Making Homeownership Affordable feat. Frank Rohde

I'm on the journey to buy this home. I'm going to take care of it. And so net-net, that ultimately benefits the investor pool.

How would you compare this to another single-family rental fund that's just investing in rentals?

You have a cash-flowing asset because you're generating rental income, but you're marrying that rental income and cash flow with all the characteristics of owner occupancy. What we're trying to do is structure the product such that that behavioral shift ultimately benefits both parties. And because the investor owns 98%, going down to 90%, most of the benefits, they accrue back to the investor pool. You can build a mousetrap and an on-ramp and a better solution for the consumer and market rate capital, not just impact investors, but folks who look at this and go, it's actually a sound investment that's going to earn me a solid return, and therefore I'm going to put money into this. And that's what we've seen with investors coming in. You know, they like the mission, but they really like the returns because of that alignment of incentives and behavior.

Hello, future billionaires. Welcome back to another episode of the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. Got a really fun show for you today. I brought on Frank Rhode. He is the CEO and co-founder of Ownify. Ownify is a really cool venture that he started a couple years ago that is looking to help create an on-ramp for people to buy their first home. As we talk about in this interview, it's become increasingly more difficult for people to save enough down payment to make that first jump into homeownership. So they've got a really cool model. I'm excited for him to share about it here and can learn about how they're kind of bridging this gap for a lot of people that have good incomes but don't have the down payment yet and want to get into homeownership, but it's not a clear path to do that. And then really how they do that from an investment standpoint, how they kind of create this matchmaking between investors and the homeowners. So with that, you're going to love the episode. He's a real great interviewee and has a lot of good things to share. As with anybody I bring on the show that may be raising capital, always got to give the caveat and disclaimer that if you are interested, you want to learn more, you know, make sure you do due diligence. I've not done any due diligence. This is more just an interesting concept. I bring people on that I think are interesting, that are doing interesting things. And so this is by no means a, you know, stamp of approval from a due diligence standpoint. You got to do that yourself. If you are enjoying the show, if you're getting a lot out of this, Always appreciate if you can leave a review, share with a friend, and get the word out for us. Really helps us bring on great guests like Frank and continue to keep the show going. So with that, hope you enjoy.

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Frank, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Hey Ben, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Well, for those that don't know much about you or Ownify, give a little, uh, background on yourself, your, uh, kind of career, and what led you ultimately to, to launch Odify?

Alright. Well, going back all the way to the beginning. So I was born in Germany and grew up there. I was lucky enough to spend a year in the US as an exchange student, fell in love with America, came back to go to college. So did my undergrad degree at Penn Wharton. Got into finance early on and then spent a couple of years as a consultant, Oliver Wyman, working with financial services. I started an online insurance company. I spent a number of years at FICO getting deep into credit and risk and, you know, how the analytics work around consumer and consumer financial services. And, and then started and built a company called Nomis, which is a software company that built the pricing engine for a lot of the large mortgage lenders globally. So I spent about 15 years of my career in the bowels of mortgage math, which is super fascinating topic. But that led directly to Ownify and starting this company. So about 2, 2 and a half years ago, I sold Nomis, and then started Ownify really to help first-time homebuyers with a better on-ramp into ownership, really as an alternative to the mortgage, right? And trying to overcome some of the hurdles and problems that I'm sure everyone is aware of anecdotally. And so that in a nutshell is kind of my career arc and trajectory, always financial services and now really focused on this challenge, right, that I believe is a big generational issue that we're facing in the US.

Yeah, well, that's awesome. Talk a little bit about the thesis for why this is an opportunity, right? Because I think a lot of people, myself included, I got lucky enough to get into the real estate market early on and have always owned a home. And I think, to your point, the gap is becoming wider, it's becoming more difficult. And for a lot of our audience that are maybe a little bit older, you know, done very well for themselves. That hasn't been an issue, but it's becoming a bigger issue. Can you kind of map out, you know, how has that happened and what are the bigger hurdles that are making it more difficult for this generation to purchase homes than it was maybe for a generation or two ahead?

