Mynd, the tech-powered property management company with the industry’s first real-time data management and mobile app, announced today that it has acquired San Diego-based Pacific Shore Management’s 595 unit portfolio. The deal makes Mynd one of the fastest growing mid-cap property management companies in the US and will more than double their unit count to nearly 1,100 in just 10 months of operations. The expansion into Southern California, one of the nation’s largest rental markets, further demonstrates the company’s commitment to overhaul the rental management industry.“The acquisition of Pacific Shore Management is an exciting opportunity for Mynd to continue our expansion into the massive Southern California market and to enable more property owners and residents to experience the benefits of our tech-powered property management service,” said Doug Brien, CEO and Co-Founder of Mynd. “We are proud to partner with the outstanding team at Pacific Shore Management and look forward to expanding further into the San Diego market.”Launched in 2016 by real estate veterans Colin Wiel and Doug Brien, Mynd marries homegrown software with industry-leading operations to offer owners a simpler, more profitable solution to manage their rental properties.“We have been in the real estate business for 15+ years and have always felt like technology was underutilized. When we met the Mynd team and saw how they had leveraged technology to make their management platform more efficient we were extremely impressed. We think Mynd’s approach to management will be game-changing for investors in San Diego,” said Krystle Moore with Pacific Shore Management.“Acquiring property management firms around the country provides a compelling way for Mynd to seed new markets so they can leverage their 21st century approach to management,” said Rich Boyle, General Partner with Canaan Partners.
A former NFL player a software engineer are teaming up to alter the property management industry for the long haul.Maybe it sounds like the beginning of a joke: A retired NFL pro a software engineer start a company together. Wait, two companies, one after the other! But nope, that’s just reality. Former football placekicker Doug Brien engineering consultant Colin Wiel first joined forces to create Waypoint Homes (), partially in response to the 2008 financial crisis. Home prices were crashing, the catastrophic low seemed like the right time to ramp up their real estate investments. The pair started with their own money, then went to banks private equity firms for more.Wiel said he Brien “were both talking about this same idea, of buying single-family homes as a long-term real estate investment, as a rental property. That hadn’t really ever been done at scale before we did it with Waypoint.”The company grew to hundreds of employees billions of dollars’ worth of properties under their management. Eventually, Waypoint merged with Starwood Property Trust went public. But after a year on the NYSE, Wiel departed, followed by Brien in early 2016. Both men longed for the exhilarating challenge of building an early-stage company.
Last year Brien Wiel launched Mynd as co-CEOs. Their new venture is a tech startup with gr ambitions to transform property management , ultimately, the whole single-family rental industry. n October 2016, Mynd closed a Series A round with Canaan Partners, raising $5.5 million. The company is funded through 2017, but the founders plan to raise their next round before the end of the year.The Mynd office is located downtown in Oakl, California. t has the vibe of a typical Silicon Valley startup—twentysomethings in jeans hoodies bent over their computers, hard at work, but there’s a ping-pong table near the entrance. Neither of the co-CEOs dresses formally for work.“We’re trying to create a culture that’s more akin to a technology company,” Brien explained. “We’re also trying to bring in lots of different people, not just people who have real estate property-management experience. We’re trying to create a culture where people speak up share their ideas,” because the status quo is not always the best way of doing things, he said.Wiel said Mynd is “an opportunity to really make a dent in the universe,” the founders see themselves exping far beyond their current 30 or so employees. Wiel’s five-year prediction is bold: “We’ll be in many markets across the country. We will be, at that point, having a dramatically different offering than owners of residential properties can get anywhere else. And we’ll be a very large very successful company, known as the company in residential property management.”Currently Mynd’s core product is in private beta, meaning their software is still being developed is not yet available to the public at large. Twelve customers, with roughly 150 rental units under management, are participating in the private beta. Mynd’s official launch is pegged for March 1, 2017.
