Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust CEO Gary Beasley became frustrated with the structure of the traditional single-family rental marketplace.
“We found it was very difficult to sell homes with tenants in them because the traditional MLS was really set up to sell vacant homes … It seemed kind of crazy that you had to wait for the tenants to move out … it was costing 10 to 12 percent on average to sell these homes,” Beasley says.
To address this gap in sales efficiency, Beasley and Gregor Watson founded Roofstock, an alternative MLS platform that allows single-family rental owners to buy and sell their properties, even if those properties are not vacant. The platform has grown from $40 million in single-family rental transactions in 2016 to nearly $1 billion in 2017 – a twenty-five-fold increase over the course of one year. The platform charges sellers a 2.5% fee, and buyers pay 50 basis points on transactions to use Roofstock’s analytics.
Among the company’s projects is the “Rental Genome Project”, a map of all of the 16 million single-family rental properties in the country. Each entry includes information about the ownership entity of each property and contact information.
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