Tenant Fraud, Credit Scores & Zillow's Power Play w/ Boom CEO Rob Whiting

What Boon CRM is really meant to be is to drive faster leasing velocity. At the end of the day, it's drive more leads, faster throughput to application started. That's the mandate and get them through the tour to the application started while owning the communications. I think the communications was one thing that we kept hearing was I've got OpenPhone or Quo, I guess they call it now, or Dialpad. I've got 8x8 or RingCentral. I've got a—

Yeah.

Boom, I've got some other touring solution messaging them. I've got Zillow messaging them, and the applicant's confused, and our team is toggling between Gmail and Boom and some CRM, and there wasn't really an elegant approach to communication, which I think is critical. Obviously, it's critical for the whole resident experience, but it's critical and time-sensitive, especially in leasing, and that's your first impression. So we really didn't kind of set out to build something that was great at driving leasing velocity. And to do that, we thought we had to get communications right.

Welcome back to the Peter Lohmann Podcast. I'm here with Rob Whiting, CEO of Boom. How are you today, Rob?

Doing good. Doing good, Peter. Yeah, thanks.

Awesome. Well, I'm really excited to have you on the show. You're actually overdue. For coming on. And just to clarify, we are a customer of Boom. We use your credit reporting app and it works awesome for our team. I haven't heard anything about it, which is always a good sign. It means it's like integration's going awesome, no issues. And I know our residents appreciate that as part of their resident benefit package. And we will come back and touch briefly on the rent credit reporting, but I want to start with tenant screening. Which is an area that's near and dear to my heart and is something I've been blogging about since before the newsletter was even a thing. This is going way, way back. And I want to start with credit scores. So property managers have different feelings about credit scores and their validity as it relates to tenant screening. First, I want to hear from you. How important do you think credit scores are to tenant screening?

So credit score has historically been a good indicator for willingness to pay, right? Like that's basically what it is. And they were made originally for consumer loans, mainly credit cards, personal loans. There's a derivative version for the rental space. There's versions for the auto space, right? Rentals, the resident score, TransUnion made that one. You have specific auto-specific ones that try to predict the likelihood of repayment on an auto loan. Directionally, I think they're a good tool to include. They have a score that people know. I think the scores alone don't tell the whole story. So you're just looking at that and you have some hard cuts. They think they could be useful for some hard cuts at a certain extreme, for sure. And they provide an objective measure that is from a disputes purpose. Criminal and housing court is a very gray murky area. The data's getting harder to access. So generally credit is one thing that is fairly black or white in terms of what's being returned by the bureau, and you can really lean on that as a property manager. So I think from that perspective, it gives you a useful thing to kind of point to as a first pass. It's generally cheaper than things like income verification, for example. Is it foolproof? No. And the reason I say that is you can actually have a fairly high credit score, While still having a thin file, one trade line, you could have been a joint on a credit card, for example, with a significant other or a parent for that matter. So I think it's good for certain purposes, early pass, hard cuts on certain extremes, something to lean on for disputes purposes. That alone though, I don't think tells the whole story. Even as a credit score itself, you still need to look at the full report. But then beyond that, there's many other factors. So I think it's useful, not sufficient, right?

Got it. Okay. And, and just to set the stage for anyone who might not already be familiar with you or Boom, so Boom is a prop tech company here in the property management space. You guys have 3 products right now, tenant screening, which is what we're talking about, rent credit reporting, which I mentioned that we're a customer of, and New, which is a leasing CRM and Showing product, and you guys have gotten a lot of press. You raised some money. We're going to talk about some of that, but I want to stay on tenant screen for the moment. So I think when it comes to credit scores, I love credit scores for screening. I believe they're highly predictive. I've seen a number of white papers from multiple of the big three, you know, credit scoring agencies showing high correlation between. credit scoring and likelihood of a skip default or eviction. But I'm a little worried that we're going to lose our ability to use credit scores for screening tenants. And I believe we already have in some jurisdictions. What are you seeing on that front?

So I actually got on a call with— so I got it. We work with a few nonprofits and a few company organizations in the credit building space just by nature of doing rent reporting, right? And so And then, so they sometimes introduce me to regulators who want to introduce something like what they're doing in California. Hey, you must offer credit reporting. And some are saying you must only report positive only. Right. And so—

Crazy. That's crazy work, by the way.

And I think that, again, this is always the like good intentions, but poorly implemented. And I basically went on the record and I have this call with this regulator and I basically, because He's like expecting me to be the advocate for, yeah, let's do everyone gets positive-only credit and that's the only thing you can report. And by the way, you must report it. California stops short of that a little bit where they say you must offer it. You don't have to pay for it and you don't have to do it. It's at the cost of the consumer by the positive-only, right? And so I think that is like we're shooting ourselves in the foot because A credit score is only useful if it's predictive. And so if you start just submitting only positive-only data, then you're going to get inflated credit scores. And then people are going to—

You don't have to defend it, Rob. It's just ridiculous.

And then people are going to stop using it. And so you saw this with Chime's credit builder account. You'd see this not with property managers, but sophisticated consumer lenders like the Capital Ones of the world. They can They can basically suppress certain trade lines of known, hey, we don't think this is predictive of repayment. We don't— that isn't something that I've seen in tenant screening, right? Like you can suppress certain trade lines and exclude them and recalculate the score programmatically or create a different score. But I think that could be coming, right? Like something like that.

Yeah.

And the easy button is to just not use credit scores, right? If we think they're too inflated and not predictive, Like without any tooling to suppress certain trade lines, you'd just be like, well, let's just throw it out. Right? So yeah.