Neither the average startup founder nor the average real estate investor is a retired pro football player. Doug Brien is both, he seems unfazed by it.Brien grew up in the Bay Area, where Mynd is now based. Originally, his sport of choice was soccer, but in high school, Brien said, “ got talked into being the kicker for the football team my senior year ended up being pretty good at it.” The blasé phrasing is typical of how Brien recounts his achievements, which exceed the norm—even in high-powered Silicon Valley.Joining the high-school team “was a pretty big turning point,” Brien said, because it secured a scholarship to the University of California at Berkeley. “ figured the opportunity to attend Cal, whether ended up playing football or not, was too good to turn down.” He majored in political economics, with a minor in conservation resource studies.Brien was the lucky college walk-on—or talented walk-on, others might say—who made it onto the field. “ sat on the bench for two years, basically learned,” he explained. Once Brien made the starting position, he said, “ worked really hard at it, kind of turned it into a craft that studied. worked on both the physical game, learning techniques how to be better, but also the mental side of the game.”Brien said business seems like a breeze after the stress of winning or losing in the stadium. “The stakes aren’t as high, the pressure isn’t as high, in business,” Brien told DS News. First in college then in the NFL, Brien put a lot of effort into coping with the pressure. “ learned to meditate, found mental coaches,” like the ones professional golfers have. Brien reflected, “t’s one thing to tell someone, ‘Focus, don’t get distracted by all the externalities.’ Well, actually doing that is a very different thing. you practice. There are actually drills different types of exercises you can do. Every single day, had an hour a day set aside that did mental training.”The CEO of a public company, which Brien was at Starwood Waypoint, faces high-pressure situations as well—earnings calls, important speeches, board meetings among them. But, Brien pointed out, “t’s not so binary. As a kicker, it’s like, it’s either good or it’s not. t’s three points, or it’s zero. There’s no two or one. Whereas in you can kind of do okay wish you did better. t’s rarely do or die.”Brien’s real estate investment career overlapped with his tenure as a pro placekicker. “t’s a pretty tumultuous existence, being an NFL placekicker. mean, you’re only as good as your last kick. never knew how long it was going to last. was making good money, wanted to look at making investments that would produce cash flow for me later in life, real estate is a good way to do that.” A family friend helped him get into the business. “As invested more, wanted to educate The myself more underst more about it,” Brien said. “And so ended up getting involved with doing due diligence on new properties spending some time in the office with them, managing some of the properties.”By the time Brien retired from football in 2005, he had been investing for almost a decade. While playing for the New Orleans Saints, he got an MBA in real estate finance. Brien said he has carried many insights from the world of sports over into business.“Just by being around all those different coaches, picked up a lot about how they treat people, how to build camaraderie, how to build a team, show people you trust them, show people you believe in them,” he said. For Mynd to tackle the market they’re targeting, a solid team will certainly be necessary.
The property-management industry is larger than a layperson might expect, according to co-CEO Wiel.“n our sector, which is buildings that are 50 units smaller—so, apartment buildings up to 50 units in size plus all single-family homes— we think it’s about a $27 billion-a-year industry in the U.S.,” he said. “Just the fees collected by third-party property management companies.”This isn’t implausible, since BSWorld’s industry research pegs the entire industry’s revenue at $73 billion.“t’s a big industry,” Wiel continued, “but there are no large companies in the space. Which is fine, but there are also no companies in the space that have really embraced technology.”Mynd its investors are betting that technology will have the same transformative effect on property management that it’s had on other industries. They’re drawing on their experience with Waypoint to support their thesis.“The conventional wisdom was, you have to be really hs-on with single-family rental, that’s why people had done it with 50 units or 100 units, but nobody had done it with 5,000 units,” Wiel said. “ we sort of respectfully disagreed with the people that were telling us that, said, ‘We think with technology, if we create an end-to-end cloud computing, mobile computing infrastructure, we can systematize automate a lot of the business, really empower our property managers to be much more efficient much more diligent about the follow-through.’ Because things are automatically happening there are lots of systems in place to make sure everything’s being done really well.”t took some time to nail down a solid strategy, but eventually it paid off.“t was over the course of seven years that we did this,” Wiel continued, “with a lot of trial--error figuring out what works. But once we really got it figured out, we realized, ‘Wow, this is a total game-changer. We’re able to do this much, much better, we’re able to bring the costs way down, do it all with fewer people, our people are much more effective.’”After leaving Waypoint, Wiel Brien saw how they could leverage their experience.“We looked around at the overall residential lscape in America,” Wiel said. “There are over 30 million units that are in buildings 50 units smaller, plus single-family, that are owned almost all by individual investors, who are either hiring a third-party property manager or self-managing, most likely because they can’t find one they can trust.”The fees for managing a fraction of those units could rise into the billions, Mynd’s founders aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed the tempting breadth of this market. Wiel named startups OneRent Castle as competitors, along with the traditional property-management firms Renter’s Warehouse HomeRiver. OneRent in particular seems to be offering the exact same services that Mynd’s initial product will offer.Brien Wiel said their competitive selling point will be their years in the industry their takeaways from having built Waypoint’s internal property-management systems.“That’s a big moat,” Wiel said, “to have the combination of deep property-management expertise deep technology experience, which is the core of the partnership between Doug me.”And the potential of that combo seems to be huge, according to Brien.“We’re saying that we’re going to manage hundreds of thouss of units,” he said. “t’s really our experience at Waypoint that gives that goal credibility.” He also cited “synergies” between the co-CEOs, both men noted that they have complementary strengths. Brien specializes in operations human logistics, whereas Wiel gravitates toward technology. They share a focus on Mynd’s strategy going forward.
