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Get guaranteed rent for your home from new startup Doorstead

Published October 7, 2019

Missing out on a month’s rent because you can’t find a tenant is a huge loss. Searching for someone to fill a home takes work, while property managers are incentivized to price your place too high, leading to costly vacancies.

But new startup Doorstead wants to take on the risk and the work for you. It acts as a property manager for single-family homes, but guarantees you rent at a specific rate starting in a certain number of days, even if it can’t fill the house or apartment. It also handles all the algorithmic pricing, advertising, tenant interviews, repairs, maintenance, leases and online payments in exchange for 8% of rent. Owners just sit back and receive the money, making it much easier to profit off of distant real estate. The startup claims to earn users 3% to 9% more than other property management models.

Doorstead’s approach to the hot sector of “iRenting” has attracted a $3.3 million seed round co-led by M13 and Silicon Valley Data Capital, and joined by Venture Reality Fund and SOMA Capital. They’re betting on co-founders Jennifer Bronzo, whose parents ran a construction and property management firm, and Ryan Waliany, who worked in product at Uber after his recipe platform Kitchenbowl was acqui-hired.

Doorstead co founders Jennifer Bronzo Ryan Waliany

Doorstead co-founders (from left): Jennifer Bronzo and Ryan Waliany

“I grew up going to job sites and learning about construction,” Bronzo says. “In the recent decade, my family purchased a lot of properties in the Bay and they needed help filling capacity. I saw so many opportunities in property management because of how antiquated the industry is.” Doorstead is now operating in five cities around the San Francisco Bay Area.

As consumers grow accustomed to zero-friction services, that approach is branching into bigger and bigger sectors like the trillions paid for long-term rentals. Waliany, Doorstead’s CEO, tells me, “We’re in the process of Uber’izing each step of the property management life cycle.” The startup is hoping to become the OpenDoor of rentals.

How Doorstead works

Doorstead LogoFirst, property owners contact Doorstead and provide some basic information on the home they want to rent out. They receive a preliminary offer before the startup does an inspection and takes professional marketing photos while digging through reams of data on local pricing, availability and demand to pick a rate its algorithm believes it can fill the home for quickly. Owners then receive a final offer agreement saying they’ll be paid $X per month starting in Y number of days (typically 21 to 45 days), with Doorstead absorbing all the risk if it can’t find a tenant.

From there, the startup does approved maintenance and cleaning as necessary, and then methodically lists the home on all the top rental platforms. It handles open house walk-throughs and runs background checks on potential tenants to find who will most reliably pay rent. Doorstead prepares a lease and gets it signed by a tenant, but even if it doesn’t, owners still get their guaranteed payments. Rent is collected online, and if a move-out or eviction is necessary, Doorstead takes care of the transition to finding a new tenant.

There’s plenty of margin for Doorstead to earn if it can consistently fill homes faster. Most property managers charge at least 50% of the first month’s rent, but instead, Doorstead keeps all the rent of any extra days if it fills the spot before the guaranteed due date. From there, it charges 8% of monthly rent with no tenant placement fee, which is close to or under the common 10% fee on single-family home property management. And if it manages to secure a higher rate from tenants than its guarantee, it gives 70% to the owner.

How Doorstead Works

Doorstead claims to be less risky than alternatives

“Property management incumbents have a 43-day vacancy average which leads to $86 billion in economic waste in the U.S. alone,” Waliany tells TechCrunch. “This means that landlords could earn the same money and lower rents by 12% for tenants with an efficient market.”

The rise of iRenting

With Doorstead, even if the owner lives far away, the turn-key service lets them efficiently rent their home. That’s not only important to them, but to overcrowded cities like San Francisco that often see apartments left vacant by overseas owners because they’re too much effort to rent out. To date, Doorstead’s algorithm has allowed it to recoup 100% of its guarantees and it’s shooting to stay above 90%, while maintaining its NPS of 80.

apartment building code overlay

But if the startup is working that well, it’s only a matter of time until incumbents try to barge in.

“It would be a no brainer for Airbnb to enter this market and Zillow to open this,” Waliany admits, given their existing pricing algorithms and popularity as rental destinations. But Bronzo says “the biggest barrier is the operations piece that an Airbnb and Zillow haven’t stepped into.” It would be a big departure from their lean software-based marketplaces. Other property management startups like Mynd, OneRent and BelongHome only offer guaranteed rent once tenants are found, absolving themselves of most of the risk. They’d have to take on a more precarious business model.

