The a16z Show - Real Estate in a Pandemic: Renters and Landlords (Part 2)
Episode Date: June 17, 2020This episode is the second in a two-part series that examines the pandemic’s impact on real estate. Part 1 focused on prospective home buyers, sellers, and existing homeowners. This episode, Part 2,... addresses renters and landlords.The conversation with host Lauren Murrow features a16z general partner Connie Chan, whose experience as a landlord herself has fueled her interest in residential real estate and technology; Richard Green, the director of USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate, and Adena Hefets, the CEO of Divvy Homes, a company that allows people to build up equity while renting a home, with the option to eventually buy it.We begin with the pressures on renters—and the uncertainty around federal relief measures—as well as the cascading effects on mom-and-pop landlords. Then we turn to the outlook for prices and volume in the rental market, particularly in large cities like New York and San Francisco. Finally, we discuss the opportunity for tech to solve outdated and inefficient processes for both renters and landlords.For more a16z content on real estate and proptech, visit a16z.com/realestate. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript
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Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Lauren Murrow. This episode is the second in a two-part series that examines the pandemic's impact on real estate. Part one focused on prospective homebuyers, sellers, and existing homeowners. While this episode, Part 2, addresses renters and landlords. The conversation features A16Z general partner Connie Chan, whose experience as a landlord herself has fueled her interest in residential real estate and technology. Professor Richard Green,
the director of USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate, and Adina Heffitz, CEO of Divi Homes,
a company that allows people to build up equity while renting a home with the option to eventually
buy it. We begin with the pressures on renters and the uncertainty around federal relief measures,
as well as a cascading effect on mom-and-pop landlords. Then we turned to the outlook for prices
and volume in the rental market, particularly in large cities like New York and San Francisco.
Finally, we discussed the opportunity for tech to solve outdated and inefficient processes
for both renters and landlords.
The first voice you'll hear after mine is Professor Richard Greens, followed by Edina.
So nearly a third of the country's 40 million renters didn't make the rent payment on time in April,
around 20% didn't make payment in May.
That's according to the National Multifamily Housing Council.
So can you put that into context for us?
What is the norm and are these numbers,
be expected given the scope of unemployment?
Actually, the May numbers are not that far off of what a normal month is.
So when they give that number, that's rent payments as of the first week of the month.
So you never see 100% come in the first week.
You can explain that difference between the collection rate at the beginning of April
and the normal rate, just based on unemployment.
And a big difference between April and May is that our creaky unemployment systems hadn't
gotten money actually out to people yet in April, whereas they've actually got okay at getting
money out of people in May, which is allow them to pay the rent. And we saw this during the global
financial crisis as well. People show that they really want to pay the rent if they can't.
I think what Richard said is exactly correct. It was actually by the end of the month only a slight
delta. With regard to how it ties to unemployment, unemployment tends to be higher in renters than it does
with homeowners call it close to 20% unemployment amongst renters. And so if people get unemployment
benefits, stimulus checks, if they have a way to make their payment, then they do. And what we're finding
is that there's this delay in when folks can actually make their payment, but ultimately they are
trying to fully meet those obligations. So should we be then encouraged by the data? Or perhaps as
coronavirus lingers and stimulus payments have gone out, do we expect that number of renters unable to
make payments to grow. How do we think about it going forward?
Well, I worry about a cliff coming. So these supplemental unemployment benefits expire in July.
Congress has yet to pass a law that will continue those supplemental payments. If that actually
happen, then I think the rental sector will be in really good shape for a while. But if Congress
doesn't come back and pass something, then I think we are going to face real problems for the end of the
summer this year.
Yeah, I'm worried not just on the renter payment side, but potentially, if you think about
all the folks who are doing short-term rentals beforehand, who then started putting their units
on market for long-term rentals and they're not getting takers, that dynamic is not getting
captured in that statistic.
How do you anticipate this crisis shaping the rental market in the short term?
In particular, I'm interested in volume and prices.
Well, it certainly slowed down the pipeline of new supply in two dimensions.
One is there are places that new construction is banned.
There are other places where it's going on but with social distancing.
Now, the interesting thing is when I talked to builders, and these are apartments a month ago,
they were saying it was slowing down their construction by about 50%.
Now they figured out how to now return to production speed.
that's quite similar to what it was before COVID.
But that by itself, of course,
slows down the pipeline of new supply.
