to the platform that we're building and the veracity of it, that it can be something that someone could start with, and then stay with throughout the lifecycle. And you can get as as geeked out is as you know, intense as you want about some of the tools and analytics, but you don't have to.   Gary: And plus all the other additional layers within stessa. Great Jones and Michael, do you want to just reiterate that question that Gary answered first related to technology we can have. Jay, Jonah and Heath take a stab at it as well.   Michael: Yeah, absolutely. So curious to know, because you all come from a technology background, what technologies and tools the individual investor has, Abigail, I think you said a nice that the mom and pop investor has at their disposal because of the companies that you all have founded?   Jonah: So I think he then I, you know came to this not because we were full time real estate investors, right? Real estate was sort of like our side side hustle while we were working in in the tech industry. And you know, that our day jobs in the tech industry, you have access to workflow automation, KPI, dashboards, like, you know, sophisticated modeling tools. And when we were working on our side hustle, owning a moderately sized real estate portfolio, we were doing spreadsheets and sending a lot of emails back and forth and had a stack of stack of paper documents on our desk. And so that was that was really the core problem that we were looking to solve is is give people that those sort of, you know, professional tools, but make it simple and make it purpose built for real estate.   Jay: Yeah, I think, you know, taking on a bit more of the operational side of property management but with a similar lens. A lot of our product strategy has been about, you know, how do we build the internal tool set and structured data that helps us create the outcomes in a scalable way. across, you know, an increasing number of markets, so enabling, you know, investors to work with us across a bunch of markets, that then leads to that transparency for the owner. And I think, you know, I talked a bit about how we've thought about turns in that context, I think that sort of measurement also allows us to then, you know, really lean in and maybe build some more custom tooling where we see there's going to be a benefit.   So for example, when we were very focused on once we had built a lot of the measurement of turn times, we saw there was an opportunity to get, you know, our staff out to homes to inspect them faster, that led to us building a set of sort of prioritization and routing tools, focused on that problem, that sort of prioritization of field work and, and completing that. And so I think part of where that thing goes, in addition to the outcomes for our investors, is a new layer of intelligence into that operational layer. So because we're measuring things like processes, or costs, maybe ROI around things like maintenance or turns or, you know, how did those decisions work out that we made around renewals or leasing, it's been our, you know, our goal, to think about how to structure those data sets, maybe into the owner, you know, web application, or, or help owners make their next decisions based on a sort of a layer of ownership that they haven't had that transparency into historically.   Michael: So I've got just one last question for everybody and very curious to see where it takes us. But I would love if you all can share a little pearls of wisdom or a nugget that you've picked up, because you are founders and co founders of tech companies that you find really applicable to real estate investors, what's the kind of an actionable takeaway or something that an investor can walk away from listening the episode today, from you all that have that have founded companies?   Abigail: I already shared, that you need to murder your darlings. So let that ne a minimum pearl.   Tom: We should we should name the episode.   Abigail: The website, you know, the original Roofstock website was so complex that he had to murder maybe just bury some darlings. So I think we saw that that the same lesson play out there, the the main piece of advice I have is to not overreact to things that are on fire. So just sort of set that your baseline is that all things will be on fire, there'll be multiple fires, and that you shouldn't over pivot or over course, correct, based on anyone, you know, imminent moment of pain, which I think takes a degree of articulation and commitment to where you're going and what the longer term path is. Less that be taken too literally, for real estate investor, I don't mean to use fire, like if something's on fire. Surely, that's not the lesson to be learned there.   Michael: I was just gonna say, do you know about the two fires that I've had in my building, I don't, I don't, where were you two years ago to calm me down.   Abigail: But whatever, whatever the appropriate corollary is, you know, to be confident in whatever strategy you set and be committed to it and not over pivot based on, you know, near term troubles.   Jonah: I would second that, that in real estate, it can be tempting to try to optimize one particular transaction or renovation at the expense of like the long term. You know, thinking about your, your network, your you know, the your business relationship, so the team that you're using to build your real estate portfolio up. And, you know, obviously, you know, building a startup is similar, you can't get, you know, there's the day to day aspect of it. But you also have to make sure you're always building for the long term.   Heath: Everything takes so much longer than you ever expected.   Gary: I would agree with that. I agree with all those those pearls of wisdom. I think having the right long term orientation, making decisions that are right for the long term, very critical, whether you're an entrepreneur starting a company or you're a real estate investor, you know, how much do you want to invest in your renovation, it's going to cost you more, but then it's going to cost you less on an ongoing basis that when you're starting a company, how much do you want to invest upfront in your core technology and in your team, you could do things more on the cheap, but it might not be as enduring. So I would think about investing, you know, in capital and people that are really, really critical.   And then I would say, just on the entrepreneurial side, what has worked for me is real optimism is I think there's different ways and but it's you're intellectually honest, but you're optimistic and you're in solution oriented. You can fall into despair very easily as an entrepreneur or if you have a real estate investment that's going sideways, but if you really sort of say okay, we are where we are, you know, what are our options, how do we fix it and I know we're going to get through this. It You find very few entrepreneurs who won't don't have a glass half full kind of orientation.   A good friend of mine found in Workday. His name's Aneel Bhusri. And he also founded, you know, another company with Dave Duffield earlier in his career. And so Dave co founded Workday with him as well. And, Aneel said one time, he said, Yeah, you know, I'm, I'm, uh, you know, I'm a glass half full kind of kind of person. And I'm a good complement to today, my co founder, you know, by contrast, he's a glasses, entirely full type person. So, you know, it's not as a glass half empty glass half full. And Aneel thought he was, yeah, I'm pretty optimistic. Dave was like, oh, off the charts, this is going to work. And this is how it's worked. He's created multiple billion dollar, you know, multi billion dollar companies. But so I would say attitude is important, and perseverance.   And I think by keeping that positive attitude, not everything is going to go right, you need to try lots of stuff, and celebrate failures, keep going. So we like to say at Roofstock, you know, fail forward fast, try new things, celebrate those things. And it's not easy to celebrate failure. It sounds kind of silly, and it's kind of a West Coast thing. But we do try to do it and you know, talk about things that don't work. And eventually, you're going to find some magic in there. And if people aren't comfortable failing, they don't take those chances. So I think, you know, those are a few things that I would just I would share.   Heath: You know, and I'm gonna add one more, which is luck surface area. And as you're talking about optimism, it kind of reminded me of this. So at my wedding, Jonah actually gave the best man speech. And he spoke a bit about luck surface area and how it applies. And I would say, both in real estate, and in starting a startup, you know, you really got to just put yourself out there, make it known where you want to be, you know, go and scream from the rooftops, hey, this is what I want to accomplish. This is what I want to do make sure everyone is you know, knowing what you're trying to do. And hopefully the right people will kind of step up and, and help you get to that end goal.   Gary: I love that luck surface area. You know, if you think it was Ben Hogan, who also said, the more I practice, the luckier I get. So there's no substitute for that hard work element, as well.   Tom: Jay, do you want to close this out? I haven't heard your pearl yet. Do you want to get to the final pearl?   Jay: Sure. I mean, I think I think it goes back to something Gary said about investing in the team where I think the quality of the team. And I think relationships among the team are just such a huge lever in it, whether it's startups or really trying to be successful at anything. And so I think, being patient around building the right team, having a high high bar for the right team, and sort of, you know, who's your network that you rely on, as you build a portfolio as you build a company, I think has, you know, led to some of our greatest successes and, and some of our missteps occasionally. And so I think, as has always been, you know, something, something I've tried to keep in mind.   Gary: And I would say, you know, one thing that I've also learned over time, and I firmly believe is, is the right strategy, whether you're building a company or a real estate portfolio, even though buying property is transactional, there is a way to live your life and build your career in a way that's more relationship oriented. And I think some of the most successful entrepreneurs, whether it's in tech or real estate, take the long view, and don't view everything as transactional. And while you want to get a good deal on a property, you might be dealing with a serial seller, you deal with that person well, you're going to develop in the long run, you're going to do much better by trying to find Win Win outcomes.   And so that I would put that out there because I think oftentimes in real estate, people view things very much as a one shot deal. very transactional, trying to maximize everything. And I think if you sort of take a step back a little bit, sometimes and optimize for the long run, take more relationship view can be smart.   Tom: We love to hear your feedback. So if you have any questions you want to ask some of these co founders about real estate entrepreneurship. Please, if you're watching this on YouTube, just write it into the comments. We watch that stuff all the time. And if you're listening to this on a podcast, if you could write this in the either Apple podcast comments, or you can just email us you can email us at help at roof stock.com with questions, comments, anything you Want related to this content that we're creating and as always, happy investing

In a market with such high demand and low supply, it's easy to see why competition for houses is making the news. Large investors vs. small; investors vs. homeowners — are the battlelines drawn? Well, I'm happy to report: The Real Estate War has been greatly exaggerated. At least, that's how Gary Beasley, CEO & Co-founder at Roofstock, sees it — instead of a war, he sees opportunities on all sides, and he joins the show today to share his insights. In this episode, we discuss: Why small real estate investors should partner with larger investors Why the American Dream is still homeownership (but maybe not a home you live in) Whether the real estate market is as overvalued as many think To stay up to date on The Real Estate of Things, check us out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on our website. Listening on a desktop & can't see the links? Just search for The Real Estate of Things on your favorite podcast player.

