- 2:31 – 6:45: Andrew introduces Rent App as a solution to streamline rent payments for landlords and tenants, highlighting its goal to level the playing field in real estate.
- 06:46 – 12:10: Corwyn and Andrew discuss the evolution of real estate technology and its impact on small landlords, emphasizing the need for innovative solutions like Rent App.
- 12:11 – 15:00: Andrew explains how Rent App simplifies transactions for landlords and tenants, making rent payments easier and more efficient.
- 15:01 – 18:30: Listeners are encouraged to engage with Rent App and provide feedback to shape the future of real estate technology.
- Email Address: andrew@rent.app.
- Website: https://rent.app/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewborovsky/
- Contact Number: 843-619-3005
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/exitstrategiesradioshow/
- FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/exitstrategiessc/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxoSuynJd5c4qQ_eDXLJaZA
- Website: https://www.exitstrategiesradioshow.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cmelette/
CORWYN:
Do you want something more? More meaningful moments, opportunities, deeper relationships, and memorable experiences? Do you want to make a difference? If you said yes to any of that, a career in real estate could be the opportunity you’re looking for. Guiding people through one of the most important decisions they ever made. The purchase or sale of their home can be both rewarding and lucrative. Exit Realty’s revolutionary compensation model, training, and technology provides you with the tools you need to start and build your successful real estate career. Call Exit Realty Lowcountry Group today at 843-619-3005, that’s 843-619-3005 or visit join.exitlowcountry.com and make your exit today.
Good morning and great morning guys. Welcome to another fabulous episode of Exit Strategies Radio Show. I’m your host, Corwyn J Melette, broker and owner of Exit Realty Lowcountry group, and partner in Exit Realty New Horizons in Columbia. So guys look, y’all know we do around here, if you don’t tell, gotta learn today. Our mission here at this show is very simple. That is to empower our community through financial literacy, and real estate education, guys, we’re legacy builders. That’s what we do. So I want to give a quick shout out to all those folks who listen to us from everywhere. You guys are holding us down locally, you’re bumping into us in the store, in the streets and other places and telling us that you listen, that you tune into the show faithfully. And I’m so humbled and honored for that for those of you listening abroad listenership across the country and around the globe, guys, thank you so much for tuning in. And most importantly, your feedback is always appreciated. Because our mission, again, is to empower and we cannot do that without people, without you. So thank you so much. So guys, today, we have been on this thing, and we have been writing this thing. I mean, we have been on it. We have been holding it down for you. And we’ve been bringing the best guests. The best content, the best information to you here on this show. And today is no different. I’m very humbled, and I feel very esteemed plus to have landed with us today. Andrew Borovsky, he is the CEO of REnt app. Andrew, how are you doing today?
ANDREW:
Awesome. Thanks for having me. Really excited to talk to you.
CORWYN:
You’re quite welcome. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to be here with us today. So I am super excited. I tell people Andrew all the time that not necessarily cutting edge. There’s some people that when the knife come down, I mean, they whisk as they get their beard shaved or whatever, they get cut. I’m not quite there. But I’m close enough where I still get the breeze. I am so excited to talk with you about what it is that you guys are doing. But if we can start with this, if you don’t mind, give our listeners high level overview of who you are, what it is that you do.
