Building the Next Generation of Housing: Inside Rooming with Michael Bernicke

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news.

Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode of B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast, coming to you from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems and our new gateway NPS One, which is a smart invoicing platform with an open API. And today we have a guest on the show. Mike Berniker, and Mike is a kind of a serial entrepreneur guy who's come up with a bunch of, you know, he's got a bunch of different SaaS products and we partner with them. So we'll preface that, that Mike is a partner with Nationwide Payment Systems and we're here today to discuss one of Mike's ventures. We may dip into a few other ones that we're, that he's still working on., and, uh, welcome to the show, Mike.

Yeah, thank you for the intro. Yeah, happy to, uh, jump into it. Yeah, we've been working together for a few years now, uh, couple years been a partner. But yeah, the most recent venture is, uh, Rooming that we're going to dive into, a property management system.

So, so like with Rooming, you know, what's the, you know, property management, you know, that's like You know, lots of, you know, there's lots of people like that's like the side gig. It's an investor gig. There's a lot, you know, and then there's, you know, huge, massive companies. So what's the target audience for Rooming?

So right now we built Rooming essentially for the growth stage landlord or property manager. So, you know, there's a lot of systems out there that are geared toward residential property management. You know, you got Buildium, Appfolio, just to mention a couple. But, you know, a lot of these systems are not exactly built for someone who's looking to grow their portfolio or is sort of new to the space. So what we did was we built a very intuitive system that sort of, you know, checks all the boxes when it comes to property management, from handling, you know, leases. So we have, you know, direct integration with DocuSign. You can fire off a copy of a lease, get a signature, store it right within the system. Obviously, we have payment integration where you can pay your rent, put a deposit down, utilities, anything like that. Maintenance requests, you know, dynamic requests where tenants can submit a request with picture, video, audio, along with sort of an AI diagnosis of the issue, sort of giving the most detailed request possible. We also built out, you know, different— we built out what we call features library where you can sort of add and drop functionality to your liking. We have a mortgage tracker in there. We have an inspections tab in there. We have a QuickBooks integration, reporting, things like that. So, you know, it's been really well received by the market since our launch a couple months ago. And, you know, we're excited. And right now it's geared toward residential property management, but we do have some plans to get into commercial and industrial as well.

Yeah, there's a lot of You know, I think from, from a landlord, not me as a landlord, but I know like my landlord, they're like, we had to mail them a paper check every month for like the longest time. Then finally they're like, okay, you can pay us with an ACH. And then recently they put up a portal, which is not exactly user-friendly, but it's, you know, it's functional.

Yeah. And that's the thing that we tried to do with Rooming was make it as user-friendly as possible. So a lot of these systems, you know, they're clunky. They might be a little slow, might, you know, the tech stack might not have been updated in a long time. And so we kind of came in trying to shake things up with, you know, a fair pricing model and also just a very intuitive flow to the system that has really been winning us business. You know, on the surface, it looks like a very simple system. And, you know, If you're new to property management, we figured, you know, that's the best way to do it. Because if you log into our system, you can see, you know, even if you don't have experience in the property management space, you'll be able to navigate the platform and understand what you're doing. So that's where we tried to build it. And again, on the surface it's simple. On the back end, there's a lot of things running that make it efficient and, you know, a tool that really brings value to people, especially in that growth stage.

Yeah, and I know when you demoed the system for me, and, you know, we talked about a lot of different features that you had in there, which is amazing, and the use of AI. So talk about, like, how you guys use AI, because I think it's really interesting for, you know, the user to understand, like, what the AI is doing and how it's helping them.

