Customer Interactions and Observations

Interactions with End User / Customer

With some experience in real estate investing, so far we have taken into account the type of service we would like to see in the market and is currently lacking: A two sided marketplace with real estate owners on one side and property managers on the other. 

Our game plan is to reach out to real estate owners and investors of small properties who are looking to invest and property managers who have additional capacity but may be struggling to find new properties or generally don’t want to sign-on one new property at a time because it doesn’t appear to be worth it to them. 

Customer Observations & Curious-to-Discover

One on hand, we are curious to see whether real estate owners and investors are comfortable with forming a co-operative and what that would look like to them: 

Would it be worth giving up some control for the opportunity to get heavily discounted and reliable property management services? How much of the payments, management, and other services the pain points for them? 

It would also be interesting to see how connected the investors want to be, since there is not currently much of a network available to new/small-time real estate investors. Perhaps they would be interested in pooling capital together (The Able Lending model) from cash or sales of properties and form partnerships to scale up to bigger projects: the traditional real estate dream is to start with a single family property and continue moving along the spectrum to a multi-family, then garden style apartment building, and to a mega complex and/or mixed asset types.

On the other hand, we are curious with the perspective that property managers might have on such a platform. Clearly, those who have been willing to take on small properties and charge the higher premium may not be keen on the idea; then again, if it means more volume and more profit ultimately, perhaps they will be open to such an arrangement. This could also reduce the sales & marketing expenses they are currently paying to find business.