WS644: Data From 600,000 Landlords and Tenants Dealing With COVID-19 with Laurence Jankelow

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:00.0] ANNOUNCER Welcome to the Real Estate Syndication Show. Whether you are a seasoned investor or building a new real estate business, this is the show for you. Whitney Sewell talks to top experts in the business. Our goal is to help you master real estate syndication.

And now your host, Whitney Sewell.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:24.4] WS: This is y our daily real estate syndication show. I’m your host Whitney Sewell. Today, our guest is Laurence Jankelow. Thanks for being on the show, Laurence.

[0:00:33.9] LJ: Thanks for having me, I’m excited to be here.

[0:00:35.5] WS: Laurence is the co-founder of Avail, an all in one software solution designed for do it yourself landlords that is used by more than 600,000 landlords and tenants across the United States. Laurence and his family immigrated to the United States when he was 10 years old from Johannesburg, South Africa. Prior to launching Avail, Laurence spent seven years in data analytics, first as a consultant at Protivita? Correct me, Laurence.

[0:01:04.1] LJ: Yeah, you’re so close. Protiviti.

[0:01:06.8] WS: Protiviti Chicago and then at Goldman Sachs.

Laurence, thank you again for your time and just being on the show today. I’m grateful but also, give the listeners a little more about who you are and let’s jump in to Avail and a few other things.

[0:01:21.0] LJ: Yeah, sure. I mean, kind of like you said, I’m a do-it-yourself landlord myself And, you know, while I was working, I had rental properties that I owned and managed, so that’s where we kind of now cater towards, do it yourself landlords. You know, my business partner, Ryan and I at the time we were working in investment banking, we were doing the 80, 90 hours a week and we had these rental properties on the side. And you know, we were trying our best to manage them, trying to be professional and it’s really hard to be professional, when your main tool is Excel and you’re emailing each other back and forth rent rolls or your merging cells and painting them pretty and then printing it and that’s your rental application that you give to tenant. It’s hard to be professional in that tool set.

We decided we were going to quit our jobs and build tools specifically for do it yourself landlords and so that’s what we set out to do. Now, called Avail.

[0:02:10.3] WS: You and your business partner were working full-time and you had rentals on the side, is that right?

[0:02:16.3] LJ: Yeah, actually, that’s pretty common, we see that a lot with our customers. Almost all of them will have one to five to maybe 10 units, and then they’re doing their full-time job somewhere else. That’s actually part of the challenge for us is they don’t necessarily identify as landlords. A lot of the times they’ll think, “I’ve got this condo that I’m renting or this single-family home that I’m renting,” and then you’ll ask them, “Hey, are you a landlord?” And they’ll be like, “No.”

That makes it very interesting marketing challenge for us. And in the end yeah, we’re there to help people who have rental properties; they need to coordinate all the day to day activities, and we basically provide the professional suite of tools to help them do that.

[0:02:52.6] WS: Very nice. I’m glad you brought that up, I haven’t thought about that before somebody that doesn’t really identify as a landlord even though they do have maybe one rental or two rentals, don’t really see themselves as a landlord.

But I’d like to dive in there a little bit to you all pursuing to do this while you all were working full-time. You mentioned working 80 to 90 hours a week and I like hearing entrepreneur’s stories around that. It’s the same thing I had to do and I think it’s like a common misconception to people to listeners and lots of people who are thinking they’re going to pursue this real estate business or any kind of other business on the side. You know, just that level of commitment.

Would you elaborate a little bit on just your path, you know, to getting to where you are at now, maybe a little bit while from the initially and having to put in all those hours?

[0:03:39.7] LJ: Yeah, absolutely, you know, when both Ryan and I were working full-time and you have different rental properties on the side, all you want to do is go home and sit on the couch and watch TV. But if you had set a light goal for yourself for us, both of us was financial independence, we wanted some passive income and as is the case for most real estate investors.

If you set that kind of goal, then you tend to not go home and just sit on the couch, you try to push that goal forward a little bit every day because that’s what we were doing. But we were doing it in the most inefficient way trying to do things through paper checks or Excel and we actually set out looking for it, is there software that’s going to automate a lot of this for us? Because I do want to just sometimes relax but obviously, you know, that’s counter to my goals.

So, we looked for tools, there wasn’t anything we wanted and then we did what is probably the most illogical thing you could do. We quit our jobs and said, “Hey, we’re going to build these tools for ourselves and we hope that there’s a market of other people who want this stuff as well,” and when we first got started here in Chicago about seven years ago, you know, we probably bright eyed and dreamy, we thought we could get an engineer to come and build this for free for us.