Yeah, so the first sort of, I guess, piece of AI that we use is for the onboarding process. So one big issue that we came across when we were doing our market research was a lot of these systems had a very long onboarding cycle where it would take, you know, anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks. So if someone wanted to flip their system, it would be, you know, a month on average to get them up and running on a new platform. So that was one thing that was, you know, evidently a headache within this space specifically in software. So we plugged in, um, a few different AI capabilities where we can do instant onboarding. So we essentially built a chat assistant where you can upload a CSV file, uh, a Word document, a PDF of essentially everything that relates to your portfolio—properties, units, tenants, monthly rent, contact info, and a bunch of other fields that are necessary. Once you have all those fields, um, filled out in the document format, you upload that to the chatbot assistant that we built, and then it will correctly map all of that data for you. And on average, that takes about around 7 minutes is what we've been seeing. Um, so yeah, that's been one thing is that we've been able to get people using the system almost instantly., we've onboarded people the same day, you know, or next day. But that's been one way that we've utilized AI. Another way that we've utilized it is we give each tenant their own assistant, essentially. So on the property management portal, you can go in and customize these assistants for your tenants. So you go in and you enter rules about your property and details about, you know, the specific unit, the area, whatever it might be. If there's, you know, a strict no pet policy, if there's a noise ordinance in the area, if tenants are not allowed to hang a TV on the wall, whatever specifics go into the rules of your property, you can coach this bot to understand that. The tenants can then ask this bot questions and say, hey, when is my lease up? Hey, what is my monthly rent? What deposit did I put down? The bot will understand the rules and everything that you entered about the property, and it will respond to the tenants. That's been a really popular feature because one thing, again, when we were doing our market research was a lot of people get frustrated with the amount of time spent on the phone for things that didn't really, you know, warrant a phone call. Tenants calling at, you know, late at night asking questions about their pets or their rent or when it's due or whatever it is. So we What we try to do is take pressure off the phones and sort of give one extra layer of peace of mind for our clients.

Yeah. And it's also like getting text messages and, you know, maintenance requests, and then it's coming in a text and then you got to send it to somebody else. It's keep it— you have tools that are keeping somebody organized and growing their portfolio. And another one of the features that I really liked was the English and the Spanish getting translated back and forth because— yeah, so that's— that can be a huge issue. I was, you know, I was speaking to somebody and they were like, well, we have a lot of Hispanic tenants and they can type in Spanish and then you see it in English.

Yeah, exactly. So we have a supported languages feature on the back end where you can enable different languages, any language that you want. So like you said, if you have, you know, a property, a building, whatever it might be, with a predominantly Spanish-speaking, French-speaking community, whatever it might be, you can translate their portal to their native language and it will come back to you in the language that you prefer to receive it in. So if you set it for Spanish for your tenants but English for you, they'll see it in Spanish. Everything comes back to you in English. That has actually— that's been another really popular feature of ours. So that's—

yeah, that's been a good one. Yeah. Because it's, you know, people have, you know, people are trying to run, run their business and not get, you know, get run over by their business. And I remember like many, many years ago before there was like internet, we were managing— me and a couple of other guys, we were managing a bunch of properties and I was like, you know, I'm not sure this is for me. I'm getting text messages from property owners. Exactly. You know, hey, blah blah blah. Then we're trying to, you know, and it's a lot to deal with when you have like— because that's sometimes, you know, that's not— wasn't my full-time job, right?

Yeah, that's the thing. And that's sort of, um, you know, another reason that we built this. Like you said, going back to your point earlier, like for a lot of people, you know, this starts as a side hustle that they want to turn into a full-time career. So what we did was we tried to build a system that saves time, is efficient, but also grows with you. So let's say you have 10 properties right now or 10 units in your portfolio. You want to grow that to 30 units by the end of the year, within 18 months' time, whatever it is. We've built out a way for you to essentially keep track of all that, keep track of the organizations that own each property. And yeah, so we built essentially what we like to call a growth tool. So you're starting out and you want to turn this into something more. Our system will grow with you during that process.

Yeah, talk about like how it works like with roommates, because that's also like a popular thing where someone owns like units, owns properties like in a college town. Yeah, exactly. So 4 people living in an apartment, but they all pay separate. Yeah, exactly.