Yeah. I mean, 2 comments on that. One, imagine a bank that only reported on-time mortgage payments and just omitted non-payment or late payment of your mortgage. I mean, ridiculous. Like you wouldn't even bring it up. It's just such a silly idea. The other point I want to make is credit scores, are one of the most powerful and most progressive modern inventions of all time. No one should be happier about the existence of credit scores than low and middle-income folks and people from disadvantaged backgrounds and minorities. Because in the old days, it was like, if you weren't a white man, you didn't get a loan.

Yeah, exactly.

You just weren't getting a mortgage or you weren't renting an apartment. And credit scores have flattened all of those biases and prejudices. And it's like, it's a score. And you know what doesn't go into the score? Your race or your sex or anything about you.

Religion.

Your religion.

Nepotism or whatever.

Yeah. Or what you're wearing on your head or what religion you are or what nationality or ethnicity you are. Those things don't appear in your credit score.

Well, it's the same thing with SAT scores. So there was a big push maybe 5 or 7 years ago to remove the SAT scores, and now it's based on essays and extracurriculars and things like that. I come from a middle-class, I'm skewing lower middle-class family. I had to take the SAT 3 times to actually get a score that got me into my college that I wanted to get into. You know, one of those kids who's not very smart but tries really hard, right? That was kind of me. But I didn't have, you know, when I got to BCG and I did consulting, I was around all these people and like, oh yeah, my guidance counselor knew the guidance counselor at Johns Hopkins, you know? So it was like, or the admissions committee, right? And like, that was not something that was at my school. And the SAT definitely helped me neutralize, you know, some of that, those relationships, right? And so I think same thing with credit scores.

Yeah. Okay. So moving on from credit scoring, it looks like, you know, I was just browsing your website before the call and it looks like you're Tenant screening product is extremely comprehensive now, and it covers not only obviously— so like, I guess just to paint a picture for a second, maybe you can help me get clear on this. When I think about tenant screening, I think about 2 types of products. One product I think of is going to run my credit, criminal, and eviction history check for me. That's like the tool that's built into Buildium or some of these other softwares.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm going to get these reports back, credit, criminal, and eviction. And it's up to me to do everything else. I need to verify employment history. I need to verify pay stubs. I need to verify residential history and any other checks I want to do regarding identity verification and stuff like that is on me. And that's kind of like, you know, years ago, I think we used AmRent, same, same type of deal. Now, what it looks like your product is, and what I think some of these more modern, newer ones is, they do it all. They've taken on everything for the property manager. They do the background on residential history, they do identity verification and a bunch of other stuff. So is that the right way? Am I thinking about this the right way? How are these products priced and what are you seeing in the market for these types of products?

I would say there's 3 levels of approaches. I would say like, uh, well, let me maybe take it. Let's take a step back and let's talk about the phases of tenant screening. So it's been like, I think there's 3, there's 3 phases that we've gone through. Phase 1 is, and this was, I don't know. Yeah. 7 years ago, 8 years ago, you'd call it the, I call it push button screening. Phase 1 is the push button screening. Push button screening is Someone fills out a form. It's basically Google Form or a Typeform or Jobform. They fill it out, I get it in, it's all just typed in. And I put, I pushed a button to run a credit criminal eviction bundle. Those are usually from the same place. It's usually TransUnion or Experian are the most common. And they sell a bundle and you get it all back and it's a standard nationwide criminal search. Yep.

So that's what we had for years and years and years and years and years. And it was like, $18 or $28 or something like that for a bundle of all 3. Yeah.

That's right. Yeah. And so that was phase 1 and then phase— and often you were going through— and so phase 2 was what I would call the link-out phase. The link-out phase was I still run my credit card automation through Bildium or Yardi or whatever the solution might be, but then I kick off an identity and income flow. It's usually at the time of checkout. Or I push a button somewhere and it sends an email or usually an email or something to the applicant to go do your identity and income. And so now I've got these kind of like almost like tentacles of things that are going out and I'm trying to wait for them to come back. Let's put aside landlord references and things like that. And that was good. It was an uplevel, right? We started reducing fraud and things like that. But there is a problem with that, which is—

Yeah.

You don't see across all the data. And all of this is very, very much intertwined, right? And my, what we've seen is that identity drives the credit report. Identity drives how you search for the criminal in the housing court, the income. It's all, you might see that, hey, they said that they lived here on their income pay stub. I can see that. But the housing history is actually different, right? So you want to be able to look across. So that was, that brings us to the third phase, which is what I call the decisioning platform. phase. And that's really what we think we do well. And there's a few players in this space, and we're not the first to do it, but I think we do it deeper than most. And so we went bare metal with everything. But yeah, that is, you kind of queued it up right, is you had that chronic criminal addiction bundle, then there were some bolt-ons. Now let's pull it all together, but then let's do it really deeply at kind of a both bare metal, go all the way to the end data sources, and then let's layer on really nuanced criteria. So that regardless of the data service that you're using, you know, Plaid, for example, you can overlay standardized attributes for decisioning. So yeah, I mean, I think it's, that's kind of the phase we're in now.

Okay. And that makes total sense to me. So we've seen an evolution to very simple and then still kind of simple, but disjointed to now much more comprehensive and cohesive background check on residents. And tenant screening is super, super important. I think it's underdiscussed and it's underappreciated even within our industry because an error in either direction with tenant screening has immense consequences. If you accidentally deny somebody who should be a tenant, first of all, you've impacted a human's life and now they're still looking for an apartment and still stressed out.

Right.