What about Zeus, Sonder and Lyric, which offer property management of homes they then use for corporate housing or as boutique hotels? “An owner of ours considered Zeus versus Doorstead and went with Doorstead because: 1) our offer was ~12% higher, and 2) they didn’t want the wear-and-tear that comes with having people move in and out of the property every few days or few months,” Waliany explains. “Sonder and Lyric have 300 move-in and move-outs over a six-year period. Doorstead has ~4 move ins/outs and that results in significantly less wear-and-tear and a much easier operations to manage. Not only that, the long-term rental market is 42x larger and has 12x more addressable revenue.” Doorstead will have to build a brand and product moat to defend against inevitable direct competition.

Doorstead Rentals

As iRenting is still a fresh concept, Waliany warns that “with any new business model, there will inevitably be ‘unknown unknowns’ that we cannot predict, black swan events and things that we might only be able to learn through calculated bets.” Luckily, because it doesn’t hold the leases for very long, and home rentals typically increase in an economic downturn, Doorstead’s liability is manageable in the event of a recession or other crisis.

“There are three large trillion-dollar industries — food, transportation and housing. At Doorstead, we have an opportunity to completely redefine the housing value chain by creating a new class of property management that eliminates unnecessary vacancies. In the end, this redefinition of the value chain allows ourselves to become the Blackstone of the future,” Waliany concludes. “It seems like we’re giving everyone free money.” That will prove either the startup’s downfall or a powerful growth tactic.

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Why you need a supercomputer to build a house

Published December 8, 2018

When the hell did building a house become so complicated?

Don’t let the folks on HGTV fool you. The process of building a home nowadays is incredibly painful. Just applying for the necessary permits can be a soul-crushing undertaking that’ll have you running around the city, filling out useless forms, and waiting in motionless lines under fluorescent lights at City Hall wondering whether you should have just moved back in with your parents.

Consider this an ongoing discussion about Urban Tech, its intersection with regulation, issues of public service, and other complexities that people have full PHDs on. I’m just a bitter, born-and-bred New Yorker trying to figure out why I’ve been stuck in between subway stops for the last 15 minutes, so please reach out with your take on any of these thoughts: @Arman.Tabatabai@techcrunch.com.

And to actually get approval for those permits, your future home will have to satisfy a set of conditions that is a factorial of complex and conflicting federal, state and city building codes, separate sets of fire and energy requirements, and quasi-legal construction standards set by various independent agencies.

It wasn’t always this hard – remember when you’d hear people say “my grandparents built this house with their bare hands?” These proliferating rules have been among the main causes of the rapidly rising cost of housing in America and other developed nations. The good news is that a new generation of startups is identifying and simplifying these thickets of rules, and the future of housing may be determined as much by machine learning as woodworking.

When directions become deterrents

Photo by Bill Oxford via Getty Images

Cities once solely created the building codes that dictate the requirements for almost every aspect of a building’s design, and they structured those guidelines based on local terrain, climates and risks. Over time, townships, states, federally-recognized organizations and independent groups that sprouted from the insurance industry further created their own “model” building codes.

The complexity starts here. The federal codes and independent agency standards are optional for states, who have their own codes which are optional for cities, who have their own codes that are often inconsistent with the state’s and are optional for individual townships. Thus, local building codes are these ever-changing and constantly-swelling mutant books made up of whichever aspects of these different codes local governments choose to mix together. For instance, New York City’s building code is made up of five sections, 76 chapters and 35 appendices, alongside a separate set of 67 updates (The 2014 edition is available as a book for $155, and it makes a great gift for someone you never want to talk to again).

In short: what a shit show.

Because of the hyper-localized and overlapping nature of building codes, a home in one location can be subject to a completely different set of requirements than one elsewhere. So it’s really freaking difficult to even understand what you’re allowed to build, the conditions you need to satisfy, and how to best meet those conditions.

There are certain levels of complexity in housing codes that are hard to avoid. The structural integrity of a home is dependent on everything from walls to erosion and wind-flow. There are countless types of material and technology used in buildings, all of which are constantly evolving.