ANDREW:
Awesome.Yeah, where do I start? I’m a very typical sort of techie. I’ve been in technology about 20 years since the.com days, if you can believe it. First half of my career I spent working for companies. So I started my career at a company called Adobe, which you probably have heard of. It gave the world acrobat. But yeah, so you know, worked a bunch there. And then actually left at Adobe, and joined Apple worked there briefly as well, a couple of years around the second iPhone. So it was called the iPhone 3G, which the first iPhone to have 3G, but it’s actually technically iPhone 2. And so also focused on user experience. The second iPhone was the first one, we actually could synchronize over the air. If you recall that many. people don’t remember the fact that the original iPhone had to plug it into iTunes to get your contacts onto it. Like it was a cord, it looked like an iPod. So that was a kind of a cool transition that I was a part of. And then I imagined like many of your listeners, at some point, you’re tired of working for somebody. And you’ve often to try and build your own thing. We had a couple of folks also from people that I worked with for a decade at Apple and Adobe, we got together and we started the company wanted to build some products in retrospect, a completely insane idea. At the time. We also started in 2008, which was like the company was started between Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. The beauty of being in your 20s is you’re completely oblivious to what’s happening in the world. He’s like, Yeah, financial crisis, lateral. Ignorance is bliss there. We built a great company that we ended up selling to Square familiar or some of your listeners will probably be familiar to Square which is like the company known as creating the ubiquitous white reader. You plug it into your iPhone, you can take credit cards. And I think there’s some parallels to a lot of the things that are exciting to you, which is that Square was created with this idea that you can empower what they defined as the micro merchants so what is the micro module basically, millions of people in the United States ran a business. It could have been anything. They were hustling. So they were selling vegetables on a remarket, lemonade stand. I don’t know, dog walkers, personal trainers, babysitters, right. And the truth of the matter is that they relied on this for the livelihood, but they could not accept credit cards. And the reason they weren’t accepting credit cards is because the big banks had a very specific definition of what a small businesses. So if you were, again, a dog walker, and you walked into your local Bank of America branch, and you said, Look, I want to take credit card payments, so I need one of those terminals. And they would say, Okay, well prove to us your business. And then most people would just not meet the bar, they expected you to have a place and employees and all this stuff. And even if you were lucky enough to get approved as a merchant, you would have to dish out $300, typically on this Verifone terminal that was super crappy. And that’s how you accept the payments and the payments, you would pay, you know, three to 5% for every swipe. So Square was founded on this premise that there’s this huge group of people out there, there are millions of people out there who are hustling building businesses, and they’re being held back by their ability to take credit cards, and now was Square Reader was free, anyone can get started, you would download the app, and you would get basically approved in minutes. And empowered I mean, Square grew to 5 million small merchants within first two, three years. And this mission of economic empowerment is still what drives Square today. So that’s why we joined and that was kind of my foray into financial technology with an eye towards can we use financial technology to empower folks that are being left on the side by these very kind of institutions. And actually, funny enough that extended through to the product ended up working on within square, which was cash on CashApp is now is one of the biggest what’s called a neobank in the United States, about 55 million customers. And also started on the same idea that there was a huge number of people in the United States were underbanked, because they didn’t qualify to open a bank account. And CashApp made it very easy for people to download the app and you get a bank account. And you start small. And you start with just moving money around again hustling, and overtime, maybe you have an employer and now you have direct deposit. And then maybe you want to trade some stocks. And maybe you get a debit card attached to it and you want to earn some rewards. And now all the way through to like free tax filings. That’s the second half of my career really focused on financial technology. And I think rent app in particular, like were focused on today is continuing this a hobby of mine, which is again, I think this is where we really connect is that let’s look at real estate, the United States. The headline over the last couple of years has been Blackstone, Blackrock coming in and buying up homes, from individual homeowners and in renting and back to them. So there’s a kind of story which I think is again, are kind of history repeating itself, which is these large private equity firms that have access to capital to lawyers that have access to really good data are they basically have an unfair technological advantage over your typical homeowner, not to mention somebody that wants to actually generate income, from rental properties, etc, And so we looked at, again, some numbers here where you have Okay, a third of all real estate in the United States is for rent. That’s out of 140. There’s about 145 million homes in the US. So about 45 million are rental properties. And what’s really incredible is half of all rental properties in the US are what’s called Mom and Pop landlords. So people have two or three properties. And actually America is built on this real estate ownership in the United States and rental property ownership United States has been like built on the back of little guy, but that trends are changing. And so it was really interesting to us is that parallel to Square are there technological disadvantages for small individual homeowners or rental property owners where if we fix them, we give them the tools to take on the big guys to resuming. The company’s goal here is we call about building a real estate focused Financial Network, which is a really big broad thing. But within rents specifically, we looked at this the rent payment space. And what’s really crazy as within this Mom and Pop demographic, more than half of all payments in the United States are made with cash, which is crazy, and not for the reasons you would think we’re always there like a shadow economy, our people dodging taxes have done so much research. And it’s not the case at all. It’s that there aren’t actually simple, easy ways for people to move money from bank to collect rent effectively. And everyone falls back on cash and cheque as the things that they know. They’re analog, they’re slow, they’re full of friction. They’re not super safe. And that’s what refers product rent up is really focused on that which is I believe created this tool that makes it whether you paying rent or collecting rent free, it’s very easy to do. And we’re starting to spread it now to that group of small homeowners and saying guys, like there’s a new way there’s a better way to manage this business. So that’s my whole journey and it was a lot but it was good.