And they wanted the place, but they can't have it. And you've impacted the owner's cash flow because we had a potentially great tenant and we declined them. If you make an error the other way and you approve someone who shouldn't have been approved, I think every property manager knows the outcome of that, which is eventually typically eviction, damage to the property, long vacancy times, releasing costs. So it, it like the cost of getting tenant screening wrong in either direction is really, really big. And yep. My like soapbox that I always get on with this topic is we don't actually know how to screen tenants because no one is actually testing this stuff. No one is like taking a million residents and letting them all move in, like screening them, but then letting them all move in and seeing what attributes are correlated with on-time payments and evictions. What we're doing instead is if you ask 10 different property managers, what should be the income requirement to approve a tenant? Most of 'em are going to say 3 times the rent in income should be the requirement. And you're like, really?

Right.

3.0, not 3.1, not 2.9, not 2.785. Like it's exactly 3.0. And same with credit scores and same with everything else. How far back do we go on residential rental history? 2 landlords, 3 landlords, 5 years, 6 years, 2 years, who knows? No one, like there's, it seems to me that there's almost no scientific data on how to properly screen tenants. And I know this is something you're really interested in too, and I believe you've worked on this problem and maybe are actively working on it with your product.

Yeah.

But I, it just, it, It bugs me to this day that there's so little around this topic when the consequences are so big of getting it wrong in either direction.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We've, we, I mean, when you talk about all those costs, it's somewhere, we've, depends on what state and a lot of dynamics, but we, it's somewhere in the, and TransUnion's done some reports on this, but somewhere in like the $8,000 to $15,000 in cost of getting it wrong, right? Depending on when, when that eviction happens and what state it's in, things like that. But you're exactly right. And it's kind of like when I was a kid, I always thought like, oh, the grownups got it figured out, right? And like if you're in the property management space, oh, probably there's some like formula or the big inverted, you know, all the biggest guys in the space, they know what they're doing. And there's some, those, they got a data team. I mean, sad to say, it's like, it's not as sophisticated as you would think at some of the biggest operators. And we are trying to bring more to that. I think the short answer is it depends and it depends on a few factors. One is your portfolio. What's your portfolio status, right? So is it, do you have one vacancy or do you have 100 vacancies? You might be willing to take, and now again, if you're a single-family third-party manager, every vacancy is kind of its own island. But if you have owners with multiple properties, then it starts to matter. But your vacancy health and like how much vacancies you have is impacting how much risk you might be willing to take. So that's number one. Number 2 is Actually the geographic climate you're in, macro but also local. And so if credit scores are going down, you need to start to normalize to what that looks like. And then it's your portfolio performance. So not just the vacancies, but like, how have you been? Like, are you evicting? Like, is your criteria too tight? Are you, you know, those sorts of things based on how it's performing? So yeah, the answer is it kind of depends and we want to bring more dynamism to that. Instead of saying it's just, yeah, 3 times income to rent, 650 credit score cutoff, and no criminal felonies in the last 7 years, right? It's like what you often see. So 100%.

Yeah. And my, you know, these platforms all the way back to, you know, the phase 1 you were talking about, you know, back then we were using Buildium's built-in TransUnion tools. They would always tout this. They would go, You can set their criteria. As if this was some like world-changing capability. And I'm like, no, I don't want, I don't wanna set the criteria. I want you to set the criteria. You're the one screening millions of tenants. How, how am I supposed to know what the criteria should be? By the time I've figured it out, 3 years will have gone by and then, oh wow, all those people we placed 3 years ago, they're getting evicted now. You know, it's like, no, I don't, don't tell me to set the criteria. I don't know what the criteria should be.

Yeah.

Now maybe I can set an occupancy target.

Exactly.

And you can recommend, or like, you know, I could also see a world in which like, you know, based on different criteria, there's like a risk-adjusted return tied to occupancy and eviction. And like, I can see different ways this problem could be solved, but the answer surely is not, oh, let the property manager pick the criteria. Property manager's not qualified to pick the criteria. If we wanted to let the property manager pick the criteria, then we would just go back to the old days where we weren't using credit scores and it's a handshake and it's like, Well, I really like the way that guy, you know, he came in. He seems like a solid guy. I think I'm going to rent to him. Right? That's what we don't want. We don't want that.

Well, at the extremes, you could, you know, it's high. It's like how, and I, and I, we have this discussion all the time with our property managers, which is we see double or triple income verification, right? They want to verify their income via bank, then they want to get pay stubs, then I want to, want to call the employer. And so there's many layers of verification and that really comes down to how badly do you want to fill the unit, right? So there's push-pull between, like you said, filling occupancy versus not making a bad mistake and underwriting less rigorously than you otherwise would. And so I think as you think about Facebook ads, and if you ever run Facebook ads way back in the day, it was set, do you want conversions or do you want impressions and those things? So you can set your targets. And I think it's the same thing. It's like, do I want to fill this now or I only have one vacancy, so I'm willing to wait for the right, for the right tenant, right?

Yep. And I think the issue is that the pro— at the property manager level, their incentive is to fill vacancies quick to get pressure off of them and show that they're doing their job. Right. And so if you leave it up to them, if there's any opportunity for humans to override things or change criteria, their temptation is going to be to loosen things up to fill the vacancy to make my owner happy. But that may— it almost certainly is not in the owner's long-term interest. Almost always it's better to let a property sit vacant for another week or two and find a well-qualified applicant that you don't have to bend the rules for over a 5, 10, 50-year time horizon. Operating like that is going to deliver better returns to property owners. That's my belief. Let's talk about fraud. So if we go back to that Phase 1 thing, 7, 8 years ago, Fraud wasn't really on my mind at all. Maybe it was an issue in other cities. These days, it's all anyone talks about. We're dealing with it all over the place, from rental applications to showing fraud with squatters.

Yep.

Fake ID, fake pay stub. AI has supercharged the ability of fraudsters. You're seeing Instagram influencers hawking fake ID, fake Identity, fake pay stubs, whole move-in packages, credit scores. It's crazy. So bring us up to speed on the current situation. What's really going on? What cities is it good, bad in? What are the trends? Love to hear, because I'm kind of out of the loop. We don't see a whole lot of it in Columbus.