And the other thing is what developers are telling me
is nobody is acquiring land right now to build on.
And the reason is nobody knows what the price of land should be at the moment.
So I think there's no way around it.
You're going to see a slowdown in supply of new stuff
for the next 18 to 24 months for sure.
Meaning less supply is so prices should hold.
What was striking to me is during a global financial crisis, you look at a place like Los Angeles, which was disproportionately hit.
You saw rents fall, but they fell by only about 10%.
And you never saw a big increase in vacancy.
And that's because, again, they're just weren't enough units available.
The other interesting dynamic, if you look at rental pricing falling already in some early cities, is that's based off a very small end.
And you have to also remember we're in the midst of COVID, where some folks, even if they want to move out, are just,
not dealing with the process of moving?
It's sort of inevitable that as people are unemployed, they're going to start moving out
of places.
And so we'll see vacancies rise and rents fall as a result of that.
I think we have to get a little bit more specific.
You need to be more nulons.
Do I think that multifamily rent might fall?
Yes.
Do I think that single family?
I've actually, what we've seen is a flight from multifamily to single family homes during
the COVID period.
And so rent and supply and demand fundamentals within those two different sectors might vary pretty significantly.
It also depends on what metro you're located in.
Where we saw some rents soft in an area like Dallas, we actually weren't seeing that at all in Atlanta.
It's very supply dependent.
So different metros are going to have different amounts in supply coming on market.
We're seeing prices hold up on the single family side, on the owner's side.
And I think it's because nobody's being forced to sell their house now because they have forbearance on their
loan so you don't have this flood of people trying to get out. And as a result of that,
you know, sales are down like 60%, but so are listings. So I think both on the existing side
and the new side, yeah, there's going to be a substantial reduction of supply for a while.
But I'd be curious what Edina has to say about that. Let's say three months goes by and there's a wave
of evictions. And so there's a ton of rentals that are all available and there's not a ton of demand.
well, then rental prices will probably drop.
If that's not the case, if stimulus continues,
if landlords are willing to work with their tenants
and there's a limited amount of supply of rentals,
I think what we'll actually see an increase in demand for rentals,
in which case rents will hold.
My personal belief is we're seeing more demand for single-family rentals.
It is harder than ever to get a mortgage.
The average FICO of individuals who are applying for DIVI has gone up significantly.
We actually track the percent of people who have mortgage declines
on their credit report who are applying to DIGO of individuals,
and that's actually gone up pretty significantly since COVID has started.
Basically, people cannot access a mortgage.
And so they're starting to turn to rentals to try to access getting into a single-family
home and moving away from multifamily rentals.
And there's going to be, I think, a real problem because people are going to see their
FICO scores get trashed.
Now, if they have forbearance on their mortgage, that's going to be fine because services
have been told not to report that as credit a bet.
But renters who default on their leases, that can be a credit event.
And on the other side, we're seeing lenders do what lenders always do,
which is behave pro-cyclically and tighten up credit standards for getting a mortgage.
I think we're now in a world of a basically $7.60, $5 or above to get a home mortgage.
I want to touch on a point that the majority of those who have lost income due the pandemic
are renters rather than homeowners and rentals.
Ventures typically have lower incomes and savings and typically less job stability than homeowners to begin with.
So for that reason, this has been called more of a renter's crisis than a homeowners crisis.
At the same time, federal relief efforts have thus far primarily focused on homeowners.
For example, the CARES Act gave homeowners the ability to deferred mortgages.
But the majority of renters are not covered by that.
So if this is indeed impacting renters more so than homeowners, why this skewed relief?
I think it's important to note that in general owners have been favored over renters, not
just through this crisis.
One of the reasons for that is homeowners vote in greater numbers than renters do.
Not only are there more owners than renters, but among those that are owners, they're more
likely to go out and vote the renters.
I think that has implications for a wide swap of land use policy decisions we see along with
subsidy policies.
Only about a quarter of renters who are eligible for a subsidy actually get one.
I think thinking about changing that balance and how we subsidize housing would be a worthwhile
thing, not just at this time of crisis.
This is a really, really hard time on a lot of consumers, and we get it.
No parents should have to decide to bring food on the table for their kids and paying their rent.
And I'm a landlord, so sympathetic to the landlord side, I think it's important to be sympathetic
to what the tenant's going through.
I would love for the government to backstop all rent payments and take care of that
parent.