Like, “Hey, we’ll give you equity.” But equity is meaningless to most – if you’re like, really small, haven’t even started anything. We couldn’t find anyone to build it for us. What we decided to do was essential roll up our sleeves, we taught ourselves to code and then we built the product ourselves from scratch. And we built it exactly the way we wanted it the way we use it and I think in a lot of ways, we got lucky because we see now the 600,000 landlords and tenants are using basically, what we always dreamed of to kind of do everything day to day from finding tenants to listing syndications to screening to collecting rent online, all those things that we wanted now, it’s good to see it finally out there.

[0:05:20.2] WS: Wow, rolled up your sleeves and learn to code, that’s not something I would probably want to do!

[0:05:26.2] LJ: Yeah, thought of leaving investment banking, I’d be taking a step down in hours but it went up.

[0:05:30.9] WS: Quitting your job and just saying, “I’m going to go do this.” I mean, did you already have some other income, did you already – what allowed you to build and make that transition and be that confident?

[0:05:41.4] LJ: Yeah, there’s always got to be something because you start to feed yourself, you know? At the end of the day. I think Ryan and I are lucky; I think we both acknowledged that we grew up a little privileged more than others. We were fortunate enough just to have an education that could get us the kinds of jobs where we could start to compile a little bit of money. Now, we weren’t rich by any means. It’s all relative, I suppose.

When we quite our jobs, we had to go down to bare bone expenses. I think we were – we also had some stocks that we would trade on the side and I think we were just depleting our savings, we were selling option, strategies which is pretty risky, just to put food on the table for ourselves. It was definitely ramen and peanut butter sandwich situation for a good two years for us.

For me, I’d actually, just gotten married at that time. So I’d gotten married middle of February and then two weeks later it was basically when I put my two weeks’ notice in.

[0:06:31.0] WS: She still said I do.

[0:06:32.8] LJ: Yeah, I mean, I kept telling her it was coming but I don’t think she knew as quickly as it happened.

[0:06:37.9] WS: Wow, you know, let’s jump in a little bit to how anyone can create the stress-free, passive income. You know, I think you have some ways or some things you help people with but to just how people can become financially independent to real estate and maybe ways you’ve done it or you can help us do the same.

[0:06:56.0] LJ: Yeah, I mean, as a financial goal, everyone should be trying to shoot for some sort of financial independence. Whether that’s the real estate or stock market or through other passive income streams or income streams in general, you should be doing that. Real estate, I think is one of the easier paths because it’s the concept that people can understand. You can see a physical building, you can walk in and out of it, you know that there’s value there, whereas I think stocks are a lot more ephemeral and harder for people to really grasp.

If you’re a beginner investor, I think it makes sense to start in real estate because it’s easy to understand. That being said, I think there is some truth to it takes some money to start in real estate because it’s a physical asset, you can’t buy partial ownership of it very easily unless you’re doing like a REIT but then again you miss like a lot of the lessons there.

But there are a bunch of things people can do to get started. I think if you’re going to buy primary residence to live in, you could probably maybe change what you’re thinking and buy three-plex and live in one of the units and rent out the other two and you can get a really good mortgage rate, only have to put 3% down if you’re going to do something like that. There are ways to get into real estate without a lot of money, they just take a little bit of tact and maybe a little bit of patience.

And there’s a bunch of those avenues that I’d recommend to your listeners if they haven’t yet gone down the path, starting their real estate careers, start thinking about how you can get in. Just the earlier the better.

[0:08:16.8] WS: Yeah, earlier the better, no doubt about it. I know a lot of listeners are pursuing commercial real estate and they’re trying to grow their networks and you know, investor databases and you know to that first property. But I think house hacking and getting into a property like you’re talking about is a great way to get started sometimes.

But also, with your all’s level of experience with building this platform, I’d love for you to elaborate too, just own some rental property systems. You know, just some things, some systems that we should have in place, whether we’re a do-it-yourself landlord or not, you know, I think understanding some of these things is crucial, even on the commercial real estate side because I don’t want to know that my management company’s doing these things, right? You know, when I’m interviewing those companies, I want to understand these systems better so I’m going to have better questions when I’m trying to figure out if they’re the property or the management company for my property.

You know, could you elaborate some on that and let’s dive into that a little bit.