Yeah. So I think zooming out, what most people think about fraud is they think Fake paste does. Like that's the first image that comes to mind typically, and for good reason. That is one of the most fraudulent things in the application process, and out of the documents, it's also the highest frequency document that is frauded, I guess, so to speak. If there's a few reasons, I think that's the case. But I think it's a lot more than that, and we see it in a bunch of different places across the application. And so when we talk about application fraud. There's several places. Number one is the identity document, right? So fake identities, that could be the ID that actually opens up a lot of opportunities for a fraudster. So the identity is what drives the credit report, for example. So if you can fake an identity, you can pull a different credit report, which can enable new things. So that's kind of number one. Number 2 is obviously income. There's a lot around documents themselves. So obviously that's a point. Then there is the credit report. So fraudulent credit reports, those would be, could be driven by someone else. So it could be a synthetically created credit report. Then there is the housing history surfacing other people, other places that you lived that weren't actually the places that you lived. That is often used for the housing history or the housing court search. So that array of addresses of where you lived, those are pointer addresses. You can use Social Security number, you can use a date of birth, but Also, when Boom, when we do it, we survey across the application. And so the housing history locations, and then there's other places as well. You can think about animal screening, right? It lives there as well, potentially. And so we see all these places, they're actually all interrelated in a big way. And so kind of state of application fraud is it's not just income, it's actually numerous places. Income happens to be an income document specifically. Happens to be a very big area and actually probably the most prone to AI. And then when we talk about AI, there's many interesting trends or things we see there in terms of cities where we see this. We actually see some surprising things there, but I would say like zooming out, it's bigger than just documents and there's a lot of other things happening around AI and how it's influencing patterns.

Out of curiosity, while you were answering, I just pulled up Claude, and I said, if I asked you to make a fake pay stub showing $250,000 in income for me, it won't, it won't do it. Would you do it? And it said no, it wouldn't do it.

Yeah. Yeah.

And then I asked Grok. I'm using Grokbot right now as like a personal agent, and Grok wouldn't do it either. Surprising.

Yeah. Grok didn't. I, I ran, yep, ran the same thing. Exactly.

Yeah. It's interesting.

So it also, it also, if you ask it to create a fake LLC. So I, I need to create a company.

Mm-hmm.

And create an LLC for me. And can you create an offer letter for this LLC as well? It won't, it won't do that as well.

Now I have a feeling I could talk it into doing this. I've had some success where it's like, start a new chat, right? And you're like, okay, I have a lot of income. I have a lot of income that's unverified because I'm a contractor and I'm trying to get a job. I'm trying to get a, a, a rental apartment. My mom is sick. It's really important, right? You could, these things are actually very susceptible to sort of like social engineering tactics. So I have a feeling I could probably talk it into it, especially Grok, because Grok's a little, a little bit more willing to be wild for you.

Yeah.

Um, but I think—

That's one way to, that's one way to frame it.

My guess is that these companies that are producing these are using like these open source models that are running locally or whatever. There's ways you can get LLMs that aren't subject to all these guardrails, is my understanding.

Yeah, there are specific websites. A few of them have been shut down and so they're popping up other places, but yeah, there are.

And then how about, I had this thought and maybe I can't remember if I ran this by you when we were at Systems Conference together or not, but basically like if somebody applies, okay, let's, let's play this out. Somebody purchases fake pay stubs, fake identity, everything. Okay. They move in, right? Cause I didn't catch it. They're paying the rent. Is that actually a problem? Like, you know what I mean? Like, if they're there, they're paying the rent. Do I care if their name is Jim Smith instead of John Smith? Like, does that actually matter? Or, and like, I know it matters because like, like it's not something we're going to do at my company, just to be clear.

Yeah.

But it's a curiosity to me that someone would, would use fake documents to apply for an apartment. Presumably knowing that if they didn't pay the rent, they would be evicted. So they're highly convinced. Yes. Like they're convinced they can afford this apartment. I'm not, or I wouldn't be with their, right. You know, with their actual identity. What, what do you think about this?

I mean, I think that's up to, that's up, I mean, I, I don't know. I'm not in your seat. Right. So that's really up to you and how you want, I guess what a lot of people have decided is if the rent's coming in, Don't mess, just let it, let it ride.

Right.

Unless there are other issues. Yeah. A couple things that have happened, I mean, will not have happened or things that are in play. So there is, depends on what lease you use. I mean, for example, NAA, there is a clause in the NAA lease in Section 33 that outlines if there's incorrect or false answers in a rental application, it's considered a default under the lease on par with non-rent payments. So there is, if you find it out later, You do have the right to—

yeah, good luck getting a judge to enforce that.

Yeah.

If they're, if they're current on the rent.

The other one is Florida on October 1st enacted a new law. It actually went into effect last week where application fraud is considered a felony.

So love to hear it.

There is likely to see, yeah, I mean, that, I think it definitely adds more teeth about that judge enforcing it. You know, you often see when something happens in a state, it's used as precedent for things happen in other states. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw that in other states.

Okay. Who got that passed? We need to get them on the show because that great work, whoever was involved in getting that.

I don't, I forget the name. We were actually just, we do recurring syncs with our legal counsel and this, this one came up. And so we've been notifying some of our property managers in the state lately.

Yeah. Yeah. In terms of animal screening, I think I saw it. Do you guys do that as part of your package now?

We do, we do, but we don't, right? We do through integrations. We partner with a couple vendors. We don't do it ourselves.

Okay.

We have a pet questionnaire. We're leaving that to, to them. Yeah.

Okay, sure. Makes sense.