This episode is sponsored by RealtyMogul. The process of buying and selling homes in the United States has remained relatively unchanged for the past century. New Prop-tech startups like Roofstock are stepping in to change that. People are now buying and selling homes over the internet and this creates new opportunities for investors, both individuals and institutions. In this episode Roofstock CEO Gary Beasley shares his insight on the booming single family home market. 0:00 Introduction1:37 The single family rental boom- Investment groups acquiring single family homes4:05 How do institutional investments change communities6:50 Are we in a housing bubble?9:30 How did the eviction moratorium affect roofstock11:14 Build to rent strategies14:06 How has investor demand shifted since the pandemic16:30 Working with iBuyers18:15 Potential changes to the 1031 exchange21:30 (BYOP) Bring your own property on roofstock24:20 Using machine learning to scale real estate technologies27:40 Vetting property managers29:55 Increase in conventional and institutional investors33:05 Different property portfolios35:55 Analyzing recent migration trends42:03 Click to buy homes and average transactions43:30 The future of real estate investing 

Gary Beasley is the Co-Founder and CEO of RoofStock, a real estate investment marketplace. He was a previous guest on episode where he shared more of his journey and start into real estate but today he is going to share a sticky situation where he was in the middle of a deal and lost his funding while in the middle of it and only had one month left of cash.  Gary Beasley Real Estate Background: Co-Founder and CEO of RoofStock, a real estate investment marketplace Gary was co-CEO of Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust - which owned and managed 15,000 single-family rentals A previous guest on episode Based in Oakland, CA Say hi to him at   for more info on groundbreaker.co  Best Ever Tweet: “It’s amazing how resilient our industry is, especially after COVID19” - Gary Beasley        

What does the ability to buy, sell and trade houses (or fractions of houses) online say about the way Americans are thinking and acting around housing decisions? While institutional funds have taken significant stakes in U.S. residential portfolios in recent months (especially in the Sun Belt), a broader segment of investors can invest using online platforms like Roofstock. For perspective on the U.S. housing market outlook, online real estate disruptors, and Roofstock's growth trajectory, we talked to Roofstock Co-Founder and CEO Gary Beasley, who has led two real estate investment companies through IPOs and was named a Top Fintech CEO in 2019 by Financial Technology Report.

Property investment is a big deal. But what if you could treat single-family with the same liquidity as you would, say stocks and bonds on Wall Street? Gary Beasley is the CEO and co-founder of Roofstock, an innovative, tech-enabled marketplace and transaction platform designed to democratize access to real estate investing. We open the show by taking a look at Gary's professional history and his evolutionary journey in the $2 trillion single-family rental sector. Gary walks us through the various enterprises he's been involved with over the years, as well as the unmissable opportunities he grabbed along the way. In particular, we hear about how he and his partner saw the opportunity to pioneer a new asset class, and how they became the first to own 1,000 plus single-family homes in the USA.

Gary Beasley is CEO of Roofstock, a leading real estate investment marketplace which he co-founded in 2015. Gary has spent most of his career building businesses in the real estate, hospitality and tech sectors. Gary was instrumental in acquiring and integrating more than $800 million of resort properties for KSL Resorts, and spent five years as CFO of online brokerage pioneer ZipRealty.Gary also served as CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, then the second largest boutique hotel management company in the country. Immediately before starting Roofstock, Gary led one of the largest single-family rental platforms in the U.S. through its IPO as co-CEO of Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust, now part of Invitation Homes.In this episode, Tyler and Gary’s discussion focused on the mindsets and traits required to fulfill seemingly impossible dreams. They discussed Gary’s motivation to prove naysayers wrong, the moment he decided to forge his own path, celebrating failure, traits necessary for innovation, different types of leadership styles, active versus passive listening and intellectual curiosity. They also discussed how Gary’s previous experiences were applied to his innovative real estate investing and technology business, the characteristics it takes to be a successful entrepreneur, how to deal with stress and more!Connect with Gary:Website: http://www.roofstock.comThe following books were mentioned in the show:Unbroken, by Laura HillenbrandEntrepreneurial Leadership, by Joel PetersonGuns, Germs and Steel, by Jared DiamondApply for coaching with Tyler! The world's top performers in any field have a coach to help them achieve drastically greater results and in less time. The most successful real estate investors are no different. To apply for a results coaching session with Tyler, visit coachwithtyler.com.This episode of Elevate is brought to you by CF Capital LLC, a national real estate investment firm that focuses on acquiring and operating multifamily assets that provide stable cash flow, capital appreciation, and a margin of safety. CF Capital leverages its expertise in acquisitions and management to provide investors with superior risk-adjusted returns while placing a premium on preserving capital. Learn more at cfcapllc.com.