Yeah, it's a great question. So there's a couple of things that are coming together and they're all coming together at the same time, right? And the first one is just that we're short housing, right? And depending on what studies you read, we're short somewhere between 2.5 to 4, maybe 6 million units. And that's true across single-family homes. It's true across condos, right? But basically, we're short housing in the US, and the impact of that is that prices continue to go up. So the, you know, median price for a single-family home is the highest it's, it's ever been. So you've got the first thing, which is just prices are high, right? The second thing is that mortgage rates are now back to what I would call their long-run historical average, which is somewhere between 5% and 6%, right? They're still, they're 6.5% today. They're going to come down a little more, but they're not going to go back to the 2s and maybe even 3s that we saw, you know, 2 and 3 years ago. So these, this abnormally low interest rate environment that we lived through, that's probably gone for the foreseeable future. So, so you have house prices and then you have the affordability of if you can get a mortgage, you know, you're paying 5 or 6% in interest and, and that's significantly more than it was in the past. So that's the second thing. The third thing is that there's a lot of corporate investment in real estate, right? Corporate buyers who show up as cash buyers and they're basically buying single-family homes to turn them into rentals. And so if you're a first-time buyer and you show up and you're looking at that $400,000, you know, single-family home, which is kind of where the starter home is priced today, you're actually competing with, you know, private equity money from Wall Street investors who show up with cash offers. So that makes it even harder. Then you have student debt, right? Especially for first-time buyers in their late 20s, early 30s. Everyone is saddled, or not everyone, but a lot of folks are saddled with student debt, which, which prevents them from saving. And then the tax deduction for first-time buyers is largely gone because most people who have a, you know, $250,000, $300,000 mortgage, they take the standard deduction. They don't itemize. So what used to be this kind of subsidy from the federal government by virtue of a mortgage interest tax deduction That's no longer applicable as well. So you take all these things together and basically comparing it to maybe when you bought your first home or when I bought my first home, you know, 10, 15 years ago, it's gotten a lot harder, a lot more expensive. And that's a real generational challenge, right? And whenever you have a big problem like that, they kind of— everyone is aware of anecdotally that creates an opportunity for new solutions. And that's really where we saw an opportunity to kind of rethink what it means to own and how we enable that path into ownership for first-time buyers.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you kind of alluded to it, but one of the other parts that is exacerbating supply is when you don't have enough new construction happening, but you also have all these people that currently own homes with super low interest rates that don't want to move and have to go get a new mortgage at the higher interest rates. And to the extent that rates don't come back down to those super low lows, it's going to continue to restrict supply as people don't want to move. And so it's continuing to create less options for people. And I don't have the stats in front of me, but I know from seeing them that wage growth has not kept up with appreciation of home prices over the past several decades. And not to mention all the student debt and other things that are saddling the income people are generating. So it makes a lot of sense. You know, talk about the model a little bit. How have you guys set up this model and how does an investment in real estate actually help people, you know, get into homeownership?

Yeah. Yeah. So the question we posed really was, why can't you buy your home over time? Right? The way we buy real estate and homes in the US has been the same for, you know, 70, 80, maybe 100 years, which is if you have a bunch of cash, great, you buy a house, you get the title. But most everyone else gets a mortgage, right? And so you go to the bank or mortgage lender and you borrow a large amount of money and you have your own, you know, down payment as your contribution. And then you pledge the title to the bank effectively over the next, let's say, 30 years while you're paying down that principal. And eventually you own the home free and clear, right? So you buy effectively 100% of the home on day one, but you incur a large amount of debt to do that, right? And that's the kind of standard way of buying a home. So the question we ask is, well, why can't you buy your home brick by brick or piece by piece over time, right? And so what we did is we looked at what does ownership really mean? And it turns out ownership is actually— there's no single definition, right? It's kind of defined through, through legal frameworks at a state level and to some extent at the county level. But there's a bunch of components that I think everyone kind of agrees to. And one is the ability to utilize the space, right? Live in the space. The other one is the ability to sell and hypothecate and, you know, transfer and all that. So we looked at ownership, we took it apart, and we put it back together in a structure that allows the customer to go out and pick a home and then utilize Ownify to buy that home, place it into an entity, and fractionalize the value of the home or the equity of the home. And so what we do with Ownify is we put a home into a limited liability company, and that LLC issues membership interest or shares, right? Which we call bricks. So each home gets fractionalized into 10,000 bricks, and a brick is a membership interest or share in that LLC that holds title to the home. So we can't fractionalize a title, at least not today in the US, but you can fractionalize the entity that holds the title. And so what we allow the customer to do is have a long-term lease on the property, which gives them the right to occupy the property. Over a 5-year period. And at the same time, we allow them to buy those bricks over time and effectively become a shareholder or a member of the entity that holds title. So it's a, it's a unique structure where the customer on the one hand is a tenant of the LLC that holds title to the home, and on the other hand also is a shareholder of that entity. And the way the product and the math is dialed in is that we say to the customer, you can pick the home and on day 1, you contribute 2% to the purchase price or effectively, you're buying 200 bricks, right? And so for a $400,000 home, that would be $8,000 as a down payment. You're buying 200 bricks at $40 each, right? 10,000 bricks, $400,000 purchase price. And then every month, you make a payment and that payment effectively does 2 things. One, fraction of your payment pays rent on the bricks that you haven't purchased. And another fraction of the payment buys incremental bricks. And so we'll get to the investor in this equation in a second. But basically what that math allows the customer to do is live in the home and rent the fraction that they haven't bought while increasing the fraction they own. And as they increase their fraction, they're stacking their bricks, right, from 200 to 300, 400, 500, all the way up to 1,000 at the end of 5 years, the rent that they have to pay on the balance, the bricks that they haven't bought, goes down as their ownership stake increases. And so the— I mentioned 200 bricks to start, or 2%, and the way the program works is that over 5 years, the customer builds up 1,000 bricks, or 10% of the value of the home. And the reason we get them to 10% is that that's sufficient to now use that amount, that equity, right, that value that they've built in the home as a down payment for a traditional mortgage. And so at the end of 5 years, or at whatever point they get to that 10%, they can get there faster. They can use that 10% and now buy the home from the LLC at the whatever future market value. And so if you take those 3 components together, right, the lease agreement, the equity share, the ability to buy bricks as bona fide membership interest, and the purchase option, we've created an on-ramp into homeownership that allows the customer to jump over that down payment hurdle, build equity, live in the home, right, make changes to the home, have all the rights of ownership, but not have the obligation to pay off that huge mortgage balance that they would have in a traditional fashion until later down the line, until, you know, 3 or 4 or 5 years from now.