Yeah.

Okay. Oh, I wanted to ask you how you handle it if when you go to do income verification, what if they're not a traditional W-2 with direct deposit? What if they're a contractor? What if they're operating without a bank account? How do you handle that?

So if there are cons, so there's a couple things we think there's about, we think about income sources and verification methods, income sources. We think there's about 11 different types. Those could be W-2, they could be 1099, they could be pension, et cetera. All of these, someone might say that I have this type of income and then we give them an option on how they want to verify it. So depends on what type of self-employed, if it's gig economy that we support that through payroll integrations for DoorDash and Uber Eats and Grubhub and all those types of, you know, down to OnlyFans. If it is a traditional—

You said including OnlyFans?

If you've got an OnlyFans account, you can link it and verify your income that way.

No way.

That's another one. Yeah. So meet the customer where they're at, I guess, right? Sometimes we've got, and I've got a couple of property managers. I have one property manager I was catching up with, one of our partners. I think it was like a few weeks ago. He was like, we got one person who's— no, they weren't doing, I mean, they didn't say OnlyFans, they said social media influencing and they were making significant money, right? And in those cases, they're either doing it through the gig platform and linking that through our payroll integration, or they're uploading bank statements or they're linking a bank. And so we give them those options. For stuff that's just cash, like under the mattress, we don't see a ton of that. We see it a little bit in the manufactured housing space. And that, there isn't a ton of options aside from like going there in person and shaking this person down to give us verification, right? But needs to make it some way that can be interpreted by a document verification solution or an integration of some sort. So yeah, we're generally able to handle the vast majority of self-employed income.

Okay, got it. And if someone is considering Boom for tenant screening in like, what, what would be like kind of the elevator pitch version of like, well, there's a million of these products, why should I, you know, why should I work with Boom?

I think the biggest thing, I mean, there's 2 things that I would, I would probably highlight. We'll zoom out. The big thing it's going to do, great data, more data than you're going to get, but I think every, anywhere else. And we're going to drop the turnaround time on these applications faster than any solution out there. And we call it time to decision. So like the benefit is you're going to just rip through applications. People think they're going to need like The training of a bunch of people, we get through one training session, this thing is like, is ripping, right? So it's just churning through applications. That's like the high-level benefit. Now, I think why I would, what's driving that is, or why it's interesting, particularly why we're different, is configurability. So we build configurability into everything. We have default settings, of course, kind of the easy button, so to speak, but portfolios are nuanced. I have a million-dollar, you know, multimillion-dollar mansion that I'm doing. This owner is very picky. We need to have all these configurations, and we can usually fit to that because we've scaled up to the American Homes 4 Rent scaled operators that have all these requirements across different geographies and down to the 50 to 100 unit third-party manager.

Mm-hmm.

The second thing is nuance. And I'd say like we built a lot of nuance into the product, everything down to like how we think about income and interpreting the documents, real-time verification, handling edge cases around This document was X number of days old, therefore we knew you were looking for something different, and then surfacing that real time and then giving them easy ways to self-solve for that. So I think it just comes down to like the nuance. It's not just bolting on Plaid, give you a string of transactions and you're kind of sorting through it. It is really product nuance and craft behind it. So, and that actually leads to better outcomes at the end of the day versus bolting a bunch of stuff together.

Okay. Couple follow-up questions on that. As far as the speed, what is your average speed to decision? Or like, what, what, what could I expect if, if we started using you guys in terms of like how quickly these applications are turned around?

Portfolio-wide, we are at, so most partners when they come through, we see somewhere in the 2 to 4 day turnaround time. Yeah. That's from the submitted application to the final decision. And that's like the, any individual applicant, right? Can start, that clock starts at that applicant. And then when the whole group is decisioned, that's how we're measuring it.

Okay.

And that's the same thing that AppFolio, they have like this time to conversion metric. That's also, it's measured in basically the exact same way. Usually when partners come to us, they're in that 2 to 4 time range. I just, I mean, we see people regularly in the 5 to 10 day range portfolio-wide across all of them. This includes manufactured housing, which we do. We, our 2 big verticals are single-family rentals. And manufactured housing, which does run at a slower cadence, I would say it's 0.9 days. So that's like 22 hours or something like that. Our people that have a team on this and they've got a person on leasing, they're typically in half a day. So apps are getting, and that includes weekends. There's no hold, it includes any hold times, things like that. So we've rolled out something called Boom Assist. It's where you just want to outsource, offload everything to us. You get even better results with that. But I mean, most operators, like, they just do it themselves and they're getting great results. And so that's not even necessary.

Which part are they still doing themselves? Is this just like chasing down the applications and making the final decision?

Basically, we, the things that they're doing mostly is if they want a second pass on the rental history verification, right? We have an automation on the rental history verification and we'll chase those down for you. It's a very small fee. It's on top of all the automation and the outreach that we do. We have a human, we have people going and chasing this down. There's some AI involved, but sometimes they want to chase it down themselves. There are some other, the pet screening, animal screening might be something that they're still waiting on. For example, we, like I said, we integrate, but we don't handle chasing those down. So there could be some other pieces, for example.

Okay. And then my second follow-up question was about the configuration you mentioned. Like you gave an example of like a big mansion. Like if I have a group of properties that has a bunch of high-end Class A homes and another group of properties that's more lower end, and I wanted to have separate requirements or separate tenant screening for those 2 groups, would I be able to do that through like property groups? Or how would I tell Boom, which, you know, which analysis to use or which criteria?

So a couple of ways you can do it by map to your property groups in your PMS. So we can, we ingest all your properties, your property groups, tags, and those property groups can drive the assignment of these various settings.

That's cool.