This week, we bring you something different with a collection scary real estate stories from some friends of the show. Join Chad Carson, Gary Beasley, Jim Barker, Tom Schneider & Michael Zuber for some creepy stories for the Halloween season.  --- Transcript   Emil: Hey everyone. Welcome back to The Remote real estate investor podcast. On today's episode, we have something really special for you guys. In the theme of Halloween, we wanted to go out and collect a bunch of horror stories very, very spooky real estate investing stories. And so we asked a couple friends of the podcast to share some stories they've had along the way. Some of them funny, some of them a little scary, some of them real spooky. So we have a total of five people speaking given their stories today, and that includes author and coach, Chad Carson, Roofstock CEO, Gary Beasley, Jim Barker, who is the VP of construction at Roofstock, our very own Tom Schneider, you guys know from this show, and author and good friend of the show, Michael Zuber. So without further ado, let's hop into their stories.   Emil: So first up, we have author Chad Carson. So let's hear from Chad.   Chad Carson: It was actually an investor friend who tried to get me to take over his property and manage it for him. And we went and looked at it. It's like, Yeah, I got this tenant who's not really paying that well. And that's okay. Yeah, we'll see how that goes. And it was a big is a brick house with a huge basement. And I said, Well, I'm gonna have to go visit the house. I'm not gonna take it over before looking at it. And so we walked to the house, we were walked inside, and we could just tell the tenant was really not at ease. Like he was just kind of nervous about something and kind of watching us too closely. And I noticed he got really uneasy when I started going towards the door to the basement.   And I said, Oh, okay, I guess I better go the basement, open the top of the door, the basement. And all I heard was thousands sounded like of wheels going squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak, like lots and lots of little wheels and little sound like little feet, you know, little rodent feet running on these wheels. And so I kind of went to flick on the light and I looked at the bottom of the stairs, and there's like two red eyes, kind of looking up at me in the dark, and I flipped the lights on. And there are, there's there's one whole room in this basement with just tons of tons of rat cages or mice cages too.   But that was only one part of this basement operation this guy had going on, there was all the reptiles and the other part of the basement that were the they're eating all of the rodents that he was raising, so he had big huge snakes. He had turtles and these big bats. He had I don't think I saw any alligators, but it's turtles and iguanas. And so it's like an exotic pet operation going on this guy's basement. This is one particular horror story. I was glad it wasn't my property and I told the guy as we walked out I said I'm not managing this property until you get rid of this tenant.   The final part of the story I'll try to make fast is that he did get the tenant notice the tenant had to leave it was like 60-90 days later when he finally got it out and we went back to the house with the same friend and we're like we walk in the front door the same front door it looks it looks empty oh okay and not so bad and we're walking down the hallway the same hallway that had the basement door and all of a sudden this massive like big you know kind of dark brown mouse rat thing like comes charging down the hallway right so we both for the living room and take off is this mouse like was not scared of us at all like runs around the corner right when that happened I was right before he said Ah not so bad.   There's this looks not so bad is this mouse comes charging down and after the mouse comes charging down we're getting ready to leave because I'm like let's just get out of this place. And I look over at my friend he's got this big huge roach crawling out of his shirt that must have dropped down from the ceiling somewhere. So long story short you know that if you get a bad tenant and that's the moral of this story was he didn't screen his tenet he didn't inspect it he didn't pay attention to what's going on and things can get out of control if you're not paying attention so that's that's the lesson there.   Michael: Holy Smokes. I thought you're gonna say yeah, you decided to take it over and have him cut you in on the business and get 10% commission for all the animals and sales.   Chad Carson: Oh man. I didn't touch that property I was I helped them advise them I you know from a distance so I didn't get any more roaches or or my shoes.   Emil: Right Next up, we have Gary Beasley so roofstock co as many of you know, he has a really spooky story to share with you guys. So let's hear from Gary.   Gary Beasley: When I was in the hotel business, this would have been back around 1997. I was in the midst of acquiring a very old hotel in Claremont Berkeley hills called the Claremont Resort and Spa. So this is right on the border of Berkeley in Oakland. It sits on top of the Hayward Fault. The really creepy thing we found out right before closing The general manager of the hotel came over the grab behind the diligence room took me in his office and said, Gary, I got to share something with you. Like, okay, what is this is the building have termites or something, he says, he hands me this file doesn't say anything. I opened it up. And it's a thick file full of handwritten notes.   These were from guests, and from people who worked at hotel, and was all very, very similar. And it all happened on the fourth floor of the Claremont hotel. So the guy's name was Henry Feldman, I could remember it like it was yesterday. And he looked at me and he really wanted to watch my reaction as I opened through and started reading some of these notes. But there were dozens and dozens of accounts of people seeing a woman in a long white flowing dress, and either hearing or seeing one or two small children. And sometimes they would look out their window and see them in the Rose Garden. And like her tending to the roses, and sometimes she'd be kind of floating the hallways and like Oh, come on is this I'm looking around for a camera. He's like, no, read more there. This is no joke. And a lot of these are pretty recent.   And then a number of things would happen in the rooms. One, sometimes the lights would go on and off unexplainably. tv would go on in the middle of the night, really blaring loud. Water would be on in the bathroom when they clearly had not been in the bathroom. drawers won't open in the dressers. And then one that was pretty freaky was a lot of people complained that they tried is when they tried to exit their hotel room, the door handle was hot, it was really hot, and it wouldn't, then they couldn't turn it. And so like this is really odd. And also, the other thing that was very common was people being awakened by someone thumping on their chest when they're sleeping, like bam. And no one's in the room.   It's like what is going on. And in fact, I heard this from when I was getting my haircut one day there. But the guy who used to cut my hair was telling the story that it just happened at someone who's the hotel, this was a few years ago, and she like, moved to a different floor or whatever. So I'm trying to say I asked him what's the commonality of all this stuff? Because you know, I have no idea. But none of these people know anything about any of the other stories. Oh, there's one more and then I'll tell you the kind of the genesis of it. And what puts the theory. There's an NBA team that used to stay there when the warriors have people in the LA Times will stay there. There was an A famous NBA player. I think you can even find this online somewhere, who was there and he was complaining about the noise in the next room, the little kids playing. And he called downstairs and they said Sir, there's no one in the room next to you. It's vacant. It's not been booked.   He's like, no, there is you could come up here right now. And so they come up open the door. Sure enough room, no one in the room, totally vacant, nothing touched. He freaks out. And I think he actually checked out of the hotel. I don't think he went to a different floor. So all this crazy, crazy stuff, right? And so I said, well, Henry, you know, what do you think that the genesis of it was? He goes well, there was a woman who lived here with her small children. Before it was a hotel, on the property. It was just a house. And she and her children died in a fire on the property   Michael: That's wild.   Tom: It's like all the different mediums to it's like the electrical, the water the…   Gary Beasley: Exactly, exactly. So he said, I'm not telling you, you know not to buy the hotel. I don't know if any of its true. But I was told by my lawyers, you know, this is the kind of thing we have to let everybody know about. And he said, we've never had anybody hurt or anything like that. So if there is anything there, it's not a malevolent thing. But he said I started very much a skeptic, but with all of these things happening that are so similar, because I don't know.   Michael: Wow, how many how many stories is that hotel here?   Gary Beasley: It's the top floor, the fourth floor.   Michael: The fourth floor? Okay.   Gary Beasley: Yeah. And then there's a tower as well, that goes up. There's a bell tower. So there's one room that actually connects to the bell tower where there's been a bunch of stuff. It's kind of centers around that whole part of the hotel   Michael: That is so wild.   Tom: If you haven't seen the hotel, just google Claremont hotel, and you'll immediately go Yeah, that's probably haunted.   Gary Beasley: Yeah, it's probably the largest wood frame structure this side of the Mississippi. So another bit of trivia with this hotel, so it was owned by this great guy named Harold Schnitzer. For probably 50 years before we bought it from him back in the late 90s. And he was one of only I think three owners and the hotel was built after the 1906 earthquake. But the land for that hotel, reportedly was one in a checkers game. Back in the around the turn of the century. So there's a lot of really, really interesting colorful history around the hotel.   Pierre: So you guys still ended up buying it?   Gary Beasley: We did end up buying it.   Michael: Wow.   Pierre: Have you received reports of this kind of stuff happening since you've bought it?   Gary Beasley: So you know, it never has been something that's been that widely reported or talked about obviously, this kind of stuff is still happening because I heard it from my the guy who was cutting my hair there probably five years ago, because I used to go there just to kind of stay connected and and all the people who work there like oh, yeah, it's just like common knowledge that this stuff happens. But But yeah, so I think if there's if there you know, there's something if there was something going on before we bought it, it's still going on.   Michael: Wow, you just in about four and a half minutes convinced me to never stay at the Claremont   Tom: Just avoid the fourth floor.   Gary Beasley: Some people pay a premium and ask to stay on the fourth floor. Like I said, No one's ever been hurt. I mean, you might be a little spooked.   Michael: Yeah, yeah.   Gary Beasley: But this way if the TV comes on or whatever, you know what to do. It's just nothing to worry about. Just go probably turn it off. Make sure the waters not running in the bathroom. Calmly Go back to sleep calmly Go back to sleep.     Pierre: Put a pillow on your chest.   Gary Beasley: Yeah, no. So the whole theory is she's trying to wake up or kids or wake up whoever's there and get out of here. Yeah. Happy Halloween boys.   Emil: Okay, next up, we have our very own Jim Barker. Jim's got another pretty spooky story for you guys. So let's hear from Jim.   Jim Barker: There's a lot of weird stories out there and I thought seeing a giant pipe organ built into a home was really up there, that was in Long Beach California but, but this one was a trip out to Indianapolis and we had a group of houses there for the firm that I was working with that that were really in need of a lot of renovation they had purchased these sort of sight unseen really low purchase prices knowing that they needed some rehab but didn't know exactly how much they needed and and when we got into this house, I think my first experience was walking into the home it didn't have the utilities on the walls were sweating. And being a Southern California native and and at the time kind of living in Florida and going out throughout the southeast. I didn't really think about it but that was like oh, it's got a basement and I kind of went to go walk in the basement I think I was using my my cell phone flashlight and it almost stepped into like a about five feet of water their water is just full of water in this basement.   So kind of quickly realized we needed to get a waterproofing company out there and they did a good job they they pumped the water out of the basement and identified Yeah, we had this long term issue there with this house and created a plan for us to waterproof the basement with some excavation around the outside and some sump pumps and rock Okay, this is a it's already a scary rehab house but it wasn't truly scary at this point, just a little odd, but when they got the basement dry and then the next step was sort of remediate all the water damage in the basement.   