Belong manages single-family rentals for absentee landlords, guaranteeing them rent while handling repairs, upgrades, and tenant requests through an in-house team of contractors and handymen. Unlike typical marketplaces that outsource work, Belong owns its maintenance operations to cut costs and control quality.
Chapters
Yeah, so I was doing some of my research prior to the chat and then it looks like, you know, you're taking a very end-to-end approach, you know, with Belong as a marketplace. So I'd love to learn a little bit more about it, you know, how some of those different, I would say like unique aspects of it as a marketplace. And then you did mention some of the operational complexities with it too. So if we could kind of jump into that.
Yeah, that's a great question. You're right, we're unique, I think, in that We really— and this confused me at the first— but really take a full-stack approach to what we do, which is really in the simplest terms like tech-enabled property management, right? We manage homes for homeowners and we target mostly single-family homes, what we call absentee landlords. So folks that own 1 or 2 homes, either inherited the home or their first home they bought and now buying a second home. but really don't want to be a landlord, right? Like they have full-time jobs, likely work in tech or like some other job, right? And don't want to be landlords. So our promise to them is, hey, we'll manage your home, give you guaranteed rent payments, place the most qualified residents possible in your home, and you never have to worry about it. You get guaranteed cash flow, right? Like give us the keys, we take over, we operate your home, it'll be taken care of, you get money. And on the flip side for renters is once we place renters in the home, we want to be the operating system for their life in the home, right? And what that means is we have a concierge, and quote unquote, because basically effectively your landlord, but called a concierge because we focus on hospitality and experience as opposed to just the misaligned incentives that usually exist. who's really there to take care of you, which is like anything you need, whether it's repairs, upgrades, cleaning, your next bartender for a party you're hosting, the concierge can help and get it done. So that's high level sort of what we do, and then we collect rent payments, of course. But what makes it unique and why I said we take a full stack approach is we really do everything to get, one, get the home ready to rent, and then two, manage the home. So the first part being getting the home ready to rent, we have a full-time staff, and this is what surprised me, of technicians. So on my team, I have a general contractor, an inspector, handymen, specialized trades for like electricians and so on. Like really like construction people, right, that we hire full-time that most other marketplaces would just sub out or, you know, use a vendor network because we really want to control that experience end-to-end and when you have— and control quality, right? We're focused on hospitality, a good experience and quality, and you can only do that when you bring that in-house and own it end-to-end, right? And you can provide like next-day, uh, you know, repairs for your home, high-quality and highly vetted repairs for your home, and really take care of it. And then from a Belong perspective and a business perspective, really utilize those resources as effectively as possible to bring that cost curve down as well, right? So that's where it's really interesting, where we'll take on a home, do all the repairs that it takes to get the home ready to rent, right, and do the cleaning, do the photos, list the home in its best light, and then manage them. But then again, on the flip side, we still have that full-time staff, construction folks that help with in-house maintenance and upgrades and so on, right? So that was a mouthful, but that's sort of what we do. And I think what makes it— to really specifically address your question, Mike— what makes it unique is we brought everything in-house. And when I was first interviewing, that just ran counter to everything I, you know, learned building marketplaces and building tech businesses, which is like, be asset light, be like resource light. But, you know, once you spend time in the business, you realize why it makes so much sense.