That's, that's one way it's programmatic assignment. So if you onboard a new property and it's your Group A property, it'll automatically inherit this.

So the other one is group of properties. That's like, you could just create a group that's like tier 1, tier 1 screening, tier 2 screening, tier 3 screening.

That's one way. Yeah, that's cool. That's how Greystar does it, right? They have their cloud, their Greystar A, Greystar B, B and C. And so that's like one way, but then, and then you can customize at a property level of, hey, they fit into this bucket, but we want to override it. And this one owner is really picky, so we're going to do something very specific to them. And by the way, they've got 20 properties, so we'll give them their own specific approach.

Okay.

And that's everything from the underwriting criteria, the data, the questions, the All the settings, everything that's happening.

Okay, sure. Okay, great. I want to move on. We really kind of already talked about the rent credit reporting. I had a note to ask you about that positive only. We touched on that already. Anything else you wanted to share about rent credit reporting? We're using it. Like I said, it seems to work fine with us integrated with Buildium.

No, I think that's probably sufficient. I mean, we're just doing it with a lot of operators. It's actually giving us a nice edge increasingly on the rentals through verifications that we've started to incorporate into that because now we know who's paying rent and where they lived. And so there's some interesting things happening there. But yeah, I think for the purpose of this discussion, let's, let's move on.

Okay. Let's talk about leasing. So you guys launched in conjunction with announcing your latest raise, I believe it was over the summer, you announced Boom CRM, which is a way to track your tenant leads. And I think if I understand right, even handle the scheduling and the showing and the listing. Is that right?

That's right. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Love to hear more about that. Not familiar with this newer product of yours and kind of bring me up to speed.

So the idea behind, I mean, we, we started, right? We started in rent reporting. What happened was they said, product managers said, hey, you're good at sending data to the credit bureaus. Can you pull data? That's what led us into applications. And we got pretty good at that over time. We, at, oh, at what we heard from operators was they kept hearing, and we, I remember very vividly, it was like early 2025, I was at a conference and operators were coming to us and saying, can we just like use BoomScreen for our CRM? Or can we like jerry-rig this table to be a CRM? Or hey, do you integrate with Salesforce? And then we got into these messy Situations we're trying to integrate with HubSpot and, or some other CRM. And so what we kept hearing was, Boom, you solve for a lot of it. We like operating in it, but we want the rest of our team to operate fully in it. And, you know, the leasing, the marketing, depending on how big the operation was, they were looking for it to kind of expand the aperture of where they were doing their work. And while we'd solved half of the funnel, the decisioning and the underwriting, We hadn't solved the full funnel, right? When you look at the whole leasing funnel, there is that inquiry to application started was one area that we didn't have control over. And so we had operators coming to us like, guys, we're not, you know, we're not seeing the lead volume. Like, we don't, or we're not seeing the application volume. Well, we're not getting the leads, right? And we're not, so we didn't have control over all of that. And so that was really the genesis of it. So we really built it over the Prior to the public announcement, we were building and live for over roughly a year. And what Boom CRM is really meant to be is a, to drive faster leasing velocity. At the end of the day, it's drive more leads, faster throughput to application started. That's the mandate and get from through the tour to the application started while owning the communications. I think the communications was one thing that we kept hearing was I've got OpenPhone or Quo, I guess they call it now, or Dialpad. I've got 8x8 or RingCentral. I've got a Boom. I've got some other touring solution messaging them. I've got Zillow messaging them. And the applicant's confused. And our team is toggling between Gmail and Boom and some CRM. And there wasn't really an elegant approach to communication, which I think is critical. Obviously it's critical for the whole resident experience, but it's critical and time sensitive, especially in leasing. And that's your first impression. So we really had kind of set out to build something that was great at driving leasing velocity. And to do that, we thought we had to get communications right. And so inherent in the platform is an omnichannel inbox, text, email, voice, link as many email inboxes, continue operating out of your own email client. It'll all track in there. And we launched that out of the gate. And so that has been, I think, a big lift for us that, that has, has kind of to, to get done. And now we're seeing a lot of the benefits there.

Sure.

With the partners that have brought it on.

Yeah, that's exciting. And are you, so tell me how the showing side of it works, 'cause I always perceived that to be pretty complicated with all these lockboxes and it's codes flying around and you gotta somehow do some type of identity verification even before you let them schedule showing and all that.

I would say it's nothing groundbreaking, right? It's like what you would expect, right? You've been in this space for a while. You know the solutions. Uh, it is an open ecosystem, number one. So it's, we integrate with many lock solutions, Codebox, SentryLock, Igloo, Rendly. So it works with a lot of existing hardware out there. We support SMS and email to the, uh, prospect as they're going to get their code. Obviously they schedule on a listings experience. When they get close to their showing, they'll automatically get that code. It'll be accessible within a certain geofence of the property and it'll be good for a certain amount of time. We support showing surveys after the, after the survey, and we drive them to a started application if they like the property. So there's a lot of detail in there of what we do, but yeah, it's open API accessible and we try to Just drive tours, right? At the end of the day.

Sure. So, and you, you've partnered, are you doing the listing as well? Like syndicating Zillow and all that part?

Yes, correct. Yeah. So forgot, forgot that. So we do all the syndication as well. I think this was probably an important thing that we didn't, I didn't appreciate early on enough was we needed to own the syndication because we were seeing application leakage where it would get syndicated to, you know, we'd, our applications, we'd be syndicating, we'd be Working through an existing solution. And then somehow the workflow, the flows of the communication, it wouldn't push our link out. And so we actually saw that as a challenge that obviously operators were already asking for this and we already saw the need, but that was just another reason was like, I think we need to do this. And so we actually offer now BoomScreen comes with a free version of BoomCRM, not with the AI, but BoomCRM is free, a free version with non-AI, but still offers a syndication, leads, locks, integrations and things like that. So yeah.