Got it. So it sounds like in this model, the type of customers that you're working with or borrowers would— the hurdle not necessarily— isn't necessarily income, right? But it's more the down payment and savings for that kind of big lump sum chunk. Is that really what you're solving for, like a forced savings program, so to speak. But they also get the benefit of the home now than having to wait for 5 years. Is that, is that kind of—

That's exactly right. So if you look at kind of our target customer and the persona that has engaged and, you know, the folks who are in the portfolio and living in Ownify homes today, they tend to be what I would call the missing middle. They have solid incomes, good incomes. You know, they're teachers and nurses and creatives. Creative types, but they're not, you know, they're not Google engineers. They're not, they're not PE, you know, executives who have a ton of money. So they have solid income. They have good credit. So our average FICO credit score in the portfolio is about 740. So they've been, you know, really good credit, but they haven't saved the down payment. And when you dig in and you ask them, well, why haven't you saved the down payment? You get all the answers that we discussed earlier, which is, well, I have student debt. You know, I just started working. It's expensive to live here. Right? So someone who's, who's, you know, 28 or 30, hasn't saved 30, 40 grand for a down payment, but has all the other characteristics. That's, that's the kind of target audience that, that we've been able to help. And when you look at the job categories, those are folks that you want in the local community, right? You want to be able to have them buy and be part of the community rather than, you know, displace them to further out into the suburbs and exurbs. Where they then have to commute to their job, right? So, so there's a net positive for the community. And, and that's actually a big part of the investor value proposition. And on the other side of the equation is to say, you can invest in this and help local homeowners, right, or aspiring homeowners live in your community by funding the path to homeownership for them, and at the same time earn the return, you know, on that investment.

No, I think that's such a cool piece of it, right? Is you're kind of creating a tangible way for investors to earn some level of return, but also have an impact on what you're doing. So talk about, I mean, this kind of seems to be part of what led the initial idea to start Onify, but talk about the investor side of this. So how does this work, right? If you're investing in the membership interest of this LLC, what's kind of the give and take when you're purchasing property? And one more quick nuance here. It sounds like you said the, the homes that are being purchased are kind of being pulled from the potential borrowers, or are you guys going in you know, pre-buying a portfolio of homes that then you try to get people, you know, excited about and to purchase, or is it the other way around?