So, um, that's another feature that has been pretty popular. So Essentially, owners of the property who are in their rooming portal can obviously create tenants, assign them to a property, give them a tenant portal. For the roommates function, you can do one of two things. If you want to set what we call an admin tenant who is responsible for handling all the maintenance requests, all of the payments, everything that has to do with, you know, the property for the duration of that lease. You can do that, or you can create roommates where each roommate— let's say there's 4 people— all 4 of them will have access to the same portal where they can see maintenance requests that were submitted by one of their roommates. They can see who paid on time, who didn't, and everyone will have access to that. There are different use cases where, you know, sometimes a landlord or property manager prefers to have an admin tenant where they're only dealing with one person. We've seen that in, you know, off-campus college houses with, you know, 6, 7, 8 people living in there. Um, and so, you know, that avoids some headache. But the roommates feature has been pretty popular. Um, it keeps everyone on top of their, you know, paying on time, and, um, they're able to track, you know, who's on top of what. If they're roommate's bedroom has a hole in the ceiling. They'll be able to see that. Okay, so they submitted that. You know, it's like, yeah, this is going on at that college. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, this, this guy isn't just letting this go by the wayside, and we're not going to lose our deposit. He's actually on top of his side of it. So it's been, um, yeah, it's been a really strong rollout. And, um, you know, we're building some new features right now that we think are going to, you know, definitely, um, be very beneficial in the market. Um, and yeah, we're excited to, you know, kind of keep building off of what we already built. Um, the system itself is strong today, but there are a lot of features that we're planning to implement very soon that will sort of, you know, grow the reach, uh, of our platform.

Yeah, one of the things, like, I was talking to somebody that has some units up in a college area And they were telling me, they said, oh, the biggest problem they have— and I was telling them, you know, trying to get them to do a demo— but the biggest problem they have is, you know, they have about 4 people because they're like quad units. So there's 4 people in each apartment, everybody pays their rent separate, and then, you know, they're getting rent payments from Zelle, PayPal, Cash App, Venmo, and, you know, And it gets very difficult for them to just, you know, to keep track.

Yeah. Yeah. That's actually another feature that we did plug into the system. So for payments that do come from outside of the platform, you can record that in your payments dashboard. So in the event that someone pays cash, overnights you a check, if you accept Zelle, Venmo, things like that, you can track that within the platform. We do encourage the use of the payment gateway just for keeping things organized and reporting and generating different things that you might need for your reference down the road. But if need be, you can record that within the system.

Yeah, it's definitely a lot easier to use the payment gateway because, you know, you're taking a credit card, a debit card, or an ACH. ACH, yeah. And so, yeah, it's easy for the customer. To pay you because that's how that money's traveling with all those apps anyway.

Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, it's— so yeah, that's been, you know, a great thing for us is— and obviously that's, you know, probably the biggest thing when it comes to, you know, the sale of the software and client acquisition where, you know, we have next-day funding, we have, you know, ACH capabilities, we have an embedded gateway that can handle everything that you need from a payments perspective. Because at the end of the day, you do want to keep everything organized from a maintenance request standpoint, from, you know, just keeping your portfolio in line. But at the end of the day, the most important thing is that you get paid in a timely manner. And, you know, we do have other features in there for, you know, we have triggers for if someone was late last month, you can create a trigger to let them know 10 days before their rent's due, hey, make sure that you pay your rent this amount on this date, and they'll be notified leading up to that date to, you know, alleviate some of the pressure for the landlord to make sure that they get paid on time. Yeah, that gives—

sends the landlord like reminders too, like, oh, these— here's the list of people that didn't pay, you know, let's say by the 5th, you know, here's a list of people who haven't paid yet, so Exactly.

And, uh, who to reach out to.

Exactly. Without manually going down your list going, oh, this guy, and you're searching through 5 different apps to— Exactly.

Go figure it out. Yeah, you're not going through your Venmo history or things like that. You can generate an invoice on the fly, send it to someone. Um, yeah, it really, um, it keeps you on top of your portfolio for sure. And, um, you know, we've seen just a lot of good feedback coming in from, you know, the current clients that we deal with. And, um, yeah, it's, it's been a great rollout. Um, you know, this is one of a few software ventures that I've been involved in, and, um, you know, like I said, we rolled it out about 2 months ago, and, um, the reception from the market's been great.