CORWYN:
So Andrew, let me ask you a couple of questions in here, because I’m fascinated by this basically. And please forgive how I referenced this or say this, but you basically just created cash out for the landlord. So what we’re talking about now is a tenant being able to pay the landlord more effectively, more efficiently, and more quickly now, being able to just do it from the device, which again, if they have cash app or something similar, they can connect that account. And this literally pay the landlord. But the neat thing about what you guys are doing, and I’m fascinated by this, man, I really see I see this blowing up. So listeners, guys, y’all pay attention to this. If you’re a tenant, great. If you are a landlord, great. If you attend, it may be even better. Make sense? I just rolled that all the way around, because you guys are reporting to credit bureaus. Am I correct?
ANDREW:
That’s right. Yeah, this is something that people have started to talk about a lot in earnest. Very recently, it really driven by the fact that more people are renting longer. Because of this kind of macro situation we’re in where there’s a huge affordability crisis in terms of being able to afford your first home, that’s not being helped with the fact that the rates are super high, go across the board. A situation is not great if you’re a young person, or sort of a couple or small, young family, and you’re trying to buy your first home. And one of the problems with it is of course, the longer you wait, the fewer opportunities you have. It’s a cycle right, the fewer opportunities, you have to build credit, because one of the things that happens with homeownership and paying your mortgage is that you’re building credit, which makes it more likely for you to move into a bigger home or maybe buy your first rental property. So people are looking at this and saying that doesn’t make any sense. And I spent the first half of my life paying rent, it’s half my paycheck. It’s the biggest payment I make every month I do it diligently. There’s good reasons for doing that. I don’t want to get kicked out. But yet you don’t get any credit. So we looked at the space. And I have to call up the credit agencies, I think, see the problem. They’re part of the solution, in fact, right. So they’ve been looking at this and it’d become more open to allowing, you know, to do this, there’s very stringent requirements around how you do this, it’s not easy to do, per se, there’s both technical and regulatory problems two reporting that we’ve solved effectively, right and took the time to solve. So I’m very proud to say the interesting thing is, it is such a hot space. And it’s meaningfully difficult to solve, if there’s a lot of services out there that charge money for this. So a lot of times, you’ll now see, you can report rent. And I’ve seen at a typical cost, like 499 a month, all the way through to I’ve seen things like $150 a year. So it’s an important enough thing that people are paying money for it. And we thought, again, I think part of our culture is like the core service should be free. We’re trying to remove friction out of the system, we’re trying to remove these out of the system. And so we’re rolling this out for free. And yet, you just get it automatically as long as you pay rent, with rent up, we will report it to agencies, you have to opt in obviously, not everyone wants that. Once you opt in, we will do it for you.
CORWYN:
Okay, so you guys are reporting based upon two things based upon whatever the rent due date. So in order for them to be able to report then obviously, you got to have whatever the rent due date is, as well as on the other side of it. You also have to have confirmation, I imagine from the landlord that says, Yes, this is correct. And as long as they’re making all those payments on time, then you’re reporting them as being in a one time payments, meaning they’re making the payment prior to the 30 day a month mark. If they get to the 30 day mark, or pass the 30 day mark, then at that point in time, are you reporting the derogatory? Or are you only promoting that one time payments?
ANDREW:
We are reporting payments made. And that’s basically the extent of unemployment is because the credit agencies are also trying to figure out how to manage this. There’s a lot of interesting questions like how do you validate this as a real lease that this is actually you’re not just paying your mom or your friend. And so we have some special tech there that sort of validates that and we’ve had to work with the credit agencies to get them to approve what we’re doing as the right process for it. I think it’s actually quite interesting what we did. But as it stands right now, essentially, a lot of the your credit is a blackbox. Unfortunately, you can understand why they don’t want to expose a lot of how things work, because then people game the system. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad actors in the space. And so what we’re doing is we create a very simple construct, which is one of the great things about rent app is we have auto pay, so you set it and forget it. That’s generally how rent payment should work. This is where again, we come out ahead against a lot of other platforms. A good example is like Zell, it has a couple of issues. But one of the obvious ones right off the bat is if you’re paying rent with Zell, you have to schedule it every month for its rent if you set it and forget it. And once you’ve created a construct on auto pay, and it can be 12 months, it could be six months, it doesn’t really matter. But once you have a payment plan, as long as you’re making payments, according to a payment plan, the credit reporting agencies like cool, okay, that’s data, because if you think about it, that’s kind of how it works when you’re making car payments, or when you’re making credit card payments. You know what they’re looking at a history of payments. Now, thankfully, we’ve figured out a way to make rent payments qualify for that as well, which should of course.