And they said okay, well take us a couple days and then you can come take a look at it really scope out this house after we're done. So in the process, they they stripped this entire basement of the drywall that was around the basement walls, and let it dry out had some fans in there. And then and that's really when when I got the call from this vendor saying Hey, you got to come back. This is something weird going on at this house. And yeah, I'd seen a lot of things probably you know, a couple thousand SFR houses that had been at this point and nothing really fazed me whether it was a hoarder house or or anything else that you might run into but when I got back to this house, he's like yeah, I just you know, it's so strange you just got to go in and experience it for yourself and so this house was odd enough already man had been stripped of drywall and didn't have cabinets or anything in the kitchen. So it just kind of looked like this old creepy space.   And as you went down in the basement, it was just kind of like a split level. So as you walk down the stairs and kind of went down there like what what does he guide me into I really didn't know and like, get to the bottom and you see this like, weird, creepy. Two foot by two foot hole that's been cut in this cinderblock wall of this basement. Like, what is that and go in there and like, what were they tunneling outside of this basement for I have no idea and stick your head in the little hole and you're like this doesn't even seem safe. But sure enough, they tunneled out and kind of created this maybe six foot by four foot little room that couldn't have been more than in two or two and a half feet tall, underground, and it had nothing in it, but a foam rubber mattress and some old like 1970s floral cushions from couch cushions and like what was going on in this house if it wasn't visible? Who decides to randomly tunnel outside of their house? And what could they have possibly been hiding in here?   You know, is that their escape room? makeshift escape room? Was it a, something where somebody was being smuggled, like I really didn't know. So it's just like, I don't know what to do with it other than like, we've got to get rid of it. And so luckily, we didn't ever find out anything bad happened here. But it was a scene out of Saw or something where you look down in this basement and everything is torn up. And there's this hole in the, in the side of the foundation wall. And so we quickly just crushed it from the outside, made sure that room was gone back-filled, the dirt and patched up that basement wall, and the house turned around. But there was a lot of speculation with me and my coworkers at the time and some of the neighbors, what the house might have been used for. And the the old man that used to live there. And I think one of the neighbors speculated that he had two wives and maybe he only ever saw one of them at any given time.   So the stories is just got more and more wild as we went along. But I don't think there was much truth in any of those specular stories, but it sure was a strange room and we never did quite figure out what was really used for but it no longer exists. And now it's a perfectly functioning SFR rental house and, and yielding well for the current owner.     Tom: Oh my gosh, just Yeah. Just perform an exorcism on that part of the house. How scary Jeez.   Jim Barker: Yeah, just Who knows? And maybe just a little hiding room or playroom for some kids. But yeah, when when you find it like that your imagination shirt runs wild.   Emil: I was trying to think in the background of something not ridiculous that could have gone on there. And I'm drawing a complete blank, like I can have it couldn't have been anything legitimate and had to have been something just, I don't know, really not safe or legal. Or…   Jim Barker: I'm convinced that the weirdest stuff happens in basements. And maybe it's just a myth from not growing up having a basement but now in my experience, I'd like a whatever weird happens. It's always in a basement.   Emil: All right, next up is our very own co host, Tom Schneider. Tom has another great, great story for you guys. Let's listen to this one.   Tom: So I was at the time this is, I don't know 10-15 years ago, I was working in acquisitions. And there was a property that I was looking to buy. This is for a company that eventually went public but we were in major buy time. And this property was located in this area called the Iron Triangle in Richmond and you guys are familiar anyways, I go to this property with my construction manager that I work with and the property is listed as vacant per the MLS listing so vacant. We go there I have my super key so I'm able to unlock the door and me and the contractor opened the door and you know I couldn't put it into words but it was so obvious this home was not vacant. There was nothing visually you can see that really spoke to someone was there but I don't know call it intuition as soon as you open the door and stepped inside you we're not the only ones in this room.   So we continue you know we look at each other and I think he felt it as well and we are walking you know through the house I think it's like a three bedroom one bath doing our our standard process right. First we go over to the kitchen estimated costs, pretty standard, you know and still have that kind of sinking feeling that this is not we're not on our own in here. So looking through the kitchen testing the water, you know a little bit of brown spurts out of the water just like a not a good omen. You know some rust or whatnot. Anyways, continuing working our way through one bedroom, another bedroom until we finally get to the master bedroom. And, I mean, we both just looked at each other. And in the corner of the room, there was this closet. And it was just slightly opened a little bit. And, you know, we had to know, is this house empty? Or is it not.   So I walk slowly over to the closet and I, it's dark out to, you know, not a lot of windows and I open the closet door. And looking in there. And I see, in the back of the closet, this is a weird deep closet, I see two eyes looking right back at me. And I turn around at the construction manager, we got to get out of here! So we sprint out of the door. I think we forgot to put the super key on and we were just spooked called the listing agent, that house is not vacant, you got to go and take care of that and made it out alive. No major issues. But man, it's it you got to trust your intuition. If you you feel the energy of somebody or you know something, I still don't know today could have been a bear. I don't know. You got to trust that, that intuition and double check with the listing agent that your house is vacant.   Emil: Next up, we have Michael Zuber who many of you know he's been on the show a couple times. I actually remember hearing this story on Michael's YouTube channel. And we had to invite him on to recount it here. So here it is.   Michael: Yeah, so let me set it up. Because again, so we were probably in year eight or year nine of our investing journey, we probably had 100 doors by this point, we had probably had 500 tenants by this point. And again, while this story is truly just truly nasty, I do want to say that most tenants are just awesome people. So I don't want this one horrible event to scare anyone away. But it is it is pretty bad. So this starts in a very unusual manner. Somebody comes in to pay rent, my property manager takes the check, tries to apply the check to the unit and says innocently enough name on check doesn't match tenant in house, what's going on? Right? Not thinking any of it.   The tenant at this point, I don't know. The first error or honesty or whatever you want to call it says oh, by the way, so and so I've already forgot their name, the other tenants left. And I moved in and I want to pay the rent that he was paying. So we're like, Okay, cool. We're not going to take your rent, we have to put all tenants through an application process, right? But good news is you have the money. So you're good, good sign. We think we're gonna get through this okay. So he fills out an application right there. He again tries to pay before he leaves and we say no, right? You're not an approved tenant yet. We can't take your money. But we should have an answer in 24. Worst case, 48 hours, right process is smooth.   So lo and behold, that evening, I get a call. And I start to hear this story. Right? Because I have at this point, they're not bothering me, the owner, I'm probably somewhere in Europe or Japan or somewhere. But they call me go we got we got a problem. I'm like, Oh, crap, what problem we're going to talk about today. So they go through it much like I have with you. And now they tell me that the application that the gentleman filled out, everything is wrong on it except his name. He's lied about everything. Where he works. Past references didn't check out. Just nothing is right. Other than his name, and the only reason they think his name is right is because it matched the check. That's that's all they know, at this point. And they're like, what do you want to do? Because he's already moved in. He was already going to pay rent. And they're just not sure.   And I'm like, well, you're my property manager. What's, what do you think the process is, this is this is not an approvable tenant. Right? So call him up. See if he has a legitimate excuse, which I don't know what it'd be, but check. So, my intention is okay, the guy's got to go, right, 30 day notice, you know, get out we'll you know, we'll Park friends but you're not approved right seems to set it makes sense. So long, behold, he calls me they call and now it turns tense. He is clearly upset. Which at which point the property manager the owner of the company gets involved because he is just berating my property manager, right my point of contact and he makes a call that Okay, you've got to get out in three days, you know, just three days to pay to quit and At which point he really doesn't like it.   We think nothing of it. He's just a grouchy tenant at this point, he tried to cheat the system and get out. Lo and behold, about two or three in the morning, my property manager gets a phone call from the police. I find this out the next day at like 6am or 7am. But apparently this individual sent out a mass communication on his social media, advertising a hammer party. So you know what, I grew up in the 90s. I'm thinking MC Hammer, right? I'm like, okay, he wants to throw a big bash. Before He Leaves. I'm like, in my, my property manager goes, No. He goes, he threw a hammer party. I'm like, all right, I give up. It's not MC Hammer. What is it, he told his entire social media staff to bring a hammer to his unit. And they started putting little holes in the drywall. Right, just smashing the drywall smashing the toilet smashing the tubs with hammers.   So much so that he almost broke into the unit next door, at which point the police were called, and people were arrested, because there were people on parole that shouldn't have been there. And lo and behold, we spent, I don't know something like $20,000 because again, right, once you start putting holes in drywall, you know, stuffs got to go. And, you know, toilets got to go and sinks got to go and countertops got to go and cabinet doors were just bashed off. They were demoing a relatively nice unit. And this all started from a guy who wanted to pay rent. That's the terrible thing of this story.   Tom: I'm never gonna hear hammer-time Just think of it and not think of that story again.   Michael Zuber: Yeah, it was a, it was not a good experience. And I just I think about it all the time. All he wanted to do is pay rent. He I'm sure he thought he was doing the right thing. But then you start lying on your application and your job doesn't check out. And yeah, I mean, it's just like, who knows what was going on? We never had a chance to dig into that. Because he just went from, you know, trying to sneak through to I'm going to be mean, And oh, by the way, he went to jail. He went to jail that night. And we're talking,   Emil: You and I we're joking before we started recording. But I mentioned I feel like if you've been doing this long enough, everyone who's been doing this decade or two, like they have a crazy story like that. It's impossible not to have one.   Michael Zuber: Yeah. You will. You're in the people business. I mean, I didn't understand that for years. Right. I thought it was spreadsheets, I thought it was sticks and bricks. I thought it was stuff. It's not stuff. If you're a landlord, and you're a long term landlord, you're dealing with people, people go through life. Sometimes you're winning in life, and sometimes you're losing sometimes. You know, it's it comes up aces, and sometimes it's deuces and Damn, I mean, it's you can run into people that are having pretty bad days. And I'm sure they don't mean maliciously, maliciously, but he was angry. And he destroyed a unit and ultimately, frankly, paid the price with his freedom because he went to jail.   Emil: Alright, thanks, everyone. Hope you didn't get too spooked out during all this. But hope you all have a great Halloween. I know it's going to be a little bit different of a year, but hope you all enjoy it. Anyway. One other quick thing to tell you guys about before you head out. We're running another Roofstock Academy promotion this month for all of our podcast listeners. And if you're not familiar with rootstock Academy, that is our online on demand training and coaching program where you can get one on one coaching with myself, Michael Tom, also in our private slack community. And we have tons and tons of hours of on demand lectures for you guys to go through to really, really power up your knowledge of real estate investing. And that code if you go to roofstockacademy.com and check out just enter the code HALLOWEEN, you'll get $151 off enrollments. So again, roofstockacademy.com, and apply the code HALLOWEEN at checkout before October 31 to get $151 off enrollment. All right, we'll check you out on the next episode. Happy investing