It's the other way around. And actually that's— so the way that works is that the customer comes in, the owner, as we call them, comes in, and the first thing we do is we qualify the customer. So that's credit and income underwriting. We've automated that to say, are you qualified, right? Do you have the income? Do you have the credit characteristics? And so assume you're qualified. The next step is we partner you with an agent and you go out and look at homes that are today on the market for sale on the MLS, right? And the benefit of that is that we don't buy a home that sits empty and then try to, you know, market it to a tenant or an owner or a customer. And while we're holding the home, it doesn't generate income. We only buy a home once we have a customer committed to that home, right? So the customer and the agent go out, they select a home, we re-underwrite the home, we do evaluation, inspection, appraisal, all that. To make sure it meets our investment criteria. And then we buy the home as an all-cash offer. So one of the big benefits to the customer is, you know, you put 2% down, you have an affordable monthly payment, but you get a cash offer. So you can compete with, you know, the Wall Street investors and the cash buyers that are out there. And that makes your offer a lot more attractive out in the market. Now, Ben, to your question, you know, what happens to the investor? So the investor, or the pool of investors on the other side of the equation invest in a fund, Ownify Home Fund, and that fund buys the bricks that the customer hasn't bought. So on day 1, as I mentioned, the customer puts down 2% or 200 bricks, right? There's 9,800 bricks left. That's what's funded by the investor pool, and those bricks are held over a 5-year period. So as an investor, You're effectively putting money to work for 5 years, and during those 5 years, you're getting 2 things. One, you're getting rental income because keep in mind the bricks that the customer hasn't bought that you as an investor are holding effectively through the fund, those earn rental income. So you're getting that kind of passive income, and you're getting the home price appreciation because the customer's transfer of equity and the way they're buying the bricks, they're buying bricks at current market value. At any given point, right? So on day 1, that $400,000 home, the brick was worth $40. A month later, it might be $40.50, right? And a year later, it might be $42 or $43 or $44. And so as home prices increase, the investor benefits from that appreciation alongside the rental income of those bricks, right? It's like being a landlord. However, you're a landlord for only the bricks that the customer hasn't bought, and we manage that whole process. And so as an investor, you know, why would you do that? Well, one, you're helping first-time homebuyers. But two, if you think about the structure, you're investing in single-family real estate, single-family homes where you have zero vacancy, right? You don't have the lease-up cost. You're, you're only investing when the home is actually bought. You have a guaranteed 5-year lease. So the customer, so you, you don't have turnover, and we haven't seen turnover in the portfolio. You're getting tenants and customers with a high FICO. So we haven't seen a single late payment in the portfolio. And you're getting people who are co-owners, right, who own a small fraction and an increasing fraction of the home. And one of the really satisfying things we saw over the first kind of 18 months or so was that the maintenance cost in that portfolio is, is about 60% lower than industry average for single-family rental. Because folks look at this and say, well, I'm, you know, I'm on the journey to buy this home. I'm going to take care of it. I'm going to repair things. I'm going to fix things. You know, I'm not going to call the landlord every time something happens. And so net-net, that ultimately benefits the investor pool in the form of a higher rental yield, right? Because you have lower maintenance costs, you don't have vacancy, you don't have delinquency, you don't have turnover, all of those things that you normally have in a single-family rental portfolio.

Yeah, interesting. So I mean, that's to me from an investment standpoint, what it seems most akin to is investing in a portfolio of rental units. But what's different is, one, you're not leveraging the underlying assets. Now, I'd be curious if you have fund leverage. We can get to that in a minute. And then two, your argument for— you have a higher buy-in, right? These are not just renters that have a 12-month lease. These are people that have picked this home specifically because they want it. They understand, you know, the, the contract for the 5 years and are effectively owning the home and taking care of it more than a tenant would. And I would assume because of the way you structured it, it creates an incentive to want to keep making those payments because it's clearly defined. You're buying more bricks or more ownership of the asset over time. And so it's a naturally built-in incentive to want them to keep, to keep making payments. Am I thinking about that right? What are some other— like, how would you compare this to another, like a single-family rental fund that's just investing in rentals and, you know, getting yield off that income?

Yeah, you got it. You got it exactly right. I mean, You have this underlying asset which is attractive, right? Which is a single-family home. So, you know, we, you can't guarantee that they're going to appreciate, but we know that they're not going to depreciate massively, right? They're not going to lose all their value. So, so the first thing is you have a safe asset, right? You have a cash-flowing asset because you're generating rental income, but you're marrying that rental income and cash flow with all the characteristics of owner occupancy, right? Which is people taking care of the property, no vacancy, no turnover, right? Better behavior or ownership type behavior rather than tenancy behavior. And so compared to investing in an asset, a single-family REIT or single-family portfolio, right? What we were trying to do is structure the product such that that behavioral shift ultimately benefits both parties, right? The owner for their fraction and then the investor for their share of the home. And because the investor owns 98%, going down to 90%, most of the benefits obviously accrue back to the investor pool. And, and that's important because you can build a mousetrap and an on-ramp and a better solution for the consumer if you can at the same time attract capital, right? And market rate capital, not just impact investors, but folks who look at this and go, it's actually a sound investment that's gonna earn me a solid return, right? And therefore, I'm going to put money into this. And that's what we've seen with investors coming in. You know, they like the mission, but they really like the returns because of that alignment of incentives and behavior.

