Being a landlord sounds like a terrific thing, and it has been a powerful path to wealth creation for so many people for centuries. But there are two problems:
- It’s very hard to just “retire” — owning stocks and bonds can provide you with passive income and asset appreciation, but being a landlord means you need to fix toilets, worry about vacancies, find tenants, and more. The grass is always greener on the other side, except when you are trying to enjoy retirement and literally need to water the grass to find a new tenant.
- It’s very hard to “aggregate” — the vast majority of single family residential rentals or small commercial properties are not owned by giant corporations or REITs, but by a very long tail of local landlords (the same ones who will one day want to retire from fixing the toilets!)…thus making it hard for investors to get exposure to an interesting asset class and hard for landlords to get economies of scale around technology, maintenance, and leasing.
Flock solves both of these—two birds with one stone, if you will. It’s a powerful platform that allows any landlord to roll their properties into Flock, which takes them over and manages them—still providing the former landlord with the same income stream with no immediate tax consequences—and in the process is assembling a powerful machine to aggregate many properties, democratizing investor access and improving resident experiences with technology.
Technology is changing real estate, and many almost “artisanal” areas of real estate will be provided under the rubric of a company. Ari Rubin, the founder and CEO of Flock, was so consumed with this idea that he dropped out of business school and painstakingly sold each retiring landlord on this vision—and got them to trust him with their properties, their future income, and their residents. In the last few years, they’ve built scalable software to replace these manual processes and have grown dramatically. They are becoming the best platform for landlord retirement, and we’re incredibly excited to join Ari and the whole flock (last bird pun, I promise) at Flock as their partner.
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