Gary Beasley is a seasoned entrepreneur, executive, and investor across multiple industries. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Roofstock, an innovative and technology-enabled transaction and marketplace platform designed to lower transaction costs and improve liquidity in the single family rental sector. Gary has also grown small companies, led large organizations, and served as co-CEO and CFO of two large IPOs, Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust and ZipRealty respectively. In this episode, he talked about his real estate journey, the reason he started Roofstock, and what he wants to be known for. If you are into single family rentals and would like to learn from one of the best in the space, this episode is for you!

Gary Beasley is a seasoned entrepreneur, executive, and investor across multiple industries. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Roofstock, an innovative and technology-enabled transaction and marketplace platform designed to lower transaction costs and improve liquidity in the single family rental sector. Gary has also grown small companies, led large organizations, and served as co-CEO and CFO of two large IPOs, Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust and ZipRealty respectively. In this episode, he talked about his real estate journey, the reason he started Roofstock, and what he wants to be known for. If you are into single family rentals and would like to learn from one of the best in the space, this episode is for you! 

Michael: Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of The Remote Real Estate Investor. This is our weekend wisdom episode. I'm Michael album and joined today by Tom Schneider and Roofstock CEO, Gary Beasley.   Theme song   Michael: So, Gary, we want to ask you a question about what is your favorite metric to use when evaluating properties? And how do you think about that metric when it comes to total return.   Gary: So I like to think of single family rental homes as sort of like a bond that's indexed for inflation with an equity kicker, and I'll explain what I mean by that. And the reason I think it's particularly relevant right now, is we're in a low interest rate environment, people do feel like with all the money we've been printing over the last few years, there is a potential for inflation down the road. So you want to think about what kind of investments could potentially be inflation hedges in case inflation. And the Fed has said, we're gonna keep rates low, and we're not so worried about inflation, so we're not gonna be as aggressive in raising rates.   And then you've got this equity kicker element in homes, which is really the appreciation component of it. So let me tell you what I mean. So the bond component is that the cash flow that you could generate from the home when you own it, and that's like the bond piece every year, you could raise the rent to at least keep up with inflation, because their annual contract. So if there's a lot of inflation in the market, you can raise the rent. So if you had to sign a 10 year lease that was flat and inflation went up, you would be in trouble. So you've got that annual indexing.   And then you've got the capital appreciation piece, which if the property goes up, you know, 3%, a year or 4%, a year, which is historically has done over the long term, you get that capital appreciation piece, like you would get, say, in a stock with a stock value going up, you've got the value of your underlying asset going up. And what's nice about real estate, unlike with stocks, which are harder to, in most cases, put leverage against unless you have a margin account, anyone could get a loan for a house. And so you could get a 70 or 80% loan on the house. And I like to give a you know, very simple example, if you have a home that basically just covers its costs over, say, a five year period, but it goes up at three and a half percent a year and you have an 80% loan on it, you could get a 14 or 15% annualized return on that, because you've got someone else paying down your mortgage and creating principal value, you've got, you know, you're you're riding the property value along, and you're getting kind of four to one leverage on your equity.   So when you sell it, your annualized return over that period can actually be quite high, even if you're not pulling money out or getting current return along the way. So when I look at investing in homes, the yield is one component of it. But I'm really more of a total return investor, I don't necessarily feel like I need to pull the money out every month and then spend it or put it into something else, what I'm trying to do is create value in that asset. And so I like the idea of having someone else pay down the loan balance for me, and create value over time just by getting that exposure to housing, and letting the market be your friend. And then at some point in the future, if you decide to liquidate it, you've got a lot of hopefully embedded equity value, that's when you could sort of realize the benefits of that investment.   Michael: That's a great kind of analogy and pictorial representation. Can you talk just real briefly about how a bond works if somebody wanted to go buy a bond, so that way they can compare that investment versus real estate? How does that traditionally work?   Gary: Yeah. So when you buy a bond, what you buy is a coupon on that that bond, and then you get your money back. So you could buy a municipal bond or Treasury, something like that. And let's say you get an interest rate on that bond of 3%. And you buy your hundred dollar bond, and you get $3, every year back. And then at the end of that term, you get your hundred dollars back. That's the entirety of your return. And that's a 3% annualized return, because you're getting your 3% every year, the difference between like a bond and a single family rental home, which you might be able to get a similar kind of return every year on a home, but the value of the underlying home is going up. And so then instead of getting $100 back, maybe you get $120 back, right and so that's where that's that equity kicker piece that I'm talking about. That's over and above that bond piece.   Michael: Already, everyone that was our quick weekend wisdom a big big, big thank you to Gary super informative. If you enjoyed the podcast, please feel free to leave us a rating and review wherever it is you listen to your podcast. We look forward to seeing the next one. Happy investing

In this episode, I have the opportunity to interview Roofstock CEO, Gary Beasley. Roofstock is a leading real estate investment marketplace that he co-founded in 2015. Gary caught the entrepreneurial bug while earning an MBA at Stanford, and spent most of his career building businesses in the real estate, hospitality, and tech sectors. We began as we often do by diving into Gary's background. He talked about growing up in small midwestern towns learning a bit about the business from his dad who owned a commercial real estate brokerage firm. Gary said things really changed for him when he went to school at Northwestern and how the environment really opened his eyes to the different possibilities available to him. He decided to go to business school after working a couple of years in real estate, thinking that he wanted to do something different, but ending up right back in real estate after earning his MBA from Stanford. Gary talked about his early work experience and the different roles that he played. He talked about how much he learned and how his confidence grew when he was able to perform duties that he had not done previously. After several years of working as both a CFO and president for ZipRealty, he decided to take a year off to work on various projects. He took some time to teach some entrepreneur courses at Stanford and ended up making a proposal to a solar panel technology company that led to another leadership role. Gary took some time to explain the circumstances that led him to starting Roofstock and the advantages to their platform. Some of these include fast sales, costs associated with selling homes are lower than through traditional means, there is no down time for the investment, and very little disruption to the tenant. As part of this discussion, I talked a lot about why using Roofstock is desirable for an investor in my situation. Gary outlined several of the benefits and guarantees that are integral to the Roofstock marketplace. We then discussed where Gary thinks the housing market is headed. He said that it is so hard to predict the future because there are so many variables, but it is very interesting that the housing market is still so hot after several months of the pandemic. He stressed that because of the pandemic, people are valuing their homestead more than ever and that is having an interesting impact on the market. Gary has an incredibly interesting background and was a great guest, so please join us for this uber-informative episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast! Notable Quotes: “One of the best things about college is how it expands your horizons and your viewpoint of what is possible.” Mike Simmons “I encourage people to view college as a time of exploration and not necessarily as a practical, pre-professional period.” Gary Beasley “College really teaches you how to think.” Gary Beasley “Early in your career, do things for the experience, not for the money.” Gary Beasley “The more difficult the decision, the less it matters what you decide.” Gary Beasley “You lean on experts that can help you.” Gary Beasley “Make sure you are surrounded by the right people.” Gary Beasley “Embrace the process and everything will be okay.” Gary Beasley “If you stay where you are comfortable, I hope you are comfortable where you currently are because that is where you will remain.” Mike Simmons “We are trying to break down the geographic barriers to real estate investing.” Gary Beasley “When you are building a marketplace, it has to be on a foundation of trust.” Gary Beasley “It has to be trust first, then growth, and then profitability.” Gary Beasley Links: Flip Hacking Live Roofstock Return on Investments Just Start Real Estate JSRE on Facebook Mike on Facebook Mike on Instagram Mike on LinkedIn Mike on Twitter Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months