That would be ideal.
but the government did cause evictions, and they also closed down all the court systems.
They did encourage landlords to work with tenants and to accept partial payments to waive all laypies,
and they gave guidance that they should encourage credit counseling and offer to pay for that.
So if you choose not to pay your rent, for the last two months, there is nothing your landlord could have done.
They couldn't evict you, but the stimulus check that did go out, the point was that it would be used for bills and your payments that came due, including your rents.
And Dina makes a good point, which is when the short term evictions are on hold in many cities,
it's obvious many renters are facing hardships and thus activists and politicians are calling
for rent forgiveness. But landlords with mortgages are still responsible to the banks who
answer to investors. So what does that impact on landlords?
So as a private citizen or a corporate, you still have obligations that you have to meet,
even if that person is not paying rent. Now, I'm not saying that we should be pushing tenants
towards making payments who are going through financially hard times. But I think that there is this
balance to realize that landlords are not eating up a ton of profits. If you look at profits by landlords,
it's insanely thin margins, right? If you look at least at single-family rentals, single-family is
98% owned by mom and pops. And it's not the government that owns that. It's individuals, right?
It's not wealthy corporations generally. And so there was no way in which the government
without providing some sort of a stipend, just say, hey, renters, you don't have to pay,
because the owners were private citizens, right?
And so it's this fine balance between figuring out how to provide relief for renters,
but then also recognizing that landlords have these fixed costs that they can't get out of.
I think that's a good point.
So much of my interest in PropTech comes from being a landlord.
And a lot of those landlords, because it's an investment property,
they're not necessarily eligible for those home equity loans that banks will give much more easily to an owner-occupied home.
So a lot of these landlords who do need that money for maintenance,
they are now looking to even hard money lending options just to have that bridge for that short-term
cash flow.
I think a lot of people imagine that landlords are people who sit on their couches just
watching the money roll on in.
It takes a lot of work to be a landlord.
So when you're asking people to take no compensation for their work and they don't get
unemployment benefits for that, that's asking a lot of people,
along with the fact that they need to pay their insurance,
and they need to pay their property taxes,
and they need to pay their maintenance.
62% of rental properties are owned by people
for whom that is the only rental property that they own.
So, yeah, the idea that you just say to a very narrow group of people
that you need to bear the burden of this crisis by yourself
seems on its face pretty unfair.
It seems to me, again, the best way to get at this is you do it directly,
You give the tenants the resources they need to pay.
And then mandate that it's used for rent.
And then you say to landlords, in exchange for this,
you're talking to your tenants and you're not kicking them out.
And you're certainly not being opportunistic.
We hope, of course, that as we start to see things open back up,
then employment bounce back and people will be able to pay their rents.
But if that's not the case, and this continues,
or in the fall there's another wave.
And tens and millions of tenants are not.
paying rent, then I am interested in that cascading effect and what solutions you propose.
Well, this is, I think, where there's a lot of data. What happens in a recession to rent prices
and people's ability to pay? Yeah, so house prices are much more volatile than rents are.
And so rents fall, but not by that much. And don't they bounce back quite quickly as well?
Yeah, they do. In Los Angeles, after the global financial crisis, we were back on our previous
path about three years after. I don't want to extrapolate that what happened during the last recession,
which was a housing led recession, is going to be what happens during this recession. What we saw during
the last recession was actually quite a bit different, but during the last recession as unemployment spiked,
we saw that there was a pretty high correlation with home prices and home prices started to drop.
But you have to live somewhere. You either rent or you own or you live with a family member.
We actually saw a flight to rentals. And so if you actually look on a month-over-month basis, going back almost
as far as we have data across the U.S., there were only like five to ten months,
literally in the history of time, that rents actually declined.
And most of them were during the recession where it stayed roughly flat.
So I would say rents do actually tend to hold because during these times of recessions,
people can't actually access a mortgage.
And so they end up turning a bit more towards rental invitation homes.
And all the major single family restarted during the Great Recession-wide,
because they saw this, which is rents held even during downturns.
But now we have to get two regional differences.
And here's why sort of the places with 20% unemployment,
which is what we're talking about here,
you know, Las Vegas did see rent declines.
The inland empire of California saw rent declines.
Arizona saw rent declines.
I agree with that.
But it is metro-specific for sure, yes.
I think the last recession didn't hit unemployment
in the way that this current situation is hitting unemployment too.