Okay. Really interesting.

I try it. Our sales team doesn't like me to talk about, doesn't like me talking about it, but— We won't tell them. But yeah, it is available for all BoomScreen operators.

Okay. And just to touch on my favorite topic for a minute, you know, Zillow and their free versus their paid platform and their dominance over this industry, I like, what was it like to approach them and say, we want to syndicate listings to you? And there, there's some kind of like backend check where they check to see if the, if your mutual customer has a paid account. And I don't know, I always perceive that as to be some big complexity and, and I don't know, I guess maybe they want as many listings as they can get, so maybe they're happy to take on a new syndication partner.

So it's a great callout. And I mean, I have a zoom out, maybe what is going to happen with this space with agents and how does that, where does that go? But before I get into that macro venture-focused discussion, at a detailed level, they were very willing to play ball with us mainly because we do single-family and single-family, it's free. Multifamily, they charge. So anything 25 doors or above, you won't get on Zillow without a paid account. And they've actually gone back and forth on their policy with single-family rentals over the years. I've, you know, I mean, you know this as well. So as of today, it's under 24, under 25 is free. And we had good volume just given the scale that we have on the platform. And I think they saw kind of where our applications were at scale and they saw that we were scaling up on the listing side. And so they've actually been, you know, the dominance there, the question, like there's definitely that. And I think about them, think about that a lot, but They've been definitely the easier to work with, I think because they've just taken the stance that we need all the, yeah, we want all the eyeballs. Right.

And what about their, 'cause they have a rental application built into their platform and I think they'll even do tenant screening.

Yeah.

You perceive that as, you know, competitive with yourself or like, are they going to try to push or aren't they? Let me ask it this way. Aren't they going to eventually push or require your customers and me to use their platform-specific rental application? And if so, what then?

I think it's a great question. There's a, there's certainly a chance. I mean, they have a relationship with some of the PMSs out there, so there's obviously some, and they have their own application solution. It's going to be a, There's a few other platforms out there, but Zillow has, you know, what, 60 to 70% of the market? I'm not sure. I don't know. I'm not, I don't have a crystal ball here. I know that they, I know right now they're just in demand aggregation mode, just from what I've seen. I know they don't have the software underneath to operate a full PMS, right? But how far down the stack will they go? And can they go past applications? Can they Who's to say? So I don't have a lot of insight there, but yeah, there is a world in which that is the case. There isn't for— I think they would probably admit that their applications are great for single-family operators at the 1 and 2s. In terms of what a third-party manager in the north of the 100, 200, 500 doors, what they're looking for. Yeah, I mean, it's going to be— if you own the distribution and maybe you can wield that power, but I don't think people would be particularly happy about it. Just given the level of nuance I think that some people require in terms of workflows and automation and things like that. And Zillow's Rental Manager just doesn't have today.

Yeah. And I think, I don't think they're going to push everyone onto Zillow Rental Manager, but what I worry about is they, here's what I would do if I was Zillow. I would beef up my application a little bit more to get it a little bit closer to asking everything that a Property manager would want to know. And then I would simply require it to list on the platform. I would require that a property manager accept a Zillow application in order to be a partner on the platform because that is so much of a better experience for the resident, right?

Mm-hmm.

Think about how great the experience for a resident would be to fill out a Zillow application one time, That was either free or nominal cost and know for a fact that every single listing you saw on the Zillow platform would accept that application. Now, it doesn't mean they have to accept it in the sense of approving your application, but accept it in the sense that you would not have to pay a separate application fee and fill out a separate application and give out your identity to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who has a rental listing.

Mm-hmm.

So Zillow has talked about their North Star being the consumer, and I believe them from what I've seen. how they act. This is something that I could see them doing down the road. And if that happened, first of all, it'd be bad for you because you're a rental application product. Second of all, it'd be bad for me because I don't want to use their stupid application either. But what am I going to do? I have to have my listings on Zillow. So this is the type of thing. This is why I keep bringing up Zillow because they just wield an unbelievable amount of power in our space.

I think you had lobbed the idea of Narpm creating its own listings platform or something like that. I mean, is there anyone that unilaterally, like, and multilaterally would be able to do, like, do you think there's enough people that would be interested in that that could drive the spend? And obviously Zillow's putting a ton of dollars behind SEO and things like that.

So it would have to be a collaboration between Narpm, Appfolio, Buildium, Boom, RentEngine, ShowMojo, Tenant Turner, Rently. We would all have to get together, a bunch of competitors too. And launch it together and put it in the hands of like a foundation or a federation or a NARPOM or something where it was like operated as a nonprofit. Or I, I don't know the mechanics of it, but no single party could do this. Not even like NARPOM. It would have to be like a big, huge secret project, like the, like the Manhattan Project or something. Take back your so—

take back your sovereignty.

Yeah.

Right.

As soon as this launch, Zil is gonna cut off all those partners and Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I don't know.

There's a lot of game, like game theory or just like strategy around that. Yeah.

I was always thinking like, all right, let's get a bunch of these people together. We'll buy Zumper and we'll use that and kind of like, you know what I mean? I don't know. Okay. And then I noticed that like you nor most of your competitors are not on AppFolio stack. I don't know if you are, if you are on Buildium marketplace or not. But what is the reason for that?