In this episode, I have the opportunity to interview Roofstock CEO, Gary Beasley. Roofstock is a leading real estate investment marketplace that he co-founded in 2015. Gary caught the entrepreneurial bug while earning an MBA at Stanford, and spent most of his career building businesses in the real estate, hospitality, and tech sectors.   We began as we often do by diving into Gary’s background. He talked about growing up in small midwestern towns learning a bit about the business from his dad who owned a commercial real estate brokerage firm. Gary said things really changed for him when he went to school at Northwestern and how the environment really opened his eyes to the different possibilities available to him. He decided to go to business school after working a couple of years in real estate, thinking that he wanted to do something different, but ending up right back in real estate after earning his MBA from Stanford.   Gary talked about his early work experience and the different roles that he played. He talked about how much he learned and how his confidence grew when he was able to perform duties that he had not done previously. After several years of working as both a CFO and president for ZipRealty, he decided to take a year off to work on various projects. He took some time to teach some entrepreneur courses at Stanford and ended up making a proposal to a solar panel technology company that led to another leadership role.   Gary took some time to explain the circumstances that led him to starting Roofstock and the advantages to their platform. Some of these include fast sales, costs associated with selling homes are lower than through traditional means, there is no down time for the investment, and very little disruption to the tenant. As part of this discussion, I talked a lot about why using Roofstock is desirable for an investor in my situation. Gary outlined several of the benefits and guarantees that are integral to the Roofstock marketplace.   We then discussed where Gary thinks the housing market is headed. He said that it is so hard to predict the future because there are so many variables, but it is very interesting that the housing market is still so hot after several months of the pandemic. He stressed that because of the pandemic, people are valuing their homestead more than ever and that is having an interesting impact on the market.   Gary has an incredibly interesting background and was a great guest, so please join us for this uber-informative episode of the Just Start Real Estate Podcast!   Notable Quotes:   “One of the best things about college is how it expands your horizons and your viewpoint of what is possible.”   Mike Simmons     “I encourage people to view college as a time of exploration and not necessarily as a practical, pre-professional period.”   Gary Beasley     “College really teaches you how to think.”   Gary Beasley     “Early in your career, do things for the experience, not for the money.”   Gary Beasley     “The more difficult the decision, the less it matters what you decide.”   Gary Beasley     “You lean on experts that can help you.”   Gary Beasley     “Make sure you are surrounded by the right people.”   Gary Beasley     “Embrace the process and everything will be okay.”   Gary Beasley     “If you stay where you are comfortable, I hope you are comfortable where you currently are because that is where you will remain.”   Mike Simmons     “We are trying to break down the geographic barriers to real estate investing.”   Gary Beasley     “When you are building a marketplace, it has to be on a foundation of trust.”   Gary Beasley     “It has to be trust first, then growth, and then profitability.”   Gary Beasley   Links: Flip Hacking Live Roofstock Return on Investments Just Start Real Estate JSRE on Facebook Mike on Facebook Mike on Instagram Mike on LinkedIn Mike on Twitter Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months

The post E1095 The Next Unicorns E13: Roofstock CEO Gary Beasley is creating the real estate cloud, opening residential investing to millennials & more appeared first on This Week In Startups.

The post E1095 The Next Unicorns E13: Roofstock CEO Gary Beasley is creating the real estate cloud, opening residential investing to millennials & more appeared first on This Week In Startups.

The Real Estate CPA podcast is for general information purposes only and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, tax, legal, or accounting advice. Information on the podcast may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. No reader, user, or listener of this podcast should act or refrain from acting on the basis of information on this podcast without first seeking legal and tax dvice from counsel in the relevant jurisdiction. Only your individual attorney and tax advisor can provide assurances that the information contained herein – and your interpretation of it – is applicable or appropriate to your particular situation. Use of, and access to, this podcast or any of the links or resources contained or mentioned within the podcast show and show notes do not create a relationship between the reader, user, or listener and podcast hosts, contributors, or guests. Always consult your own tax, legal, and accounting advisors before engaging in any transaction. -- Today we're joined with Gary Beasley, Founder and CEO of Roofstock Capital to discuss how Roofstock helps single-family real estate investors buy and sell their properties, and how you can buy fractional shares of single-family rentals via Roofstock One. To learn more about Roofstock and Roofstock One visit: https://www.roofstock.com/ For more education about optimizing your tax position, use this guide as a resource for just about every topic that applies to you as a real estate investor: www.therealestatecpa.com/the-ultimate…te-investors For a free consultation from The Real Estate CPA visit www.therealestatecpa.com/become-client Subscribe to our YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/c/therealestatecpa Like us on Facebook www.facebook.com/realestatecpa/

Gary Beasley is the founder of Roofstock.com, an online marketplace for turnkey rentals. This fascinating innovation has sold thousands of homes so far. You can reach Gary at Roofstock.com.

The Investor Show is an financial literacy and commentary show that features a number of investors, financial experts, professional athletes, business owners and more. The views of each video are not advice. SUPPORT Our Patron: https://www.patreon.com/theinvestorshow Our Merc Store: https://streamlabs.com/royalfinancial... Books: https://amzn.to/2IXCO0P FOLLOW US Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theinvestors... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theinvestor... Podcast: http://www.theinvestorshowtv.com/podc... Twitter: https://twitter.com/royalfinancials Website: www.theinvestorshowtv.com CONTACT Email: prince@childrenfinancialliteracy.org Workshop: http://www.theinvestorshowtv.com/videos/

Buying Rental Homes With Tenants Online With RoofStock CEO Gary Beasley The Investor Show is an financial literacy and commentary show that features a number of investors, financial experts, professional athletes, business owners and more. The views of each video are not advice. SUPPORT Our Patron: https://www.patreon.com/theinvestorshow Our Merc Store: https://streamlabs.com/royalfinancial... Books: https://amzn.to/2IXCO0P FOLLOW US Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theinvestors... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theinvestor... Podcast: http://www.theinvestorshowtv.com/podc... Twitter: https://twitter.com/royalfinancials Website: www.theinvestorshowtv.com CONTACT Email: prince@childrenfinancialliteracy.org

As a leading housing expert often seen on CNN, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, John Burns joins us in this interview to break down what he is currently seeing in the industry due to COVID-19. During this episode, John shares his predictions on the shape of recovery for the economy and how the pandemic will impact the real estate sector. Hosted by Roofstock CEO, Gary Beasley, don't miss out on this opportunity to learn more about: Impact on multi-family rentals and rentership Fundamental changes to the future of housing Predictions on a "reverse J" economic recovery and what that means Factors investors might want to consider If you want to dive into John's research that details the most current and accurate information on the housing industry, visit his site at www.realestateconsulting.com . 

Zach helps investors locate and identify properties that fit their goals; whether that is cash flow or long term appreciation. He explains how diversifying where your investment property is located can be beneficial. On average his clients have investment properties that are 900 miles from their residence. Zach also gives out some great lessons on what to pay attention to when buying properties.  Zach Evanish Real Estate Background: Director of Retail at Roofstock He’s been with Roofstock since the beginning and has worked in the real estate sector for most of his career Based in Oakland, CA Listen to our interview with Roofstock’s CEO, Gary Beasley:   Say hi to him at   Best Ever Book: Think and Grow Rich  Best Ever Tweet: “He said “No”. Go Buy a single-family home, start with that and then from there we can talk about duplexes and fourplexes. How do you think I got these 10-15,  50 unit apartment buildings? I started with a Single Family Home.” - Zach Evanish

Justin and Joe discuss the similarities between Real Estate investing and investing in online businesses. They sit down with Roofstock’s founder, Gary Beasley, for an in-depth interview that covers the founding and scaling of Roofstock, how Roofstock works for both sellers and investors, and the unique challenges that come with running a 2-sided marketplace.

This week, Gary Beasley, the CEO, and co-founder of Roofstock, explains the origin story of his online real estate investment company, as well as the company's evolution throughout the years. Additionally, Beasley discusses America's single-family rental market, which he says continues to attract more and more institutional capital. 