Right.
Which is why I think Vegas is the place to look at
because Vegas did see an unemployment rate of 20%.
20% the last recession. That is fair. I actually recently ran a correlation between home prices and
unemployment during the last recession. And it's actually like an offset of about two years,
where your unemployment would determine your home price two years later. And I agree with Richard
completely. When you do look metro-specific, there could be more nuanced. So this is something we've
all circled around, but I want to pose the question, which is, do you anticipate the pandemic will
have lasting effects on the rental market? I think 10 years from now, I think,
will be fine. But I do think in the near term, again, very metro-specific, things could get shaken
up quite a bit. Yeah, I think for three to five years, tall buildings are going to have a really
hard time of it. I think in the absence of the vaccine, I think any kind of density, particularly for
Americans, is going to be unappealing. I think the single-family rental market makes a lot of
sense to me. But I think tall buildings with elevators for the next three to five years, that's
going to be a tough segment. And then in 10 years, you think it's going to be a wash? Yeah, I think people
in 10 years forget. One of the things that I find miraculous is the world's great cities
seem to overcome anything, not immediately, but ultimately. I mean, the ultimate example was
Tokyo's GDP was 90% wiped out after World War II. Japan could have reorganized its economy,
all over the islands.
What happened?
It all came back to Tokyo.
You look at Lower Manhattan,
it lost 150,000 jobs in the immediate aftermath of 9-11.
And within six years, all of those jobs
were back in Lower Manhattan.
People didn't care they need to be back.
So yeah, I think 10 years from now,
unless we have another event like this between now and then,
New York will be New York and San Francisco,
will be San Francisco.
The other thing is marriage is an important predictor of other people,
owners or renters.
And one of the reasons that millennials are not big owners is because their marriage rate
is just very low relative to past generation, even controlling for how old they are.
We have way more 30-somethings who've never been married than ever before in American history.
And maybe this is a little fanciful, but I'm wondering if the pandemic is getting in the way of
dating, how do people date right now?
And could that delay marriage even further?
And that would have a positive impact on the rental market.
The thought is trust my mind.
There's a thing called Zoom dating now.
Everyone does it.
It's love in the time of Corona.
Lots of my friends are starting Zoom relationships.
So you're arguing this could actually speed up marriage?
I'm not making that argument, no.
I'm just saying people have found ways to make it work.
Adina, what's your perspective?
Do you anticipate the pandemic will have lasting effects on the rental market?
If you think we're going to have a vaccine by January,
and you think the government is going to continue to stimulate the economy and offer straight cash to a lot of the citizens here, but I think everything will be fine.
However, if you think it's going to be two years until we get a vaccine, and you think the government will not continue to stimulate the economy and unemployment states where it is, I think it's going to be tough across the entire economy, including housing, which is the largest share of GDP, right?
There's no way we have 20% unemployment for the next two years, no vaccine and no government stimulus.
and the largest share of GDP doesn't get impacted.
I personally think over the short term, single-family home rentals are set up pretty well for success.
I agree.
I think any kind of a rental investment property, I would probably put single-family rentals at the top.
Just because there's also more liquidity.
If you are a landlord and you own that home, you could rent it out, but you can also sell it.
And so you do have other options.
But for me, the issue with single-family rental has always been the management issue.
and so the reason we tend to have multifamily rental and single family owning is you get economies
of scale and property management.
The single family stuff, a lot of it is do it yourself.
If the plumbing goes, you either go to Home Depot and buy a toilet and try to figure out how install
it yourself or you call a plumber.
Whereas if you have 300 units, you can actually have your own plumber who just deals with stuff
on a daily basis. So how do you manage those sorts of day-to-day issues when you're doing single family?
Do you have a plumber or an electrician on call? How does all that work?
I'd say, yes, this is the biggest challenge, and that's pre-invitation homes or American
Homes for, and everyone thought this was impossible. They both with what I would call very little
technology, we're able to make it scale. The way that we handle it at Dibby is if a maintenance
request comes in, it actually gets automatically assigned to a specific category. It gets priced out
and it actually gets automatically routed out to a bunch of subcontractors that we have on the ground.
Those relationships takes a lot of time to build up because you're right, we couldn't operate otherwise.
But because we're setting them volume and it's automated and we pay them within 24 hours,
they actually offer you better discounts because you're supplying them with jobs in bulk.