“Historically, property management has been done in a very ad hoc, manual, paperbased way,” Brien told DS News. “To create the paradigm shift do something different in real estate, which is needed, you have to come at it from more of a technology perspective. Having said that, you could definitely err on being too technology-centric build technology for technology’s sake. You can sit in a room think, ‘Oh, these tools will be so cool,’ but then you take them out to the market nobody cares about them. t has to be both, having that balance is important.”n keeping with Brien’s comments, Mynd is trying to strike the perfect balance. The company is a continuation of the co-CEOs’ work at Waypoint. Underlying both companies is the fundamental bet that software can reduce—or even eliminate—the time-intensive logistical headache of managing a rental property, thus increasing the effective RO of the investment, allowing the management system to scale to a very large number of units. , they got up to 17,000.However, Mynd is not trying to do away with humans altogether. The company’s operations sales will require manpower to support the digital component.“Our whole philosophy—that think was a big part of our success at Waypoint— was marrying the benefits of scale the technology platform with local experts that are boots on the ground,” Brien said. “Real estate is always will be a very, very local business. No matter how great of an operating platform we build, if we didn’t have the right people on the ground, it wouldn’t work. would say that our philosophy is very much about making people more efficient.”me of those people on the ground may be independent contractors or part-time employees, potentially reducing Mynd’s costs.When the product opens up to the public in March, Mynd’s co-CEOs intend to acquire customers through a mix of digital traditional avenues. Brien Wiel expect to ramp up content marketing in 2017, using articles, webinars, similar means to build name recognition generate inbound leads. Still, Mynd will have a stard sales department.“t’s always going to be a fairly high-touch sales process,” Brien explained. “For most people, a majority of their net worth is tied up in this real estate. We met with someone today; he’s probably got a million dollars of equity in his building. don’t know of any asset class when people are talking about million-dollar investments where they just kind of haphazardly decide to try something.”Mynd’s CEOs hope to charge lower fees than the current crop of non-digital property managers, while offering a more convenient, more transparent experience for owners. Their platform will coordinate things like dispatching a plumber to fix a leaky faucet without having to align three different people’s schedules. Data about what’s happening at each property will be easily accessible to users. Brien emphasized the mobile app, calling Mynd’s approach “real-time property management”.“Once we build our system we have all the data in our system,” he said, “we can start to provide owners with lots of interesting information. think in the future, we’ll transform ourselves from more of a quoteunquote ‘property manager’ to an investment manager.”“Transforming the asset class” is a focus of Brien’s.“There’s a lot of people on the sidelines who just don’t know how to manage the properties themselves aren’t impressed enough with existing property-management companies to allow them to manage for them,” Brien said. “ think those people will come off the sidelines, think people who own property today will be more willing to invest more capital into the asset class if we can make it more like other asset classes.”Already, Brien is sure.“There’s a belief out there that property management is going to change,” he said. “ mean, it doesn’t take much to look at how property management is done, to have some understing of new technologies that are used in other industries, to ask yourself the question, ‘Why is property management still done this way?’ don’t think that’s too big of a leap of faith.”Taking away the headache for owners who manage their own rental properties offering a better service than the traditional property managers, is what Brien Wiel see as the key to unlocking this potential.“The ability to allow an owner to have complete transparency into the operations of their real estate,” Brien said, “to make investing in single-family homes small apartment buildings more like owning a stock or a bond, where you can go online any time find out how your investment is performing— mean, why can’t you do that with investment real estate?”f Mynd can make good on its potential, the answer will be, “You can do that with investment real estate."This article originally appeared in the February 2017 issue of DS News magazine.