And it automates like the late payments. So if there's a late payment due automatically puts it on there.

Yep, exactly. You can create, um, you know, different types of late fees. You can set a percentage of the rent, you can set a fixed amount, a daily rate. You can do that kind of thing where, you know, if you want to set a trigger for, you know, you owe me an extra 10% of your rent if you're a week late, or whatever it is, that'll automatically dock on there. And, you know, again, an added layer for making sure that your tenants are paying on time.

And talk about like the maintenance feature, like how that works. Someone puts in a ticket and then if you're the landlord, let's say maybe you're the fix-it guy, it doesn't need to go to somebody. But let's say you do have a handyman that you—

Yeah. So, so we created a feature within there, a contacts tab. So very similar to your phone, you can store a contact list, name, email, phone number. Categories. A category could be, you know, maintenance, legal, realtor, whatever it might be. Um, and you can give these people access to the system if they're, you know, someone who handles your maintenance requests or your property manager or whatever it is. But another popular feature has been our contact search tab. So let's say you get a maintenance request for a clogged drain and you don't have someone on call or someone that you, you know, trust to deal with that. You can simply go into this, um, contact search feature and enter the address or use your current location depending on where the property is. It'll pull a list of people in your area. So let's say you select plumbers, you enter the address of the property that needs maintenance, you can click search and you can see Google reviews, contact info, things like that for people in your area that can help you with this issue. You can add them to your contacts list, give them a call. If they approve and say, yeah, we'd love to help you with this, you can actually assign that maintenance request to them right from the platform. They'll get an email with all of the maintenance request details, so they'll see a picture of the clogged drain, they'll see an address of the property, and, you know, they'll be able to see the tenant notes like, I tried resetting it, didn't work, um, can't seem to get this fixed, whatever it might be. They can then go into the portal, update that. They can add their own pictures, own videos once it's done. And then from there, you can send them their payment. If you decide to charge the tenant, you can fire off an invoice to them. So that's been a really popular feature, especially like I said, for that growth stage landlord or property manager. Yeah, the people who are kind of getting their feet under them in this industry who might not have the contacts, you know, for these maintenance requests. So it's helping build relationships, it's supporting local businesses, and, um, yeah, that's been another really popular feature.

Yeah, and if you have a maintenance guy to just shoot it up him, that person over the info, and then they have it and you're not like going through like your text messages and copies. Exactly. Pictures, and you know, keeps everything like organized so that you're keeping track of it. And then also, you know, owning properties, you want to keep track of how much it costs you to whatever, do repairs because— Exactly.

Time to do taxes, right? Exactly. And yeah, that's another feature too where you can enter an estimated cost where, you know, if someone submits a request, you can take a look at it and say, I think this is going to cost me $500. And you can go back and once it's updated, you can enter the actual cost. And let's say it costs $350 and you go back and say, okay, I saved $150. I was anticipating spending $500, cost me $350. So, you know, another just added layer of detail. But that feature specifically we've seen has really been beneficial in building relationships for, you know, landlords, owners, property managers, and, you know, the people who tend to these maintenance requests. You know, it's again pulling people in your area, which, you know, it starts with one maintenance request and then they build the relationship from there. So that kind of all goes back to, you know, we kind of grow with you. So yeah.

Yeah, so even if you own like an apartment building and you have onsite maintenance person, this just keeps things a lot more organized than just text messages and emails.

Exactly, exactly. So yeah, that's been another very well-received feature that we built. So yeah.

Or like when you're going to get a tenant, Talk about like the features that it— you— that you have built in there so someone can make good decisions on tenants, because that's always, you know, a landlord's nightmare is, oh my God, you know, I'm getting the bad— you know, is this tenant good or that bad?