Well, I mean, I can tell you the stated reason and the implied reason, but the reason is we've asked, right? The reason we've asked, they said no. And I assume that's the case for our peers in the space as well. AppFolio makes, and I used to know the number, they make, I want to say it's 75% of their annual revenue, ancillary revenue, which is primarily payments, screening, and insurance. Those are the 3 big, big 3. Okay. I think with the stated reason is data security and all this data stuff, that's a good reason for what happened. Just so happens that the 3 things that make 75% of the money are the things not on the Stacked Marketplace. There are a couple exceptions there. The couple exceptions, and we asked them about rent reporting as well, they said no. The 3, you know, the couple exceptions, SafeRent's on there. That was a large client that specifically pushed for that. So you'll see that a few places, I think. But yeah, I mean, you can kind of read between the lines here, but there's a stated reason and it's like, it's, we've asked, right?

Yeah. And I'm glad you were willing to say that. It frustrates me because my position as an operator is that that sucks because I want, you know, if I'm a Boom customer, which I am, I want your product to be directly integrated with AppFolio, Buildingium, you know, all of them. And AppFolio protecting their territory as it relates to transactional revenue does not help me as the operator and does not make for a better product.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So it's frustrating that these commercial turf wars are preventing a better experience for a property management operator. I know it has nothing to do with you guys. It's, It's actually the opposite of that. You want to be on that platform. Yep. So it's interesting. And then what about, is it the same with all of them? Like, are you on, I know Rentvine lets anyone integrate. What about Buildium?

Yeah. Buildium, we're not on the marketplace for the premium. If you have a premium, you have the API access, we're integrated. Buildium, I haven't, I haven't reapproached them in a while, but because we had applications, they didn't let us on. But there are some companies that have gotten in through a backdoor, right? If you started as showings and you added applications, you still So, so there's like an order of operations here. That's good to do it, right? But anyways, so Buildium, yes. AppFolio, no, but we integrate really well. Uh, so we've got a great solution there. Yardi, yes. We actually pay them a lot of money every year. Rentvine, yes. ReadWrite, obviously.

Mm-hmm.

Who else? Entrada. Yeah, pretty much all except RealPage. If you're not, if you're on RealPage, we, we don't help you, but everything else. Yeah.

Okay, I got it. And then just curious if you had any thoughts on the, the, the ShowMojo RentEngine litigation that's ongoing. It's kind of in your space. Just wondering if you had any thoughts on that.

On that, I mean, no real thoughts. I mean, I would just say it's a competitive space there. One of our investors said, man, this is the most litigious niche subsector of software that he's ever seen. And so, Like, I don't have a lot of perspective because I'm only in one niche, right? But he sees across a lot, and apparently that's what he's saying. I think it's just, you know, obviously the AppFolio Beagle thing. There is a battle of openness here in general versus closedness. And I don't know, I think it's the pendulum swinging, and Rentvine has pushed it this way, Rent Manager has pushed it this way. It's hard to battle. It's hard to It's hard not to be open. And I think with AI, even Ramp, like we use Ramp for our cards, they have a cloud connector. It's an open— it's open, right? Like it allows you to do a ton of stuff. So yeah, I just think like long-term, that's probably direction. I think from there, from those 2, I'm not, I can't really comment specifically on that, but that's probably competitive space. A lot going on.

Yeah. And speaking of openness, your product actually scored pretty well on the API report card I put together. So anyone's not familiar, I graded every API on the major platforms in our industry, including AppFolio, Buildium, Rentvine, your company, a bunch of your competitors, a lot of different categories. And I was looking at it from the perspective of an operator, not from the perspective of a computer programmer, but from the perspective of an operator who owns a PM business. Can I connect to this API and get up and running with an agentic tool like Claude Code, not knowing not much about programming? And you guys came back with a pretty good score. I was curious if the API has been kind of a focus for you, or is it just a byproduct of your company culture? Do you have any plans related to your API that you could share? Anything like that?

We have, yeah, we've from day one, we've always had an open API. And again, we support 3 products. So we support Boom Report, BoomScreen, and BoomCRM. And the whole thing, there's a few areas that aren't open, like some of our, not by intention, but just, it's not useful, like setting up settings. And making changes to settings.

Yeah.

Just would not get used very much. It's easier to do it in the user, the UX in the platform. But by and large, yeah, the whole thing is read, write, open, real time. And we don't hit many people who hit limits on it either. I think some of our power users have asked for, you know, ceilings to be lifted, but it's pretty rare. And I did, we did score pretty well on your report card. Eric, our chief product officer, said, I think he might have misinterpreted a couple things. I think we should have been higher, but he, Uh, he definitely, I think he might've already submitted or he—

He may have. Yeah.

Yeah. He was working on, yep. He was working on changing some things in terms of future plans. I mean, we've already got an MCP server live. It hasn't been publicly announced yet. It's a little sneak preview, but, and Cloud Connector along with it. So there's, there's a lot coming there. Um, but yeah, the whole thing is like, allow you to build what you want to build with the workflows and where you We very much believe in that.

That's awesome. I love to hear that. And I think as AI agents are starting to do more and more of our work as a property manager, working with partners like Boom who are open and supporting agentic workflows, MCP, OpenAPI, it's just going to be more and more important. So I really am excited about that. Well, Rob, it's been awesome having you on the show. And it was great to hear, you know, the latest and greatest with regards to tenant screening and everything else going on in your world. For people who want to keep up with you and Boom, where is the best place to do that?

The best place would be if either, I mean, a couple things. Add me on LinkedIn, Rob Whiting. You can always email me rob@boompay.app if you're interested to learn more. And then our company account on LinkedIn, a lot of updates coming out of there as well. So between those Those 3 many ways to get in touch and follow.

Awesome, Rob. Thanks again for being on the show. Awesome.

Thanks, Peter.

I hope you have enjoyed this episode. If you like the show and want to get connected to the community, you can follow me on Twitter @PSLohmann and subscribe to my email newsletter on my website, peterlohmann.com. I try to share as much valuable property management content as I can on a regular basis. Thanks again for listening and have a great week. Bye.