Gary Beasley went with his gut to leave his first job after few months, despite the general rule of thumb his mentors suggested of staying at a company for few years. This was only one of the many successful calculated risks he took to become the CEO and Co-Founder of Roofstock, a technology-enabled marketplace that provides tools to investors for evaluating, buying, and selling single-family rental homes. Beasley shares his experience of how to take charge in one’s non-linear career track and how to manage transitions between varying levels of roles at one’s company. You’ll also hear tips on how to be a valuable CEO at a thriving organization and how to scratch the entrepreneurial itch.  

This is episode 200!  What a milestone! Every week the show host John Siracusa talks with impressive fintech leaders and entrepreneurs, through conversation uncovers the remarkable stories behind them, their creations and the most important topics in fintech. You can subscribe to this podcast and stay up to date on all the stories here on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify and iHeartRadio In this episode the host John Siracusa chats with Gary Beasley from Roofstock. Roofstock, is a marketplace for investors to access single family homes with tenants, adding rental investments to their portfolio. Roofstock's technology centralizes the individual homes in one place and they offer property management services making the asset class easier for investors. The company has attracted VCs such as Bain Capital, Khosla Ventures, NYCA, LightSpeed, QED and a bunch of well known angels such as Marc Benioff to tackle this opportunity.   Tune in and Listen.   Subscribe now on iTunes, Google , Stitcher, Spotify and iHeartRadio to hear Thursday's episode with Chris Cunningham from C2 Ventures.   About the host:   John is the host of the twice-weekly “Bank On It” podcast recorded onsite at offices of Carpenter Group, a creative services agency focused on the financial services industry. He's a highly sought after fintech, VC and financial services industry enthusiast and connector. He's in the center of the fintech ecosystem, keeping current with the ever-innovating industry.   Follow John on LinkedIn, Twitter or on Medium

Every week the show host John Siracusa talks with impressive fintech leaders and entrepreneurs, through conversation uncovers the remarkable stories behind them, their creations and the most important topics in fintech. You can subscribe to this podcast and stay up to date on all the stories here on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify and iHeartRadio In this episode the host John Siracusa chats with Jake Benson from Libra.  Libra provides the service of tax accounting and reporting for institutional crypto investors.  A service that is vital for institutional investors, with recent announcements of JP Morgan, ICE and other projects by traditional institutions launching into the crypto space, this service will be a key component of investing.  Libra has raised $25,000,000 to date from investors such as Liberty City Ventures and XBTO Group.   Tune in and Listen.   Subscribe now on iTunes, Google , Stitcher, Spotify and iHeartRadio to hear next Tuesday's episode with Gary Beasley from Roofstock.   About the host:   John is the host of the twice-weekly “Bank On It” podcast recorded onsite at offices of Carpenter Group, a creative services agency focused on the financial services industry. He's a highly sought after fintech, VC and financial services industry enthusiast and connector. He's in the center of the fintech ecosystem, keeping current with the ever-innovating industry.   Follow John on LinkedIn, Twitter or on Medium

Gary Beasley, CEO and Co-Founder of Roofstock, is on air with Abhi to discuss Roofstock and the services they provide. Roofstock was recently named to the Forbes Fintech 50 as only one of six real estate tech platforms in the country. Gary gets into the business model and how Roofstock makes its money and the due diligence that is necessary to build your future as an investor. Gary and Abhi discuss some important factors to consider when looking for a property. They touch on everything from artificial intelligence to some different markets you can look into when you are getting started. Does it sound like looking outside of your market and investing outside of your market would be stressful? It doesn’t have to be any more stressful than buying a local property as long as you have a good property manager, Gary said. Toward the end of the show, they get into single-family rentals and discuss whether or not it is a good time to invest in these. Gary compares the SFR market today to when he first started in the real estate game and he has some words of wisdom for people looking to invest in SFRs out-of-market. Tune in now to hear from Gary and Abhi! Email Gary@Roofstock.com to get in touch with Gary today!

Connect with Fintech One-on-One: Tweet me @PeterRenton Connect with me on LinkedIn Find previous Fintech One-on-One episodes

Investing in real estate has been around for centuries but it is only in the past few years that it has become possible to do this remotely and at scale. While institutional investors have had lots of options individual investors have been limited, for the most part, to buying homes in their local area. Our […] The post Podcast 172: Gary Beasley of Roofstock appeared first on Lend Academy.

Gary Beasley, co-founder and CEO of Roofstock.com, joins us today to discuss the single-family housing market and the options you have for purchasing. His business makes it possible for you to go online and shop for homes without having to be “in-market.” Gary and Abhi want to make sure you have the data you need to make smarter decisions with rental property. For more information on Gary Beasley and how you can get started with an investment outside your market, visit Roofstock.com  

What if there were a better way to buy and sell rental homes without having to go through the pain of waiting until tenants moved out, letting the home sit empty for months while it sells, losing rent, maintenance costs, and property value?

There are 16 million single-family rental investment properties in the United States. Yet, investors often only know about the limited real estate opportunities in their own local market. While many other investment opportunities have become accessible due to technological advances, real estate has remained largely analog. As the founder and CEO of a tech PR firm, I spend my days working with companies that are developing cutting-edge consumer technologies. I use technology to manage virtually every aspect of my business, as well as my personal life. I also own and manage single-family rental properties. But I realized that I’ve never used a website or app to help me purchase any real estate. Gary Beasley, CEO and Co-Founder of Roofstock is changing that reality. Roofstock is not only making single-family rental investment easy, but it is also giving investors access to markets around the country. In this episode of Unconventional Genius, you’ll hear my conversation with Gary Beasley as he shares an inside look at starting and growing this revolutionary company. What sets Roofstock apart from other Real Estate websites There are several real estate websites out there. So what sets Roofstock apart? Gary Beasley says, “Most real estate sites are primarily advertising vehicles, but Roofstock is a comprehensive marketplace and transaction platform. We enable investors to treat their real estate investments more like stock portfolios, focusing on asset allocation rather than dealing with the hassles of researching and buying vacant homes." The challenge is to help investors feel confident about buying a property they may never physically visit. “No property is perfect, and every one has its own idiosyncrasies,” he says. “The idea is to make it open and transparent so investors can see all the information and select what they want to buy.” Hear more about Roofstocks unique approach to single-family real estate investment during this episode. Upending the traditional single-family real estate investment model Gary and his co-founder Gregor Watson came up with the idea for Roofstock after Gregor tried to sell 500 homes that his fund management firm owned. “The first broker said, ‘Gregor, I don't have 500 signs, I can't possibly sell your 500 homes,'" he laughs. "Others would not list the properties on MLS until the tenants were out. That’s when we realized we could upend the traditional real estate investment model of only buying properties that are vacant." The brokers' collective reluctance to list houses on MLS (Multiple Listing Service), a free service realtors use to search for real estate, did not make any sense to Gary and Gregor. Why would buyers and sellers of single-family rental properties feel compelled to wait until the home is vacant to sell? "You're trying to take advantage of the positive cash-flowing," adds Gary. "It actually costs the investor more money when you consider the fact that no one is paying rent, and the property remains vacant during the marketing process." Hear how Roofstock is changing this flawed approach in my conversation with Gary Beasley. Valuable Lessons Gary Beasley has learned while growing Roofstock While he has experience working for early-stage startup companies, Roofstock is his first turn in the role of founder. There have been many challenges, including balancing supply and demand, hiring new employees that mesh with the company’s culture, and not letting his cautious nature hamstring his vision. "I'm from the Midwest where people are prone to underselling themselves and their ideas, which is the polar opposite of the Valley's 'Change the World' mindset," he says. "What was clear to me is that in order to get the momentum that you need to create these businesses, you really need to think in a big way. We have been thinking big, and it's paid off.” The exciting future of single-family rental investment properties through Roofstock Roofstock is growing rapidly under Gary Beasley’s leadership. They are continuing to hire the right people who can develop and engineer the company’s technical needs that are fundamental to building a tech business. Gary is also constantly looking to increase their geographic footprint. Roofstock’s growth will continue to open up opportunities for single-family rental investors across the country. “One big factor is that the category of real estate fintech is in vogue right now because it’s arguably the largest segment of financial services that is the technology sector has not paid much attention to,” says Gary. “This is a very large addressable market, and we have an innovative business model that brings down a lot of costs and inefficiencies.” Through my conversation with Gary, I learned that there are exciting new opportunities to invest in single-family rental properties by utilizing Roofstock. Listen to Unconventional Genius now to hear more. If you are with a consumer technology company planning to launch a new product at CES, or are even looking ahead to CES 2019, the Max Borges Agency can help you succeed. To learn more, check out: www.maxborgesagency.com. Topics Featured In This Episode [3:40] Gary Beasley details what sets Roofstock apart from other Real Estate sites [4:26] How Roofstock makes investing in properties as simple and secure as possible [9:19] The secret knowledge of Real Estate investment that led to Roofstocks inception [12:04] Gary Beasley explains how they were able to secure investors in the company [16:01] The biggest challenges and lessons in growing Roofstock [22:57] How the future opportunities with Roofstock will benefit customers. [26:02] Insider tips on how to find a good Real Estate investment deal Connect with Guest Name Roofstock Connect With Max Borges www.MaxBorgesAgency.com LinkedIn    