[0:09:09.3] LJ: Yeah, I think having systems and processes in place are important, especially if you’re wanting to have more than one rental property, you know? Trying to establish it with that first property is the right time, you don’t want to try and get it when you’ve got too many, it’s just, it’s all going to fall downhill from there.

One thing I’ll mention to your listeners, Avail specifically is for residential rental properties. Id’ say, there’s a little – there are some obvious differences and nuances if they’re going to go more commercial or retail rentals. It depends also how they’re in their head defining commercial. Commercial can mean a couple of different things to people, it could mean you know, you have shops and stores or could me you have a residential of five or more units. Either those cases, you want to have a system and process.

For us, we start thinking about how you can be consistent with your tenants. At the very beginning, there’s a lot of laws and regulations in place especially if someone’s going to live in it in the property, so you have to obey their housing law. So that starts even with how you find tenants.

And I hate for this to sound like an infomercial for Avail, so my apologies ahead of time, but Avail’s going to help with the entire process so if you have a vacancy, you’d come to Avail, you would create a listing with us and we would just automatically syndicate that across the web for you so that you have your one listing going to a lot of different places, not just where you know, potentially white people rent from or Black people rent from so you can avoid a lot of fair housing problems by picking just one website. We’ll kind of put them on a lot of places that has huge benefits to the landlord because you are exposing yourself to more people, more diverse set of people and at the end of the day you just have more options.

That’s number one and then the second thing from there is you want a process on how you’re going to screen applicants. You can’t choose to you know, do a credit report for one applicant and not the other. And obviously, you want to do some sort of tenant screening, you want it to be consistent there. For us, we get you 18 or so leads and at that first week or so we’re having that listing, you’ve got it and whittle that down to the people that are truly interested in the place and that usually comes with some pre-screening questions, we’ll hand those to you, they’ll be like 10 questions that normally want to ask a renter, “Who else is living here over the age of 18? Do you smoke? Have you ever been evicted before? Are you willing to pay for an application fee and authorize credit background check?” There’s some pre-screening questions to make sure you have the right candidates.

And then, you want to go and go get their screening reports, so we’d look into TransUnion and provide real time 10 screening reports, credit reports, criminal background checks, eviction checks so you can look at those things. And you should try – I mentioned the word over and over again. Consistency, you really want to be consistent with each and every applicant and how you do that process.

And then from there, you hopefully have an applicant that you want to sign the lease with and you got the perfect tenant, a lot of the problems don’t stop there, they actually begin there, where now you need a lease agreement and sure you could go to a lawyer and pay $500 to get a lease agreement and immediate after one year it’s out of date and you have to figure out what you’re going to do because the laws change all the time.

So, what we do, we provide city and state specific lease agreements, they’re all digital so we know what city your unit is in, we’ll automatically going to feed that lease agreement into your system and that’s what your tenants would sign online and you would sign it online. And then from there, you set them up to pay the rent online and [inaudible 0:12:22] online.

If you can have a system that takes you through all those operational tasks of being a landlord, you’ll find that you’re not spending the 20, 30 hours a month, this part-time gig of being a landlord but maybe it’s now in one hour a month and that’s a huge savings.

[0:12:37.7] WS: Do you find you’re still pursuing real estate as much as you thought you were, now that you all are focused so much on the software?

[0:12:44.6] LJ: Yeah, well personally, on a personal level no. I haven’t had as much time as I’d like and then I’m Chicago where housing is super expensive and it is really unaffordable. And that’s one of the reasons why for a lot of landlords who maybe are first getting started, we actually recommend not using a property management company, just so you can get in and try to keep some of those returns for yourself. Because what will end up happening is if you buy a unit in Chicago or a three flat in Chicago and you have to pay a property manager, all of a sudden you are not making money on the property anymore. And then if that’s the case, you shouldn’t be even investing in it.

So you know for that reason, we try to encourage a lot of our landlords to really do it themselves not to be self-serving where they’ll come in and use our software because that is the only way to make a return in some markets and because of that reason I haven’t really bought a lot more just for how much strain the business puts on my time.

[0:13:34.9] WS: Sure. So, you know but with somebody like yourself has access to that much information, I mean 600,000 landlords, tenants, you know I would love your feedback on just how they are dealing with the COVID-19 crisis and how you see them being affected in the future as well.

[0:13:52.7] LJ: Yeah, well we have a lot of real time rent data that happens in our system. So usually we have a lot of information and it is actually been really interesting to watch in March when everything was starting to take shape here, we sent a survey out to our customer base. We had gotten 10,000 responses from our tenants and we asked simple questions like, “Have you lost your job?” And this is in the middle of March so it was really early.