CORWYN:
that’s awesome. So you’ve taken all this knowledge from these years and just okay, boom, this will be on right here. And you’ve integrated on the real estate space which there are a tremendous amount of landlords who are really struggling with how to do this. You got tenants Cash App and you got tenants sending you Zell, you got someone still owes right when a tenant wants to record of it, older tenants or tenants that are more like rigid, they’re gonna go down to the bank with a check or something or money order and deposit. And that way they can get some type of receipt that it was, quote, unquote, paid. So nobody can say, hey, this later on to them, but you built something that kind of appeases and works for everybody. That’s what it sounds like to me.
ANDREW:
Yeah, you framed it perfectly, maybe I can give you a quick kind of overview of where most people find themselves. And I imagine most of your listeners as well, is that sort of like, if you have one or two properties, which the vast majority kind of a long tail of US landlords are actually that 123 properties. And that’s your sweet spot. Generally speaking, you’re not going to invest a lot of infrastructure into collecting payments there. And so you fall back on what you know, which is the simplest thing that the lowest common denominator user experiences cash. But of course, the problem of cash is like not having a record of digital payments, it really hurts both sides, at the baseline, of course, because if there’s a problem with any kind of dispute of any kind, you can’t prove a renter can’t prove it, they pay to make the payment. You see this all the time, if you watch like daytime court shows, right, like people are arguing that I make the payment that I received the payment, that’s good baseline. But then if you go beyond just the basic kind of dispute problem, if you’re building a business as a landlord, you have to show cashflow, because that’s how you grow and you get approved for that loan, because you’re going to be scaling yourself and building yourself who’s showing a record of monetization or record of income or revenue, and then you’re going to be like I am running this rental business, and it’s doing really well and you want to record of that, and cash just does not cut it. For their tenants, it’s the same issue on the building credit side. So both sides are actually trying to do the same thing with which they’re trying to grow. And digital payments is the base of that. And so you want to switch from cash and cheque as soon as possible. But the problem is, in the United States, the way our banking system works is, there really isn’t an easy way to move money digital, you go down two routes, you either go into this p2p world, which is peer to peer payments. So CashApp Venmo, which unfortunately, they’re not supposed to be used for running a business. So what happens is, after you start collecting money, as a landlord, your business, eventually you’ll be slapped with a 2% fee. So unfortunately, how it works is it’s treated basically by the banking system with a credit card. And so it’s not actually a great way to do it, you don’t build credit, there’s no auto pays other issues with it. But that’s the problem. Zell has free, but very low limits, a lot of people have to split payments into multiple payments, again, no auto pay, no credit building. And then what you have is, and I think a lot of your listeners, I imagine have seen this, which is you go down this property management side, and property management, there’s some great solutions out there. The problem is a lot of them have not seen traction, because they’re kind of overkill, they tend to be sort of their sweet spot. And they’re going up to the big landlords. So they’re building all these features for people who have like 10 units or 20 units. And so this is where I think rent app, what we’re trying to do is vast majority people are between these two systems. And rent app is super easy. You’ll see the easiest software to use. If your tenant downloads the app, they send the payment as a landlord, you don’t download the app, you don’t create an account, you just hit a button it says accept payment, you tell us where to put it in your bank account and goes there automatically from that point onwards. So really spent a lot of time simplifying that piece. And so I think we hit this perfect sweet spot is fundamentally better than cash and checks. And yet not nearly as complicated by with his hidden fees as a property management software. I think for the vast majority of folks who are hustling out there and building their first second third property. We’re like the solution.
CORWYN:
That is a sweet spot, Andrew, because you guys are right there. And you’re able to vital resources. I’m over here thinking okay, wow, yeah. How can we look to integrate this to make life simple, because obviously, that is something that doesn’t take much for it to get extremely complex or what have you, because you’re trying to figure out how to check all these buttons, and these boxes, but you guys made a saint and got into one platform that does all those things that benefits the consumer, the tenant and the Democrats, the consumer as the landlord, everybody’s winning, and the money is getting where it needs to go. So I love that. So rent app is this thing available like now can are available now load it.