And so we were able to automate a large portion of the maintenance and then use subcontractors on the ground.
A lot of younger folks don't have the patients to go through Yelp and call 10 different plumbers.
they don't want to go through that kind of hassle.
They want to do something like the ticketing method that Adina described.
I take a photo of the thing.
I send it to my landlord.
It automatically creates a work order.
I get in real time transparency over how it's being handled when it's being scheduled to get fixed.
It's quite a challenge, but it's something that technology can address.
I think it's a good segue into the opportunity for tech.
Real estate is traditionally a pretty inefficient market.
Where is there opportunity for tech in the face of these challenges?
to either streamline processes or solve some of these pain points?
There are not a lot of technology companies that focus on rentals,
and those that do tend to focus on taking rent payments, reporting rent credits,
so basically reporting rent to the credit bureaus so that they can track that and report it.
To some extent, you can look at apartments as being like seats on an airplane
or rooms in a hotel.
It's a stack of capital, and you want to completely fill it.
And so developing algorithms that maximize yield.
And the problem is right now, I don't think those algorithms are
sophisticated in the following way, is you will look at an existing tenant
and you evaluate them the same way as you evaluate a new tenant.
That's a bad idea.
Is an existing tenant has a track record with you.
And if they move out, even in a strong market, that's among the foregone rent
because you need to paint and do it.
the maintenance that you have to do.
And so a really good price elasticity algorithm that would tell landlords what is the right rent
to charge given market conditions, I think it's a place that technology could contribute
to help landlords ring the most efficiency that they can out of their properties.
Certainly.
There is no good data source for small mom and pop landlords right now to figure out what to charge.
They basically go on Craigslist-Zillow.
they look at other homes in the neighborhood.
Their data is sometimes based on a very small number of listings.
And I think another problem that tech can help solve is helping landlords and banks understand
what's behind the credit score.
You know, the FICO score that got hit from a one-time medical emergency versus the FICO
score that's low because the person always overspends and always has overdraft issues should
be viewed upon differently, right?
So how can we use tech to better measure responsibility and truly get a sense of, is this person now going to be able to make their rent payments?
I think that's a big opportunity for software.
Right.
In many ways, the way we underwrite people is based on 1980s, 1990s standards, even though Fennie and Freddie and others have models.
They're still using FICO5.
That means they're using a 20-year-old algorithm to evaluate people's credit.
At the end of the day, they don't believe the models.
They still go back to heuristics.
And the heuristics are not particularly good in terms of measuring credit risk and are really
problematic in that people from non-traditional backgrounds, immigrants, people of color,
older people who are very good credit rates.
Don't get easy access to credit.
You have large swaths of people, largely immigrants, who pay for stuff with cash.
people who pay rent every month, month after month after month are good credit risk.
So the interesting thing is if you pay rent every month, you don't get any credit for it.
But if you default on your rent and get kicked out, evicted, then that hurts your credit score.
So there's an asymmetry to how that's done.
And if you use a simple econometric model to evaluate credit based on actual payments going in and going out,
you do a much better job of predicting loan performance than if you use methods we have right now.
I would love to see a world where we use data, where we use modeling as a foundation for doing
underwriting in all kinds of dimensions of life. And I think we'd have a more inclusive world as a
result of that as well as a more accurate evaluation of credit. Yeah, and the reason why this is
important is that FICO score is not just used when the person's trying to get a mortgage.
Landlords are all looking at credit reports when they decide which tenant to choose.
So where we found that technology has been able to really help on the rental side is one,
quickly assessing risks in financial services, this idea of underwriting models is something that's
only come about, I'd say in the last 10 years, which is being able to pull in someone's entire
credit history and assess if they're getting into a rental situation that they were set up for
success or failure. And what I mean by that is you can go on crisis and post $2,000 rent a
month in San Francisco and do you want this apartment and someone can make a judgment as to whether
they can afford that or not. However, understanding really what your debt obligations are,
what your income is and really what you could afford it.
It's something that's pretty hard to do as an individual.
The second place is driving efficiencies through managing a large rental portfolio.
So things like, for example, on the maintenance side, making sure you can actually scale up
a large rental portfolio, be able to offer it and get some efficiencies from having technology
automate a lot of the back end.
So I'd say not a lot of technology in the traditional industry where most of the homes are
own, technology has not fully penetrated yet.
But I think that's also the opportunity, right?
because there is a lot of friction.