By nya Mann DS NewsTackling Tech, February ssueFebruary 1, 2017
Oakland-based Mynd made its first acquisition, buying San Diego-based Pacific Shore Management as it seeks to bring more technology and innovation into the highly fragmented residential property management industry.Mynd plans to embark on something of a roll-up strategy, looking to buy residential property managers with certain characteristics, such as strong tenant and vendor relationships in their local markets, Mynd co-founder and CEO Doug Brien told the San Francisco Business Times.But Mynd is also assessing less common criteria such as seeking acquisition candidates that have a high proportion of tenants making their monthly rent payments electronically, signaling that the property manager embraces technology and has convinced tenants to make digital payments.
Mynd’s co-founders, Brien and Colin Wiel, have a lot of credibility in Bay Area real estate tech circles. The two were among the three co-founders of Oakland-based Waypoint Homes, a pioneer in institutional ownership of single-family homes. Waypoint was founded in 2009 amid the historic housing crisis with a vision of turning the mom-and-pop single-family rental business into an institutional asset class. At its peak, Waypoint owned and managed more than 17,000 single-family rentals in 13 markets around the country. Waypoint went public in 2014 and is now called Starwood Waypoint Homes (). Starwood Waypoint is in the process of combining with Invitation Homes Inc. ().Waypoint’s other co-founder, Gary Beasley, last year founded Oakland-based Roofstock, which wants to make it as easy for individuals to invest in rental homes as it is to buy stocks. Roofstock also helps with one of the biggest challenges that often comes with investing in a portfolio of rental homes: finding strong property managers.At Waypoint, Wiel and Brien found that technology can go a long way in managing a huge rental portfolio. But Brien said the Waypoint founders also realized the important role of people in successful property management.That’s why Mynd is eager to acquire property management firms with strong relationships in their local markets, handling 500 to 1,000 rental units. He said it’s preferable to find property managers who manage properties located close together vs. a manager with rentals 30 miles apart, citing as an example how much the housing market in the East Bay’s 680 Corridor differs from that of the Peninsula.Brien said the Pacific Shore deal will be the first of many as the startup seeks to become a national company over the next five to seven years.Mynd declined to disclose terms of its Pacific Shore purchase, which was disclosed on Aug. 30.But asked whether Mynd’s acquisitions are only for cash, Brien said sellers may want to take part of the purchase price in the startup company’s stock.“Our sellers aren’t looking to cash out,” Brien said. “They’re realizing that when it comes to technology changing property management, it’s a case of when, not if.”Mynd has raised $10.6 million in venture capital, which includes a $5.5 million first round in March that was led by Canaan Partners. Other investors in the company include Jackson Square Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.“Acquiring property management firms around the country provides a compelling way for Mynd to seed new markets so they can leverage their 21st century approach to management,” Rich Boyle, general partner at Canaan Partners, said in a statement.Brien says Mynd may raise its second round of capital by mid-2018, possibly pulling in $20 million to finance additional acquisitions.Brien said he’s seen a shift in investor appetite for opportunities in real estate tech startups since the company’s founding last year.“When we first started, we had to tell our story and explain why we see an opportunity to disrupt residential property management,” Brien said. “In the last six to eight months, investors began calling us to say they see opportunities in property management and want to know what we’re doing.”By Mark CalveySenior Reporter, San Francisco Business TimesSeptember 5, 2017—————-Read article on San Francisco Business Times.
Oakland-headquartered Mynd, which describes itself as a “tech-powered” residential rental property management company, has acquired San Diego-based Pacific Shore Management for an undisclosed price.
