it for free. “If we have to sell it for less, we’ll make up the difference,” Beasley said. “It’s this idea of getting a mar- ketplace going—you have to stand behind your product and we’ve done that since our very early days.” Beasley pointed to three critical areas that will help Roofstock continue to grow: • Deliver outstanding customer service to buyers and sellers; • Continue to improve underwriting
so investors who visit the company site can see well-
presented listings with data that they can use to make investing decisions; and • Attract a diverse inventory from multiple sellers and different types of homes in numerous areas. “The beauty of real estate is there’s generally a buyer for every type of property,” Beasley said. “You have to match those buyers and sellers and the Internet’s fantastic at doing that because we know what the buy box is of everyone who’s searching on our system. These insights allow us to know what kind of supply we should go out and try to secure.” It only takes a quick look at Bea- sley’s background to realize it is no surprise he ended up co-founding a real estate company. His father had his own real estate brokerage firm and his first job out of college was with corporate real estate services firm LaSalle Partners (now Jones Lang LaSalle) as a financial analyst. REAL ESTATE IS IN BEASLEY’S BLOOD
ahead of time, ensuring the home had a rentable layout, taking and sharing pictures and 3-D animat- ed tours of the property so people would feel comfortable buying the homes from anywhere in the world without actually seeing it in person. The process also taught Roof- stock’s founders the importance of building trust. The company has a 30-day money back guarantee on homes that investors buy through its program to add a layer of com- fort. If an investor isn’t happy with their purchase, Roofstock will resell
stock a low fee and wouldn’t have to worry about fixing up the property to sell it because it was already occu- pied, and therefore livable. The last piece of the puzzle for the founders was to figure out how to make people confident enough to buy homes off of their website, not just list them. They realized the answer was addressing buyers’ pain points—mainly the headaches that came with the traditional acquisition process. That’s where they got the idea to do all of the upfront work. This included inspecting homes
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