Right. So how do you price this for the, the borrowers? Right. The— is it based on a net yield? Is it based on kind of the average rental income in the market? Are you trying to solve for a number for the— for your investment? How does that work?

Yeah, the answer is a little bit of all of that. But one of the interesting things here is We look at the, the rental yield in the market, right? And basically look at, you know, you have to be somewhat competitive on the rental yield to offer a value proposition to the consumer. However, one of the interesting things, and when you, when you talk to renters in particular, the thing they like the least is the fact that the landlord can increase rents every year, right? And so you have this ever-increasing payment and somewhat unknown payment And so one of the things that we've done is we've, we've gone back to our customer base and we said, look, we're going to fix your rent for 5 years. You're not gonna get that anywhere else. You're gonna have a fixed payment for 5 years. In return, that payment or the rental component of that payment is gonna be a little bit above market today. Right? But it's not gonna increase. So for the investor, you're getting a higher yield, in return for certainty that you're giving to the consumer by saying we're not going to increase your rent, right? We're not going to increase the yield in the second and third and fourth year. And that's a fair trade-off that the consumer understands, right? And that benefits the investor. So to answer your question, we look at the market rents that are out there for single-family homes that are comparable in that market. We price above that today because we know that those rates, those rents that are competitive for standard SFR rentals are going to increase over time. And because we have this fixed offer over 5 years to the customer, the customer's okay with that. You know, plus they're getting the optionality of picking the home. It's a home that's for sale, not for rent. It might be in a better school district, all of the things that, you know, provide incremental benefit. And that's why that math actually works for the consumer as well.

Yeah, I mean, we're kind of in a unique environment right now too, to where the, the spread between the average rental cost and the average mortgage is as wide as it's been in a very long time. So it's actually much more expensive than it has been historically to, to pay a mortgage in current rates. And so if you price it slightly above the average rental market, kind of somewhere in between right now, right?

Yeah. All in, we're actually— our customers pay less than they would with a mortgage.

Yeah. Interesting.

Today. Right. And there's still, and there's still a good amount of room there, right? Even as mortgage rates fall. And so that's, that's kind of this interesting missing piece that didn't exist in the market is to say, you know, it's, it's better than renting because we give you ownership, we give you the ability to build equity, we give you the ability to pick a home, all of that. But it's cheaper than a mortgage and you don't have the big upfront down payment. And today with a monthly payment at, you know, whatever, 6.5% mortgage rates, the monthly payment is a little lower as well.

So how do you define— you said you mentioned that you're valuing the asset every month for the purpose of buying new shares. How do you value the asset every month? Is it just kind of based on the, the AVM models out there and some kind of average of that?

That's exactly right. We use third-party AVMs, right? Because we don't want to be we don't want to have a conflict with our customers where we say, you guys came up with the value and I don't know how you did this. We said, well, we use these 3 third-party AVMs, you know, we, we throw out the outlier and we take the average of the other 2 and that's our valuation model, right? And so that's what the customer, that's what's used to value the bricks every month. And it's also the valuation mechanism for the purchase option that the customer has to buy the remaining equity, right? And because, because you, we publish that, there's a portal, each customer can see their valuation of Bricks over time because that's an ongoing, you know, valuation model that is visible. There's also not going to be any surprises when the customer comes back, you know, in 2 and 3 years and says, I want to buy this home. What is it worth? Well, it's worth what it was last month, right? Plus or minus a small amount because they, they don't really jump all that much month to month. But you've seen the walk, you know exactly how we to this price, right, from wherever we started.

Interesting. You know, in one scenario, if, you know, house prices crash and, you know, prices are down 30%, all of a sudden they come into some money. They could— they could— could they buy you out at that price at a low, low valuation from what was originally purchased at? Or do you have kind of some type of right of refusal or something?

There's a, there's a floor in the model that basically says the customer has the right to purchase the home at market as long as it's 5% above the entry price, right? Because we want— what we need to protect the investor against is the customer coming in saying, okay, I bought it at $400, right? The AVM says $350. All of a sudden, now I'm going to swoop in and snap it up 6 months later, right? We obviously need to protect the investor, right?