ANDREW:
So very easy. It’s rent.app, similar to cash.app, which was my prior company, but rent.up very simple to get started. And if you’re a property owner, and you want some more complex, you go to rent out app, and you’ll see a link to kind of like, Hey, I’m actually a property manager. And so you can see a little bit more content that’s focused on its rent.app/landlord, if that’s interesting to you, but very easy to use, very easy to get started completely free. There’s no catch. I should also say we have like all these other things. We have a phone number you can call if you have a problem, and it’s real people. And also I encourage your listeners like I’m here like we’re building this law We have a small team. We love this group, like we love our customers, both tenants and landlords, we love this idea of empowering the little guy to become the big guy and take on the private equity companies of the world. And so like Andrew at rent.app, email me, like, I’m happy to chat, happy to get on a call with people, the success of this product is going to be based on like me, getting in there with our customers and learning what the problems are and what we should be building more.
CORWYN:
That is awesome. So Andrew, look, thank you, thank you, thank you for being all with us today. So I have this thing. And I almost feel like it may be a waste to ask you because you have definitely done some major things thus far in your life when you were talking about getting in during the .com. And all that stuff. And everything that you started between Lehman and everything. By me, let me that thought was man at that age, oftentimes, we just feel we’re invincible. And we just go into anything. Without fear, we just take the leap, because that’s what we believe. But I’m so grateful. And to me, it’s humbling that you took the leap, man and you keep leaping, you keep jumping. That’s why you keep doing these things that you’re doing, which is starting these amazing companies to benefit people to make it easier on people. And then once you got it, then okay, let’s do this in another genre, let’s do it in another realm. So thank you for being that. But my question that I’m going to ask, I call it that 20/20, if you had the highest starting to go back and look, what would you have done differently, that would have accelerated this whole process for you?
ANDREW:
Oh, man, you know, I really feel like we all end up exactly where we need to be. So it’s hard to say, look, I’ve had successes, I’ve had failures, and all of them have built up to I think making me effective at this moment. And I have many more of those things to go forward. I think that you know, the most important thing I was told this, I now speak to a lot of I’m in my 40s I talked to a lot of people in their 20s The worst thing you could possibly be doing is standing still. That’s what it boils down to, are we standing still, the air is still right. When you start walking, the air starts to move past you. And you just gotta take the step. And they say Hindsight is everything. Because that’s absolutely true. We won’t always make sense to you why you’re going in this direction. But everything will make perfect sense in retrospect, and just gotta keep moving.
CORWYN:
Wow, that is profound. Man. I’d take part of that. And use that. Because I love that I’m big on mindset. That’s something Andrew on this show that we talked about oftentimes with our listeners. And when the message that we want to get in front of them is about that, Randy, you can’t always be completely fearless. But they’re all calculated risks and things that you can do an exercise you can take. So Andrew, thank you. Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to be here on the show. Thank you for sharing with our listeners. rent.app. Appreciate you.
ANDREW:
Thanks, Corwyn, appreciate you inviting me over and really a huge fan of what you’re doing.
CORWYN:
I appreciate that. Thank you so much. So for our listeners, look, y’all got some good information today. So this what I need y’all to go to rent.app, I need y’all to check it out. If you are a landlord, look at it. Talk to your tenants about it. If you are a tenant, and you want to make life a little bit easier to talk to your landlord about it. And any questions you have to reach and find Andrew, he just put it out there, he gave his whole email address, but let’s add it up. So please look for this episode. And so make sure that you guys are connecting and getting to Andrew to his team to give them feedback on how to improve this or what things that you’d like for it to do. So his him and his team, his Think Tank, his if you will, his massive brain over there can then work on getting that thing done. That’s why you have a team, you always keep the greater people around you so that you can do the greatest things. All right. So guys, look, this has been an amazing show. It’s been a good time. So make sure your let your listeners, fellow listeners, your friends, your family, church members, whoever know about today’s episode, and how they can connect with us online. So one final time again, Andrew, thank you for being a part of the Exit Strategies radio Show Family. I’m deeply humbled and honored that you took time out to be with us today. So for our listeners, looking at all know what I say, y’all know how I feel. You know, I always put the two of the things together, I intertwine them and make them do this thing right here. Which is I say to you, I love you.
I love you. I love you. I’m gonna see you guys out there in those streets.