There are multiple players.
A lot of the processes are somewhat predictable or foreseeable.
And so there is a lot that technology can do.
In real estate, even just on the payment side, it's crazy what percentage of it happens
through checks or cash.
Speaking on behalf of a small mom and pop landlords, I used to accept rent with checks, right?
My mom used to accept rent with direct bank deposits.
But if you think of it from like the small landlord side,
Checks is not necessarily a great option. Checks can bounce. You have to go check your mailbox.
You have to go to a bank or use your phone to cash it in. We can't rely on PayPal, Venmo, and so forth.
Actually, not only do they have limits on how much money you can transfer it to your bank account every week.
There's also a lot of stuff you put yourself in danger of around partial payments and other things.
Now we can use mobile apps to collect rent and we use the same app to chat with our tenants.
so everything's in one place.
And so I think there's a real need for software in this space.
Even those small things around rent collection make a huge difference.
I think once people realize you don't have to go drive to the rental to pick up a rent check
and there are safe ways to do it online, how can you go back to the old ways, right?
We use stripe to power our entire back end where people opt in and then we've automatically
debit their account and then we literally pull their money in, parse it between what is actually
going towards building their equity savings in the house and what's actually going towards
us as rent. And then waterfall that out to our investors and debt providers. And all this is done
completely automatically, which is something that 10 years ago couldn't have been done. So there's
definitely a lot of technology that has smoothed out the process. But one of the things that
is just true is owning a rental property, be it a multifamily building or a single family home
is highly capital intensive. That's not sort of course rate. This capital that's generally
more legacy players. And so what we've seen is it's just taken longer for technology and innovation
for people to actually come and fully own the asset and be able to actually provide a rental
experience. That's why 98% of single family rentals are mom and pops, even the largest company
invitation homes, even though they're backed by Blackstone, they have 80,000 homes and that is the
biggest company, right? They own less than half a percent of the market. And they're $20 billion
dollar enterprise value. We were a couple months before COVID. So all that's to say is technology is
new because it is capital intensive, as is most fintech companies, which is something that has to be
chipped away at slowly. I think Adina raises a really important point about when you have a very
capital intensive industry, it's hard, I think, for technology to be transformative.
Do you think of places where it's transformative, it's in places with relatively little physical
capital and where ultimately you can get big margins. And in real estate, getting big margins is a
really, really hard thing to do. However, one counterthought though is yes, real estate is operational
capital intensive, but also so much of the dynamics around real estate is created by government.
Think about what percentage of mortgages are backed by the government now, right? So many issues
around getting a loan around tenant landlord laws. These are all government.
instituted policies. And therefore, if you look at something like an Airbnb, when they can come up
with a business model that unlocks either additional supply, whether it's investors or homeowners
or renters or what have you, that could also be a huge opportunity, right? When you look at any
kind of sector that has so much government intervention and shaping. There's got to be arbitrage
opportunities. There is definitely arbitrage opportunity in this space, which is why we stay very
optimistic on PropTech. I agree on the experience. It was kind of like when there were SBA loans that were
the cheapest possible loans and then Lending Club came out, which was you can get a small business loan
much quicker, but you're going to pay more, right? We can definitely improve on the customer experience
on how quickly you can apply, how quickly you can get a mortgage to have people like better mortgage
on the home purchase side. The issue is that the government subsidizes home purchases. You can get a loan
for a house cheaper than you can get any asset loan, period.
If you are a qualifying borrower, which is shrinking in terms of how easy it is to qualify.
100% agree.
All that says, it's hard for private corporations to compete on price.
What you can compete on, though, is providing a better customer experience and opening up
the housing market to a larger percentage of Americans, whether it's on the rental or a home
purchase side.
That's why I'm so acutely aware of the lack of technology, the fragmentation, the value of all
the data that actually is being generated, not just how much you're paying for rent, but all other
kinds of things around how well that house is being maintained. I think real estate's super exciting
to me because it has all those things. Strong fragmentation, which technology is generally a great
solution for. Finding more use cases for the data that's really right now stuck in people's memories
or Excel spreadsheets or filing cabinets. So again, you also have a treasure trove of data. You have
lots of financing needs, and we've talked before about how fintech is really an obvious, huge
opportunity for both renters and homeowners. So I do think the need for technology, even just
to do our everyday business, is there. Great. Well, thanks for joining us on the A16D podcast.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.
