By Nancy Dahlberg
There are many scenarios where you have significant equity tied up in your home but you could really use that money. Perhaps you ran up insurmountable credit card debt, lost your job or are facing unforeseen medical bills, to name a few. But at the same time, you love your home. Where would you go and what would you do with all your stuff?
What if you could liquify that equity you’ve built up and didn’t have to move? Instead you rent from the new owner, knowing what the rent and terms would be before the transaction is complete. That’s the idea behind a new Miami real estate startup, Sell2Rent, which matches homeowners with investors for these situations.
Sell2Rent co-founders Alex Arguelles and Daniel Kattan together have nearly three decades of experience in the commercial and residential real estate world and believed there must be a win-win solution for situations like these. “People are sitting on a lot of equity. Our strategy is to create a leaseback, which is one of the biggest strategies in the world – you can do it for an airplane, for commercial real estate and all that but it doesn’t really exist for single-family rentals,” said Arguelles [pictured above], CEO of Sell2Rent, in an interview with Refresh Miami.
“There are 150 million single family homes and condos in the US. Every year about 7 million are sold, It’s 11,000 a day – a super big number … We are building a marketplace that does this across the US.”
However, Arguelles adds, there will be always a human touch behind the service. “You won’t get an instant offer after typing in a few data points. We want to talk to you. We want to understand what the problem is and then we want to help you.”
Their solution differs from a reverse mortgage, which requires a person to qualify, meeting a number of conditions, and be a certain age. Another strategy, refinancing, is an expensive option in a rising rate environment and is not readily available for people in financial distress.
The co-founders started testing their idea about four years ago. Arguelles was skeptical at first, but the early feedback made him a believer. About two years ago they made Sell2rent a fulltime venture and began creating a marketplace that aims to make the experience easy for both the buyer and seller.
On the day of this interview, the marketplace featured properties around the country. So far Sell2Rent has done over 100 transactions. They purposely did not start with one market to expand outward because markets can change very fast. “Our growth has been across the United States. We don’t want to grow at all costs. We have to make the unit economics work,” said Arguelles.
Sell2Rent has about 30 employees spread around the US and Latin America. The service charges sellers a 6% fee. What’s next is a deeper focus on finding the perfect investors for any deals launched on the platform, Arguelles says. “We’re innovating around how we contact people, different mediums, user flows, different touch points that go to our biggest problem to be solved: the investor side of the platform.”
People deep in debt have been the biggest users of the platform, including those facing foreclosure or bankruptcy. Couples going through a divorce is another growing customer base because one spouse wants to stay in the house. An expansion market they are pursuing is the senior market, as many older people might need to cash out to fund their retirement but still want to stay in their home. A challenge is the demographic may lack tech experience, but Sell2Rent has been working on easing the process for both sides of the marketplace.
As might be expected amid South Florida’s massive real estate sector, proptech has been building a strong foundation in the startup ecosystem for several years now. Refresh Miami has covered at least 11 real estate technology stories so far this year, including Waltz, an international home-buying solution, and Dono, an AI-powered homeownership verification platform, both of which recently raised venture capital. Sell2Rent joins other startups building here, including those focused on construction tech, property insurance, property investment, management, maintenance and more.
“We have been busy building,” said Arguelles. “We are super driven to help people.”
READ MORE IN REFRESH MIAMI: Find recent proptech coverage here.
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