Thus, each thousand-page codebook from the various federal, state, city, township and independent agencies – all dictating interconnecting, location and structure-dependent needs – lead to an incredibly expansive decision tree that requires an endless set of simulations to fully understand all the options you have to reach compliance, and their respective cost-effectiveness and efficiency.

So homebuilders are often forced to turn to costly consultants or settle on designs that satisfy code but aren’t cost-efficient. And if construction issues cause you to fall short of the outcomes you expected, you could face hefty fines, delays or gigantic cost overruns from redesigns and rebuilds. All these costs flow through the lifecycle of a building, ultimately impacting affordability and access for homeowners and renters.

Startups are helping people crack the code

Photo by Caiaimage/Rafal Rodzoch via Getty Images

Strap on your hard hat – there may be hope for your dream home after all.

The friction, inefficiencies, and pure agony caused by our increasingly convoluted building codes have given rise to a growing set of companies that are helping people make sense of the home-building process by incorporating regulations directly into their software.

Using machine learning, their platforms run advanced scenario-analysis around interweaving building codes and inter-dependent structural variables, allowing users to create compliant designs and regulatory-informed decisions without having to ever encounter the regulations themselves.

For example, the prefab housing startup Cover is helping people figure out what kind of backyard homes they can design and build on their properties based on local zoning and permitting regulations.

Some startups are trying to provide similar services to developers of larger scale buildings as well. Just this past week, I covered the seed round for a startup called Cove.Tool, which analyzes local building energy codes – based on location and project-level characteristics specified by the developer – and spits out the most cost-effective and energy-efficient resource mix that can be built to hit local energy requirements.

And startups aren’t just simplifying the regulatory pains of the housing process through building codes. Envelope is helping developers make sense of our equally tortuous zoning codes, while Cover and companies like Camino are helping steer home and business-owners through arduous and analog permitting processes.

Look, I’m not saying codes are bad. In fact, I think building codes are good and necessary – no one wants to live in a home that might cave in on itself the next time it snows. But I still can’t help but ask myself why the hell does it take AI to figure out how to build a house? Why do we have building codes that take a supercomputer to figure out?

Ultimately, it would probably help to have more standardized building codes that we actually clean-up from time-to-time. More regional standardization would greatly reduce the number of conditional branches that exist. And if there was one set of accepted overarching codes that could still set precise requirements for all components of a building, there would still only be one path of regulations to follow, greatly reducing the knowledge and analysis necessary to efficiently build a home.

But housing’s inherent ties to geography make standardization unlikely. Each region has different land conditions, climates, priorities and political motivations that cause governments to want their own set of rules.

Instead, governments seem to be fine with sidestepping the issues caused by hyper-regional building codes and leaving it up to startups to help people wade through the ridiculousness that paves the home-building process, in the same way Concur aids employee with infuriating corporate expensing policies.

For now, we can count on startups that are unlocking value and making housing more accessible, simpler and cheaper just by making the rules easier to understand. And maybe one day my grandkids can tell their friends how their grandpa built his house with his own supercomputer.

And lastly, some reading while in transit:

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Apartment List raises $30 million to find you a home

Published November 3, 2016

Midcentury living room in Manhattan There’s no shortage of competition in the housing space, but Apartment List is making a dent in rentals.
With more than 5 percent of America’s listings already on the site, the startup is raising $30 million in a round led by Canaan Partners to take the business to the next level.
“Our goal was to bring as much inventory to consumers as possible,” CEO John Kobs told… Read More

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Technology will change where we live

Published July 2, 2016

San Francisco skyline Governor Jerry Brown has recently proposed legislation that would streamline the path for large scale development across California. It could have a huge impact on growing housing supply in San Francisco specifically, which suffers from NIMBYism and a lengthy, local review process for building developers. Read More

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Airbnb Confirms Its Massive $1.5 Billion Raise

Published December 7, 2015

brian-chesky-airbnb-3-of-6 Back in June, the WSJ reported that Airbnb had raised a massive $1.5 billion round of funding. Today, the company confirmed those reports by way of SEC filing. The total offering and sold amount is $1,499,937,904.00 for those keeping score. Airbnb’s valuation is now at or above $25 billion, which is just staggering. It sounds like Airbnb is going to focus on strengthening itself… Read More

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