A statement from Mynd, which currently operates primarily in the Bay Area, said the acquisition of Pacific Shore Management, based in Mission Valley, enables the company to continue its expansion into the Southern California market.Mynd acquired Pacific Shore Management’s 595-unit portfolio of single- and multi-family properties currently under management, doubling Mynd’s unit count to nearly 1,100. Pacific Shore will retain its current name.Mynd was started in 2016 by real estate veterans Colin Wiel and Doug Brien, who also founded Waypoint Homes, which provides nationwide listings of single-family rental homes. Mynd is backed by Cannan Partners, Jackson Square Ventures and Lightspeed Partners.Mynd offers what the company calls the rental property management industry’s first real-time data management and mobile app, designed to give property owners “a simpler, more profitable solution” to manage those assets.Pacific Shore Management is led by Krystle Moore, who is also president of locally based Pacific Shore Capital. “We have been in the real estate business for 15+ years and have always felt like technology was underutilized,” Moore said in the Mynd statement.
By Lou HirshSan Diego Business JournalAugust 30, 2017
----------------Read article on San Diego Business Journal.
Matt , host of Leading Voices in Real Estate, sat down with Colin , CTO and co-founder of MYND Property Management in early December. Colin discussed his tech background, the “small residential” real estate industry and how Mynd got its start in Oakland, CA.
To listen to the entire podcast, download Leading Voices in Real Estate.
Question : Talk to us about the rental business.
Answer : MYND is a full stack, tech-enabled property management company focused on the small residential industry, which includes single-family rentals and multifamily buildings with up to 49 units. It’s a $430 billion industry, and rent rolls are twice as big as the hotel industry. Yet, it’s highly fragmented. There are over 30,000 companies that provide property management services, and the largest one has one-seventh of 1% market share. But nobody’s operating at scale, and nobody’s really applying technology.
Q: How did you get here? One of headlines is you’re a technologist.
A: I went to Cal, where I studied mechanical engineering. I got a dream job at Boeing writing algorithms for automated control systems on airplanes. It was Nirvana for me. At Boeing, I invented a new way to control anti-lock brakes for airplanes. I worked in AI and created patents for this technology that Boeing still holds to this day.
Q: What was your next move?
A: I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, so I became an independent software consultant. In 1996, I spent a year at Netscape, where I became one of the first Java programmers in the world. Eventually, I started a software consulting company that grew to 35 people. I got to experience the dot.com boom firsthand. Luckily, I sold that consulting company when things started to unwind in 2000.
Q: So, you had some money saved, and you put into real estate?
A: With a friend of mine, I invested in a mobile home park and storage facility. It was highly reliable income because residents never seem to leave mobile home parks. I am always looking for inefficiencies in a marketplace, and what the masses are getting wrong. If an idea is counter what most people think, all the better because that’s where the opportunity lies.
Q: Why did you decide to co-found Waypoint Homes?
A: In 2008, I was looking at what was happening in certain San Francisco Bay Area communities in the East Bay like Antioch and Vallejo. Homes in that region had lost 70% of their value from the peak. But rents weren’t off at all, or maybe down slightly. Along with Waypoint Homes co-founder, Doug Brien, who is the co-founder and CEO of MYND, we ended up buying 25 homes in Vallejo, Antioch and Pittsburg. We were buying houses for under $100,000, with cap rates between 8% and 9%.
Q:How do you work with MYND co-founder Doug Brien?
A: Doug is more of an operationally minded person than me. He ran all of the property management operations at Waypoint. I realized there was a much bigger opportunity at play: to own the entire property management space for small residential. And I was excited to launch another company with Doug. The opportunity to start MYND was so compelling that we had an easy decision.
Q: When you’re with the right people and you take a concept and iterate it over a period of time, it’s an amazing experience. Describe your even bigger opportunity.
A: When we were at Waypoint and had 17,000 homes under management, over 500 employees and a robust tech platform. We kind of nailed it with our technology. But we felt we could have managed a lot more properties. The small residential sector...is an old-school industry with lots of mom-and-pop third-party managers. Most people self-manage, and they’re not leveraging technology like we were at Waypoint. If you look back at the industries in America, at some point, they became larger, institutionally managed industries. For example, before the 1950s, there were thousands of convenience stores nationwide. Then 7-Eleven started in the 50s. They found they could more efficiently control the supply chain and distribution of goods. They were able to benefit from the economies of scale. Similarly, taxis were disrupted by Uber and Lyft. Technology eventually disrupted all of these industries.