We asked, “Are you planning on paying rent? Are you going to be able to pay your rent? What does the future kind of look like for you?” And we just wanted that information so that we could help formalize what is the process that landlords will put in place knowing that a lot of rents were not going to be paid. And what we found is you know 54% of those tenants back in March has said they have already lost their jobs due to the pandemic.

So that was a certainly high, we haven’t even seen those numbers yet in unemployment rates and all of those things that took a while of time for it to catch up and now we are seeing segments of the population that have 50% plus unemployment rate.

But then what was interesting to see is did they pay on time. So, in the surveys they said they want to pay on time but you know it was something like 40% of them that said they weren’t going to be able to pay the rent. And what we found is April 1^st rolled around and we actually didn’t see any decrease in people paying rent. We actually saw it slightly uptick from normal. We think that’s because of the stimulation checks had just come out right and tenants were applying the stimulus checks and so then we set our sights on May 1^st, right? Oh man, well May 1^st then, rent is going to drop but then again, like the unemployment stimulus came into effect and people could finally get through the unemployment lines and get that unemployment.

So, we actually didn’t see any decrease in May or June either and we’re right now in the middle of the July rent and we are actually not seeing any decreases there still. So, we are actually seeing overall in the rental market things are kind of stable for the time being and surprisingly so. And I think a lot of it is because landlords are making deals with tenants. Stimulus is kind of working but obviously it ends at the end of this month, a lot of these unemployment and other stimulus package ending in this month. So, we will have to see what happens on August 1^st.

[0:15:49.0] WS: Do you have any projections for the future, for the next three months, six months after all of this?

[0:15:55.7] LJ: Yeah, I mean you know what data can do a lot of things for you but I don’t know that necessarily predicts the future. I do think August 1^st is going to be telling. I would personally predict that if there isn’t additional stimulus that we will see rent payments drop August 1^st. There’s just people aren’t necessarily back to work at full capacity yet and that money is going to come from somewhere. So, I would imagine without some intervention that August may not be as pretty as the rest of this.

[0:16:24.6] WS: What’s a way you have recently improved your business that we could apply to ours?

[0:16:29.3] LJ: What’s a way I’ve improved my business to reduce hours?

[0:16:32.2] WS: No, what is a way you’ve recently improved your business that we could apply to ours?

[0:16:36.5] LJ: Well, we have 25 employees. Are you talking – how many employees do you guys have currently? I’m just trying get a sense of the size of your business.

[0:16:44.1] WS: We’ll have anywhere let’s say three to four people and that doesn’t count property management or general contractors, people like that. But just working for us and it could four to six depending on virtual assistants and things like that. But much smaller.

[0:17:02.2] LJ: Yeah, so one of the things I’d recommend to anybody and this is maybe stolen from Robert Kiyosaki, you know in the cliché book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, was to get experts surrounding. For us at Avail, that meant hiring people who knew what they were doing. You know Ryan and I are first time entrepreneurs. I think we are good problem-solvers but we aren’t good at everything. We weren’t good engineers; we weren’t good marketers.

So, part of what you have to do is find people who are experts on those things and bring them onto your team whether that is as an employee-employer relationship or an advisor or mentor relationship, every business can be improved by adding more people to it and there is always a way to add people in an affordable way.

So, if your business with the three to four full-time employees, you know think about how you could always bring on more influential knowledgeable sophisticated people onto the team, even if it is an advisor capacity and you’re not really paying them a salary, potentially there is some other way that they derive value. Or if it is for your listeners and they are thinking, “How do I invest more?” They should all get mentors or somebody who has gone from nothing to a hundred units or a hundred properties or so and let them guide it. There is as much value in the mentor relationship for the mentor as the mentee. So, in a nutshell, bring more people onto your team.

[0:18:18.5] WS: Great advice. So, tell me maybe a couple of tips on how you found that individual that you are willing to bring onto your team.

[0:18:25.3] LJ: Yeah, well for us it would be very patient in how we hire, super patient. We also have, as a startup, you try to find people who are passionate, don’t have resources the way they are used to. So, you’ve got to look for someone who is really resourceful, scrappy and that just takes time and there is not as many of those people out there. You just don’t want to rush into something like that. We’ve made that mistake. We have hired a lot of people who didn’t really understand what startups are about.

And I don’t mean you know lots of amount of work. I just mean the resourcefulness that can still be done in a 40-hour week. You can’t just be at your desk not know how to do something and give up. We have to push yourself forward.