Exactly. So explain that. Yeah, so we do, um, we offer, um, we integrate with a company that does, um, full background checks So all you have to do is send over an application to your potential tenants. You can run the background check, see that in real time. It only takes, you know, it takes less than a day to pull all the information and get the background check over to you. From there, if everything looks good, like I said, we do have an integration with DocuSign where you can go right into the rooming portal, pull your lease template, enter it into DocuSign, enter the tenant's email, and send it right over to them. Once they sign it, it'll come right back to you. You can store that right within your portal for your reference. It will also be automatically stored in the tenant portal. And then once that tenant moves in, you'll be able to update that portal with an updated copy of their lease, their monthly rent, what their deposit was. And tenants will have access to this portal, um, through the web.

And what about checking their credit?

Yeah, so that's part of the background check. So it comes back with, you know, everything that you need to know if they're going to be a reliable tenant or not. Um, so again, that's, you know, um, obviously very important because, you know, a big thing that we've tried to help with too is tenant retention, right? Where you want to keep tenants in, you know, a unit as long as possible. You want to make sure that, you know, their process is seamless and that they have a good experience living at your property. Um, so what we've tried to do is create a system also for the tenants that, you know, is just easy to use and, um, goes a bit beyond just the property management itself. So like one feature that we put in there was a Things Near Me feature where let's say you just moved to a new area, you just moved from New York to Miami. You're brand new to the area and, um, you know, you're not really sure what's around you, what to do on a Friday night, that kind of thing. If you log into your portal, you can go to the Things Near Me feature. You can filter it by events like concerts or flea markets or any events that are going on, restaurants, bars, nightclubs. Um, you know, it's fully customizable to what the you know, what's going on in the area. But that all goes back to, you know, us trying to create an extra layer of tenant satisfaction where, you know, we're kind of living in an age where, like, I personally know a lot of people who are, you know, digital nomads where they'll go, they work remotely and they'll go live somewhere for a year. Once that year is up, they go move somewhere else and they're just trying new things and exploring new areas. Where, you know, we've added a feature that, you know, people can see what's going on around them. Um, it's, you know, something that our competition isn't doing. And again, it's, um, something that we created that, you know, keeps a tenant paying attention to the portal, making sure that their rent's paid on time. It's one extra thing that they're keeping an eye on, and it's actually been a much more popular feature than I thought it would be for people who are moving to a new place.

Yeah, because you want to be engaged with your, you know, you want to be engaged with your tenant, and because they're your customer, and you want to make the customer happy. So you want to provide them with, you know, tools, because not everybody is on social media. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Stuff up, and, you know, and I've been fine, and, you know, it's just funny like how that is, and especially like younger people They're like not into, you know, they're not into Facebook, they're not into all these things. So they're, you know, they rely on other, you know, other tools to get their information. Yeah, 100%.

And, you know, another thing is it gives visibility to local businesses and, you know, new things to try in the area. Um, so again, you know, that's been— I personally, I wasn't sure how that feature would be received from a tenant standpoint, but it's been like I said, a lot more popular than, uh, than we anticipated. So it's been really cool to see.

Yeah, I was looking at a survey recently and it was talking about, um, people, people's, you know, moving, and just talking about how some of the, you know, how rent, rents are fluctuating and up and down and how that, you know, and how that is affecting like the, the rental industry. And it was pretty interesting. I was, I was actually shocked about how often like people move. I remember when I was younger and I would, I would be happy to live in an apartment for 2 or 3 years.

Yeah, I'm the same way. And yeah, it's crazy. And, um, yeah, people are moving, you know, um, at, yeah, at crazy rates and You know, another thing that we've seen is, you know, right now it definitely seems like it's a renter's market. You know, like I said, people are moving constantly. People are, you know, always looking to try a new place. And, you know, before they commit to buying a home, you know, people are traveling more. They're exploring more places to try out for 6 months, a year, whatever it might be. So, you know, we've gotten a lot of our clients who have these use cases where, you know, their tenant is there in Florida, but they're moving to California in a couple of months. And it is pretty crazy to see, you know, how much people move around these days.

Yeah, the whole, like, work-at-home thing is kind of like spawned this whole thing where people, you know, are like, okay, well, I'm working at home and my employer either have my own business or my employer doesn't care where I end up.