Q: Tell us how MYND was built.
A: MYND provides complete end-to-end property management service. We are competing with incumbents that are disrupting the real estate industry. Small residential is one of the largest industries in America, which hasn’t been disrupted by technology yet. But there is no reason it shouldn’t be now. Everyone has access to technology: cloud computing, mobile tech and SMS. There are much better ways to manage properties using technology.
OAKLAND, Calif. - Mynd Property Management, a customer-first, tech-enabled property management firm, has acquired Jevons Property Management, a property management company located in the Seattle area.With the transaction, Mynd launches in Washington State with more than 800 units of multifamily and single-family rentals. The Jevons team adds valuable local property management experts and technicians who will continue to provide great service in the Washington market to MYND’s staff.“We’re pleased to bring Mynd’s best-in-class service to the Washington market in partnership with the Jevons team,” says Doug Brien, CEO and Co-Founder of Mynd Property Management. “Mynd looks to partner with property management firms whose core values align directly with ours, and Enrique was a perfect fit. Jevons is committed to providing residents and owners in Seattle and Washington State with excellent customer service and that aligns well with our approach. ”Moving forward, Jevons Property Management will be known as Mynd Property Management. Residents, property owners and real estate investors who are interested in property management can expect the same high-quality customer service and responsiveness they did in working with Jevons.Enrique Jevons will remain in charge of the Seattle office as its Regional Director. A seasoned real estate investor with more than 20 years of experience, Jevons has worked in various hospitality management positions for Hyatt Hotels, Stanford University and the Marriott. In addition, he personally owns 71 rental housing units.“My goal is to continue to provide optimal service to the property owners and residents of Seattle, the Puget Sound, Yakima and everyone in Washington State,” Jevons says.For more information, visit MYND’s Seattle property management page.mynd.coMynd Property Management is a customer-first, tech-enabled property management firm based in Oakland, Calif. Mynd focuses on the small residential sector, or multifamily and single-family rentals with fewer than 50 units. The company’s team of on-the-ground experts provide a combination of excellent service and efficient technology to boost net operating income () for property owners, while improving the rental living experience for residents. With management capabilities throughout California and Washington State, Mynd has aggressive plans to expand nationwide in 2019.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEMedia Contact: Stacey Corsostacey.corso@mynd.coPhone: () 672-6460
Mynd Property Management, a property management firm serving the small residential sector with a combination of on-the-ground experts and innovative technology, has merged with RentVest, a property management company operating in major metro areas nationwide.Combined, the new entity forms one of the largest small residential property management firms in the U.S. The small residential sector includes all single-family rental () homes and multifamily properties with 50 units or less, where the majority of U.S. residents reside.Mynd expands its footprint to 16 markets nationwide, including existing markets of the Bay Area, San Diego, Sacramento and Seattle. The bulk of the 4,000-plus RentVest portfolio is located in Phoenix, Reno and Las Vegas. Additional markets include Dallas, Atlanta, Portland, Vancouver, Tucson, Denver, San Antonio, Houston and Tampa. In all, Mynd oversees more than 8,000 units on behalf of its property owner clients.“The RentVest team shares similar values to ours, and we believe they are a perfect fit culturally,” says Doug Brien, CEO and co-founder of Mynd. “We’re excited to collaborate on best practices and create a best-in-class nationwide service.”Colin Wiel, chairman, CTO and co-founder of Mynd, says, “This merger is a huge step forward in our goal to become the first company to scale property management for the small residential industry. By leveraging technology, we hope to transform the industry and scale to over 100,000 units under management within a few years.”Mynd’s vision is to offer investors easy access to high-caliber investments and property management nationwide. The partnership between Mynd and RentVest moves the company closer to that goal by providing investors access to strong rental markets, such as Phoenix, Las Vegas and Dallas.Under the leadership of Vincent Deorio, Mynd’s director of M&A, the company continues to target property management partners whose core values align with its own.Pursuant to the merger, RentVest co-founders and principals, Jacob Ash and Benton Cotter, join Mynd’s leadership team. Ash and Cotter bring decades of experience in the property management and real estate investment sectors to Mynd.“We were very impressed with Mynd once we started learning more about what they were doing, and how they were doing it,” explains Ash. “The company’s business operation is built for scale, which will further enhance our offering to property owners,” he adds.“Teaming with Mynd means that we gain additional resources that will further streamline our operations and improve our service,” adds Cotter.###About Mynd Property Management Mynd Property Management serves the small residential sector with on-the-ground experts in all of the regions it serves. Headquarters in Oakland, Calif., Mynd’s team of property management professionals and technology combine to boost efficiencies for property owners, and improve the rental living experience for residents. Currently, Mynd manages over 8,000 units in major metros nationwide. The firm plans to expand into additional markets in 2019 to provide real estate investors with access to fully managed, income-generating properties in markets with strong employment and rental growth.About RentVest RentVest in a national property management company based in Mesa, Ariz., offering high-quality and affordable property management services nationwide. RentVest manages income-producing properties in Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Denver, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Portland, Atlanta, Vancouver, Reno, Las Vegas and Seattle.
