Many of you may know Daniel Shaked. He is a longtime entrepreneur in the local space with a history of building businesses using advanced technology to help SMBs acquire customers as efficiently as possible.
You may recall NoProblem. That’s a company Daniel founded in the call tracking space that required SMBs to pay only for actual calls and decide how much a call is worth once they heard the customer request.
Then there was ClipCall, a company that used video as a tool for adding efficiency to the process of requesting a home repair quote. ClipCall was a two-sided marketplace. And we all know how hard those are to build. Yet ClipCall morphed into Home365, which just raised $16.3 million to continue scaling its AI-driven proptech business. The company has reportedly raised $24 million since its 2016 founding.
Greensoil PropTech Ventures II (GSPV II) led the round, which also included investments from existing shareholders that include OG Tech, Verizon Ventures, lool Ventures, and North First Ventures (N1V).
Home365 is based in Santa Clara, CA, with an R&D office in Israel. The company currently manages 7,000 rental properties, in six states according to its website.
Home365 also announced it has acquired SlateHouse Property Management and Realty. The release describes SlateHouse as “one of the largest and fastest-growing scatter-site property management companies in the U.S.” This looks like an acquisition designed to bring more customers onto the Home365 platform. Nate Jones, SlateHouse’s co-founder and CEO, will become Home365’s COO.
Fully Automated Property Management
Home365 has evolved into something quite different from the original idea behind ClipCall. Even though the notion of requesting home repairs through an app remains a core piece of the solution. Here is the company’s self-description.
“Home365 is an InsureTech/PropTech company, offering residential real estate investors a fully automated Property Management solution coupled with a Net Operating Income (NOI) Guarantee that underwrites the operating expenses of their properties and guarantees their performance over years.”
Here is how Daniel describes the opportunity in the announcement of the raise and acquisition.
“Home365 provides PropTech optimization for small and medium-sized property owners by boosting margins, reducing risk, and diminishing the unpredictability that comes from owning and operating smaller-sized rental portfolios,” Daniel said in a statement.
“Being focused on delivering passive and predictable financial results, Home365 in fact invented a new Asset Class that transforms the risky nature of being a real estate investor into an all accessible ‘savings account’ experience.”
OK, But What Does that Mean?
From what we can tell, Home365 is a very high-tech property manager. Based on what we gleaned from its website, it does the following.
- It uses AI to customize rates based on more than 40 data points. These include property age, size, and location.
- It’s a tenant management platform. We find the most qualified tenants for your property. This includes conducts full credit, background, and rental history checks on potential tenants. Then once they are in, tenants use the app to report any issues.
- The platform also offers full insurance. For example, it covers operating expenses such as routine repairs, proactive maintenance, turnover services, and so on.
- It installs a “preventative sensory system” throughout the property to detect maintenance issues before they become major problems. This sounds a lot like the IoT vision of your refrigerator messaging the repair tech once it detects the ice maker isn’t working.
- Its top plans provide a rent guarantee. Basically de-risking property ownership. Of course, that comes at a price.
Daniel seems to have landed on something interesting. It’s not a bad time to own rental property, with rising home values driving more people into the rental market. But owning rental property is a hassle. And it’s a hassle most building owners gladly handoff to a management company. What Daniel is doing essentially is turning that management company into a platform. And squeezing a lot of inefficiency out of the process.
So a local industry vet, with his fair share of entrepreneurial scars, appears to have landed on something big. And without straying from his local and SMB roots. After all, there is nothing more local than property. And the segment Home365 serves, small rental property owners, certainly fit into any reasonable SMB definition.