It's that Yeah, it's interesting because I bought a house in a newer development, you know, a year or so ago. And it's funny because AVMs, you know, as soon as one sells or sometimes they fluctuate all the time because it's a newer market trying to figure out what the price is because there's land being purchased and there's, you know, so it's kind of an interesting but okay. And then at the 5-year, so the goal is they have you know, 10% equity, but it's theoretically they could have more or less based on the valuation of the BRICs over time. Right. So, you know, if you can have that 10%, that gets them potentially to qualify for more financing options. At that point, is it, you know, you guys are kind of prepped them, they're ready, everything's good to go, and it's pretty easy for them to get financing. Doing it for a couple of years. You haven't gone full cycle with some of these, but what does that look like, right? If someone theoretically doesn't have quite 10% and/or lenders pull back and, you know, first-time homebuyer programs are, you know, less, less aggressive, you know, how does that take out? What does that look like? Can you just basically at that point, sorry, we're not going to extend this, this loan? Or what happens at that point? What's the takeout? Yeah.

So the golden path is exactly the one you're describing, right? Which is the customer builds up their 10%, they work up to 10%, they now have the down payment. We know they have good credit. So unless something bad happened, they will have good credit because they started with good credit and most likely they have the same or better income. Right. So they should be mortgage qualified at that point. And the option to the customer is buy the home go get a mortgage, right? We have partner lenders that understand what we're doing and understand how the program works, who can qualify you, and then you can go get a mortgage and buy the home. So that's the golden path, and that's the ideal path. And let's say you're not exactly there, you're at 9.8% or, you know, 9.5% because you haven't, you know, home prices kind of went up too fast, so you haven't built up your 10%. You can always extend by a month or two or three, right, to get you to that 10%. So that's not an issue. The second path is one where the customer says, well, I don't really want to buy the home. I'm happy living in it. I've built my equity. You know, this is working for me. And so at that point, we offer the option to extend for another 5 years and stay in the same program. And basically, you know, the customer builds from 10% to 20% equity over the next 5 years. The investor pool either stays the same or we swap it into, you know, a successor fund and continues earning rental income and, you know, appreciation over time. And then the third scenario is, and that could happen at any point along the way where the customer says, well, I don't want to buy the home and I don't want to live in it anymore because I'm moving to the other side of the country for, you know, work reasons or what have you.

Right.

And at that point, we will buy back their accumulated equity and we will charge them a relisting fee. To then put the house up for sale, and that returns capital to the investor. And the relisting fee, again, is similar to the kind of the floor buyout, is a protective mechanism to make sure that, you know, the investor base is protected and we cover any costs that we might incur by listing the home and selling it.

Got it. Okay. Last question. So it's interesting you don't use any leverage at the asset level. Which obviously, you know, if you have strong unlevered returns, you don't need it. But do you use leverage at the fund level or anticipate using leverage there?

We do.

We do.

Yeah. And so today we have about 55-60% leverage at the fund level. We're being fairly conservative. You know, as interest rates come down, we may increase that a little bit, really to make sure that ultimately, you know, it's still cash flowing and it's still generating passive income to the investor base. But that's, you know, that's ultimately kind of a provision we've put into the fund docs that we look at on a periodic basis to say what's in the best interest of the investors and how do we maximize returns, right? I don't think we'll ever have huge amount of leverage here, especially not with where interest rates are today. And also, quite frankly, from a perspective of protecting the investor base, right, and making sure that you can't have negative returns.

Right, right. Very cool. Frank, thanks so much for coming on. This is a really, really cool concept. And I love how you said you're kind of solving the gap in the market here for homeownership and definitely a very, very unique model. So congrats for getting off the ground and excited to see where you guys kind of, kind of go from here. What's the best way for people to learn more about Ownify if they want to hear more what you're doing?

Well, check out the website, ownify.com, or ping me directly, frank@ownify.com. And happy to, you know, answer any questions, dig in deeper, figure out how we can help other folks, you know, expand into new markets.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Great. Frank, thanks so much for coming on. It's really fun.

Ben, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

This is the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast where we uncover the alternative investments and strategies that billionaires use to grow wealth. The tools and tactics you'll learn from this podcast will make you a better investor and help you build legacy wealth. Join us as we dive into the world of alternative investments, uncover strategies of the ultra-wealthy, discuss economics, and interview successful investors.