Mynd Property Management, a modern property management company powered by on-the-ground experts and technology, has acquired HomeUnion, a company that enables investing in small residential properties in 20 U.S. markets. The acquisition comes on the heels of Mynd’s recent merger with RentVest, which doubled Mynd’s property management footprint to more than 8,000 small residential rental units in a total of 16 markets.One of HomeUnion’s major accomplishments was the development of INVESTimate, an online home valuation tool that allows users to determine the investment potential of any home in the U.S. INVESTimate takes into account a variety of factors, including supply and demand trends, metro-level employment and neighborhood quality using AI and machine learning.“Adding HomeUnion’s capabilities to the Mynd platform solidifies our position as a leader in the small residential real estate investment business,” says Doug Brien, CEO and Co-Founder of Mynd Property Management. “Property management is a fundamental aspect of executing a successful investment. However, picking the right property in the right market for the right price at the right time – is also crucial. We saw this very clearly at our last company, Waypoint Homes. We look forward to leveraging our investment experience and HomeUnion’s data and tools to help our investors grow their portfolios,” he notes. HomeUnion’s ability to identify small residential properties that meet the financial strategies of a variety of investors is appealing to Colin Wiel, Mynd’s Co-Founder, Chairman and CTO. “We are excited to be able to serve our base of over 2,000 customers by leveraging HomeUnion's AI-driven approach of scouring hundreds of thousands of for-sale homes to find the ones that will perform as the best rental properties,” says Wiel. The acquisition aligns with Mynd’s long-term goals of becoming a full-service real estate investment solution in the top 50 most investable markets in the U.S., and managing 1 million units. Real estate investors will have the ability to purchase off-market and MLS rental properties in metro areas with strong employment growth, without the traditional geographic barriers that come with real estate investing.“We are pleased to be part of the Mynd team,” says Don Ganguly, President of HomeUnion. “Investors who purchase SFR homes through the new Mynd platform also gain access to the company’s high-caliber property management services and proprietary local operating data, thereby making investing accessible to a greater number of investors.”
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Mynd Property Management is a modern property management firm serving the small residential sector. Based in Oakland, Calif., the company’s team of on-the-ground property management professionals and technology boost net operating income () for property owners, while improving the rental experience for residents. Currently, Mynd has over 8,000 units under management in 16 markets nationwide. The firm plans to expand its platform in 2019 to provide real estate investors with access to income-generating properties in markets with strong employment and rental growth. For original article click here.