Yeah, we don't have to be in office, right?

You don't have to be in an office. And they'll say, okay, I'm gonna live here for a year, then I'm gonna go move somewhere else for a year and try that out. Exactly. And, and they don't have— it's like I was listening to somebody and they were talking about stuff. They don't have any stuff.

Yeah, yeah, you move into like a fully furnished, uh, apartment or A lot of people do, uh, what I've seen is a lot of long-term Airbnbs. So people do, you know, a 3-month Airbnb somewhere, or, um, it's, it's a pretty wild time when you, when you look at it.

Yeah, I actually was talking to somebody recently and they were, they own a bunch of Airbnbs and they were thinking about peeling some of them off of there and doing like 6-month rentals on them. And yeah, And, and I think that some people are starting to figure out, like, hey, maybe that's a more popular type of thing to do with a rental property. I think we're going to see a lot of different things pop up in the future in the, in the property management, um, business where— oh yeah, where there's just more things going on. And even I've talked to people that are I mean, I'm 65, so— and I'll talk to younger people in their 20s and 30s, and they're like, I'm not interested in owning a home, I'm not interested in buying a condo. Yeah, there's this whole like, um, layer of people that they just want to rent.

Yeah, exactly. They don't want to commit to, you know, a mortgage. They, you know, they're kind of just seeing where life takes them. And yeah, it's, it's funny that you mentioned the short-term rentals because we recently signed up a portfolio. So we're actually headquartered in Philadelphia, and we just signed up a portfolio of houses down at the Jersey Shore who, you know, they do 3-month rentals, 1-month rentals. And they came to us and said, is this something that we can do on this platform? We were like, yeah, you know, if you have a short-term lease template, you can drop that in. And if you have to run a background check, you got to take a deposit, whatever it is. So that was actually the first use case that we saw of the short-term rentals. So I'm curious to see if we run into more of that.

Yeah, there's definitely like executive housing. We have a client that does executive housing, but it's usually like 6 months to a year furnished, like luxury homes. The lowest one is around $5,000, $6,000 and then up to like $20,000 a month.

Wow. It's crazy. That is wild.

Yeah, they don't have very many houses and their plan is they buy them rent them for a few years, and then they try to, they try to flip them. But they buy a lot of stuff that's near like the, the coast, all over like the East Coast, up and down the East Coast. Gotcha. That's, that's cool. Executive homes. Gotcha. Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting, you know, the different types of things that you see. So if people want to find Mike, what— and they want to find rooming, What's the website?

So yeah, if you're interested in Rooming, our website is getrooming.com. That's G-E-T-R-O-O-M-I-N-G.com. And you can reach out to me directly. My email is mike@getrooming.com. And, uh, we'd love to show you a demo and explore, you know, an opportunity to work together. Um, we're always looking to collect feedback and, you know, speak with new clients. So we're, uh, We're always ready.

And if, and if they're listening to the podcast, any special offer you want to give people?

Yeah. So right now we are offering, we're waiving our onboarding fee for any new clients. So if you reach out from the podcast, we're again free setup. And yeah, like I said earlier, we'll have you onboard within a day's time for no cost to you. So yeah. All right.

So Mike, thanks for joining us on the podcast today. I've known Mike for a couple years. He's, he's entrepreneuring. It's a young guy. He's like trying to build tech stuff. And I think this project is really cool. We're working with them and also helping them try to find some new customers while supporting the payment processing on these platforms. Yeah, and it's, you know, it's a great product. And if you're a landlord or you own an apartment building, whatever it is, Mike can help you out and explain everything and make it easy to get onboarded and get running your business. So thanks for listening today to B2B Vault. Again, you can watch the show on Spotify, Apple, YouTube. Find me on LinkedIn, find the podcast there, and you can look up Mike's software at getrooming.com. Mention B2B Vault and get a free onboarding. So thanks for listening today. Thank you, Mike, for joining us on the show. Yep, peace out everybody, and carpe diem.

Have a good one. Thank you. Peace the day.