Gary created Roofstock with intentions to attempt to democratize the real estate investing world. Not only does his company and the technology help him with his investing, but also helps anyone who would like to invest in single family homes anywhere in the country. They have already negotiated deals with property management companies, an important aspect when 90% of his investors are investing in markets they don’t live in. If you enjoyed today’s episode remember to subscribe in iTunes and leave us a review! Best Ever Tweet: When we first started buying the single family rental homes, a lot of people thought I was crazy   Gary Beasley Background: CEO and co-founder, Roofstock, first online marketplace for investing in leased single-family rental homes Provides research, analytics and insights to evaluate and purchase independently certified properties at set prices. Served as CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, then the second largest boutique hotel management company Integrated more than $800 million of resort properties for KSL Resorts, and spent five years as CFO of online brokerage pioneer ZipRealty Based in Oakland, California Say hi to him at Best Ever Book: Guns, Germs and Steel   Made Possible Because of Our Best Ever Sponsors: Fund That Flip provides short-term fix and flip loans to experienced investors. If you're looking for a reliable funding partner, their online platform makes the entire process super easy, and they can get you funded in as few as 7 days. They've also partnered with best-selling author, J Scott to provide Bestever listeners a free chapter from his new book on negotiating real estate. If you'd like to improve your bestever negotiating skills, visit to download your free negotiating guide today.

In Episode 63, we welcome Gary Beasley and Gregor Watson, co-founders of Roofstock. If you’re one of our listeners who has written in requesting an episode on rental real estate, be sure not to miss this one. We start with some quick background on the guys, how they came to found Roofstock, and the way in which their company is aiming to make rental real estate investing far easier. In essence, they want to simplify things by separating the “investing” side of rental real estate from the “operational” side of owning a rental home. After the background, Meb starts with a broad, contextual question: So how would a new rental real estate investor start? In the old way, you would identify a market in which you’re interested, look at tons of homes, make some offers, perform due diligence on the ones where the offers have some traction, renegotiation the price and finally buy, then find a property manager to handle operations for you. But the guys then tell us how Roofstock is making this traditional process far simpler. Basically, the home and rents, tenant, and local property manager have already been vetted and approved. You see the various yields ahead of time. This enables investors to buy without all the traditional brain-damage. The guys tell us “Our goal is to make it incredibly easy to get exposure to the asset class (rental real estate).” What follows is a wonderful discussion about some of the traditional challenges with rental real estate, and how Gary and Gregor are helping investors overcome those challenges. The discussion touches on how to compare rental homes across different markets… Evaluating rental homes via gross yield, net yield, IRR, and on an after-tax return basis… How Gary and Gregor arrive at rental home valuations… Financing versus all-cash buying… There are also great tidbits of rental real estate investing wisdom dropped in. For instance, did you know that the total cost to a home-seller to vacate, spiff up, and sell is about 10-12% of the sale price? Did you know that the average cost of a property manager is about 7-8% of collected rents plus a separate leasing fee? Guess what percentage of rental real estate owners live within about an hour of the homes they own? You’ll find out… Later in the episode, Meb asks about the range of yields on the various rental homes featured on Roofstock; specifically, why wouldn’t he invest in a handful of homes yielding, say, 25% versus those yielding just 5%? Is there a parallel here to high-grade bonds and junk bonds? The guys tell us, yes, lower yielders tend to be the safer investments, whereas the higher-yielding homes are a bit riskier. But both potentially have a place in a rental portfolio, depending on the needs/goals of that investor. There’s much more in this episode: the difference between buying single-family homes directly versus investing in a REIT… How to think about starting and building a rental real estate portfolio… How much time an investor would need to commit to being a landlord when not using a property manager… What happens if there’s another 2007… And Gary and Gregor’s single best piece of advice to listeners interested in starting with rental real estate investing. What is it? Find out in Episode 63.

Up until recent years, REITs were the option of choice for investors who wanted to invest in real estate, but lacked a strong professional background in the industry. The economic crisis, low interest rates and the rise of sophisticated trading methodologies led millions of investors to search for alternative ways to search out, invest and manage real estate investments.  Crowd funding became a popular platform for investors to access the market.  Joining the podcast today is Gary Beasley, CEO of Roofstock.   Roofstock is the first online marketplace created exclusively for investing in leased Single-Family Rental homes that generate cash flow day one.  It’s also one of the fasting growing startups and has just announced another $20mm B round participation led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Prior to founding Roofstock, Gary was co-CEO of Starwood Waypoint Residential, one of the leading single family rental companies in the US.

So, is there a way out of the 9-to-5? Um, yes. That’s what you’ll learn in this episode of the Cash Flow Diary podcast from guest Gary Beasley, who took his own experience in real estate to create his own entrepreneurial thing. You’re sure to get answers to your burning questions about jumping into the real estate investing pool.  As you might have guessed, Gary wasn’t always the real estate entrepreneur he is today who started www.Roofstock.com, which is something that allows a whole lot more people to participate in real estate investing than ever before. In Gary’s words, he’s proud to have been a part of building a very disruptive company and makes money for the investors and the employees! But he says another thing that gets him excited about Roofstock is the psychic rewards he receives from knowing he is a part of this brainchild. Gary loves what he’s doing! Coming from a small town in Indiana, he grew up in a traditional, hard-working family where he learned the value of working toward goals. Gary said he feels fortunate not to have grown up with money, because he’s known a number of people who came from money and lacked the motivation to get out there in the real world and do anything special. Gary says that early on he knew the path he didn’t want to take was one that would force him into clipping coupons and working in a company Monday through Friday.  Gary says that you don’t need your own money to get started as an entrepreneur. While you can’t start a company that requires a lot of capital to get it going, if you have a great idea and a well-thought-out business plan, you can capture the interested of angel investors. In fact, in his experience, investors often like the “scrappy entrepreneur” who will work really hard to make the dream become a successful, income-producing reality.  You’ll learn a lot about courage, drive, motivation and what makes an entrepreneur great in this episode. Listen to Gary’s story and how he describes his personal journey to success, what he didn’t like about being in a business vs. helping others start businesses and creating real wealth, and why he changed his path to becoming the entrepreneur he is today. LISTEN NOW.

Gary has spent most of his career building businesses in the real estate, hospitality, and tech sectors. Immediately before Roofstock, Gary was co-CEO of Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust (NYSE: SWAY), one of the leading Single-Family Rental companies in the US. Gary founded Roofstock on the belief that the Single-Family Rental sector has stuck to the old way of doing things for far too long – it's an industry ripe for disruption. Roofstock is the first online marketplace created exclusively for investing in leased Single-Family Rental homes that generate cash flow day one. Created by investors for investors, Roofstock provides research, analytics, and insights to evaluate and purchase independently certified properties. Roofstock turns the old way of investing on its head, bringing transparency and efficiency to create a better way to transact. Buyers access vetted homes with current cash flow. Sellers market homes without lost income or disrupting tenants. Neighborhoods avoid signs in yards which could depress values. It's win-win all around. The most revolutionary aspect of the Roofstock marketplace is enabling investors to treat their real estate investments more like stock portfolios, focusing on asset allocation, rather than dealing with the hassles of researching and buying vacant homes that need to be repaired and leased. Key Takeaways: [1:42] What Roofstock is [4:35] The reality of the single-family rental home investor [7:10] Where Roofstock's inventory comes from [10:00] The 3D Rendering Roofstock does of each home in their inventory, and what benefit it creates [12:15] Who is there in the walk through for the property and how sellers don't have to pay for a lot of things they usually do [15:35] The number of transactions Roofstock has been able to do in their first 18 months [18:45] How the buying process works [22:00] The investment fund Roofstock recently released (and who is managing it) [25:00] Why Roofstock has properties in high end areas with RTVs below 1% [27:30] How the valuations of the property are done [30:10] What Roofstock does to find and certify property managers, and why investing close to where you live is an outdated idea Websites Mentioned: www.roofstock.com

Gary Beasley talks about his innovative service, which strives to standardize single family investment transactions into an online exchange.