So how do we find those specifically? We have designed a series of challenges during the interview process that we can suss out that information. We source people from AngelList, which is a website dedicated to people looking to work at a startup.

Here in Chicago there is another website called Built in Chicago, again people looking specifically for startups. So, if you can try to narrow down the universe a little bit for people who want to work at startups that helps as well if it is a startup.

[0:19:29.0] WS: What’s the number one thing that’s contributed to your success?

[0:19:31.3] LJ: Persistence. There are a lot of times Ryan and I should have just up. We probably should have just given up, but we didn’t and I think that is probably true for anything people do. Like we have a tendency to as soon as something gets difficult or outside of our comfort zone, to abandon and actually that can even happen before we even start. A lot of people just won’t start something because it is out of their comfort zone. And so, for us, stubborn persistence is the biggest benefactor, the most beneficial thing for us.

[0:20:02.1] WS: I meant to ask you too, can you share a couple of the challenges that you have for applicants when they are applying to work with you?

[0:20:09.0] LJ: Oh yeah, we usually do a pretty extensive take home project and then we do that for all roles. So, it is pretty common for an engineering role. So, you’d be – here is a code this and then we will review the code together, very common for engineering roles. Most of the places don’t do that for customer service or product marketing or marketing in general. But we do.

We do it for every role. We want to know that someone can go take something on their own time, figure it out unassisted, use the resources and then come back with a complete thing. For us most recently, we told someone, “Hey, can you design our own program from the ground up with these three extra challenges on it?” And some people come back either very successful with that or very unsuccessful. The thing is yeah, every person you bring onto the team has to be stronger than the last person. So, the challenges only get harder every year.

[0:21:01.0] WS: That is an interesting thought, every person you bring on has to be – Say that again.

[0:21:05.7] LJ: Every person that we bring onto the team has to be better than the last person. Here in December we brought on a new Head of Product and very clearly was awesome and considerably better than me at product management, which is kind of the role I was doing before he joined and flat out told him, “Hey, you are going to be the worst hire we do going forward” and not in a bad way. He was fantastic but that sets the precedent.

If every person you bring on you tell them you are going to be the worst let’s make sure next time we hire someone better then you are only going to get a highly skilled team because there is the tendency for A players to hire B players or B players hire C players and you just want keep getting your team better every year.

[0:21:41.6] WS: Laurence, how do you like to give back?

[0:21:44.2] LJ: Yeah, well we with the Avail, we do a lot in that realm. We write a lot of educational content, there’s been a lot of lessons we’ve learned both as landlords, as founders, as entrepreneurs, as business owners and we write tons of educational content and then we put it out for free on our website.

To the community, I’ve got two little girls. I got a six-year-old and a four-year-old and we’ll take around their little red radio fire wagon and we’ll pick up trash on the weekend sometimes. They’re very interested in trying to help the planet or save the planet and so we’ll do a lot of that. We’ll just walk, we live close to Wrigley Field. So, there is a lot of trash always and so we’ll just pick stuff up and they love that.

[0:22:21.6] WS: Wow. Well, I appreciate you sharing that. It is great to hear your kids involved doing things like that as well. Laurence, it’s been great to meet you and learn more about Avail and just to hear more about your story as well, even hiring people. It is interesting to hear some stories like that as well. It is difficult. It is difficult to hire somebody, right? And then just being an entrepreneur altogether and then growing our business. But tell the listeners how they can get in touch with you or learn more about you and Avail?

[0:22:46.1] LJ: Sure, well if they want to learn about Avail pretty simple, just go straight to the website avail.co, full suite of tools for landlords. It is entirely free and I also love talking with people directly too. So, if there are questions on how to start your own business or how to get started in real estate or landlording questions, maybe you already got started and you just need a little bit more expertise, people can contact me directly at my email which is [email protected].

I love talking with people, I’ve been on maybe 20 or so podcasts in the last six months and I give out my email every time and no one ever emails me. I’d love to have someone finally email me and just get a conversation going.

[0:23:28.1] WS: Awesome, Laurence. Thank you very much.

[0:23:30.0] LJ: You’re welcome.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:23:31.7] WS: Don’t go yet, thank you for listening to today’s episode. I would love it if you would go to iTunes right now and leave a rating and written review. I want to hear your feedback. It makes a big difference in getting the podcast out there. You can also go to the Real Estate Syndication Show on Facebook so you can connect with me and we can also receive feedback and your questions there that you want me to answer on the show.

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[OUTRO]

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