AUSTIN — Investors purchased a record share of Dallas-area homes last year.And these for-profit homebuyers are expected to continue to gobble up thousands of houses in North Texas and nationwide.Home investors are having the biggest impact in the lower price ranges of the Dallas home market — the same sector first-time buyers are shopping.More than 14% of low-priced houses in the Dallas area sold to investors in 2018, according to new data by CoreLogic. Overall, more than 8% of Dallas homes of all prices were snapped up by investors.“Investor buying activity in the U.S. is at record highs,” CoreLogic’s Ralph McLaughlin said. “It’s not the big institutional guys that are leading the increase in home buying — it’s the smaller guys.“They are buying homes that are in the lower third of prices — they are essentially buying starter homes,” McLaughin said at a meeting of the National Association of Real Estate Editors in Austin.Small investors accounted for more than 60% of these home buys last year.CoreLogic found that by the end of 2018, the investment rate in the U.S. housing market reached 11.3%, the highest rate since 1999, when the researchers started keeping this data.The share of investor home buys in the U.S. and the Dallas area is even higher than during the Great Recession, when thousands of distressed homes hit the market and were sold to owners who converted them to rental properties.That’s still what’s happening with most of the houses sold to these buyers.“Most investors are investing east of the Mississippi,” McLaughlin said. “Places investors are not buying homes at such high rates are in the West.“California markets have a realtively low share of homes being purchased by investors.”U.S. markets with the highest home investment purchase rates last year include Detroit (), Philadelphia () and Memphis (), according to CoreLogic.“Homebuyers today are more likely to cross paths with investors during an open house than at any other time in the past two decades,” McLaughlin said.David Hicks, who heads Dallas-based HomeVestors of America, said his company, which mostly represents small investors, is seeing record business.He said HomeVestors buyers are on track to purchase 16,000 to 17,000 homes across the U.S. in 2019. “We are buying the lower end — small houses,” Hicks said.The houses that HomeVestors’ members purchase through franchises around the country are mostly under 1,400 square feet and were built in 1985 or earlier. “Our average age is 1960,” Hicks said.Most of the properties need repairs and updating. “People don’t call HomeVestors if they have a nice house,” he said. The buyers spend an average of $20,000 a rooftop before reselling the homes or offering them as rentals.The average North Texas property-flipper made a profit of $30,588 in the first quarter of this year, according to the latest estimate from Attom Data Solutions.While the home investment business is booming, Hicks said he worries about some of the deals he sees in markets where home costs have risen.“A lot of investors are getting in buying houses who don’t understand the economics,” he said. “We see the prices they are paying and the numbers don’t work.“It’s not a get-rich scheme — they work hard.”Hicks said if there is a housing slowdown and prices decline, some small investors who bought a few properties and paid too much could be hurt.“Right now there is a lot of money for properties,” he said. “There is more money than there has been in years.”Colin Wiel, cofounder of California-based home management firm Mynd Property Management, said the increase in rental homes is meeting a need in the market.“For many people, owning a home is the albatross around their neck that holds them down in life,” Wiel said. “I think there is fundamental change for the long term in homeownership.“Today a young person is going to have 10 to 15 jobs throughout an entire career, and job mobility is very important,” he said. “The millennial generation is very much aware of this. Homeownership is a burden as much as a benefit.”Wiel said that the U.S. home rental market is a huge, behind-the-scenes business.“It’s twice as big as the hotel industry by revenue — about $460 billion a year,” he said. “About $29 billion is collected by third-party property management companies in fees.”
Investor buying of homes in the U.S. is at record highs, and Dallas is one of the hottest markets in the country, the chief executive of HomeVestors of America Inc. told the Dallas Business Journal at a conference in Austin on Wednesday."Dallas is one of the most competitive markets in the country,” said David Hicks,president and CEO of the Dallas-based company known for it’s “We buy ugly houses” ad campaign. “It’s an unusual market right now. There are more investors right now that are looking for properties and buying properties, and the values in Dallas are going up and up.”Nationwide, business is booming as well, Hicks said during a panel discussion called “New Landlords and Cutting-Edge Investors” at the National Association of Real Estate Editors conference.“Last month was the best month ever in our history,” Hicks said, “and it looks like we’re going to beat last month this month.”Colin Wiel, co-founder of three-year-old property management company Mynd Property Management, said today it’s difficult for individuals to invest in rental properties, but his company’s technology is trying to change that.Mynd provides property management technology for “small residential,” including single-family rentals and apartment buildings up to 49 units in size. Small residential constitutes 87 percent of all the rental units in America, Wiel said during the panel discussion.“There’s this whole invisible industry of small residential that needs to be transformed with technology and made more professional and mature,” Wiel said. “When that happens, it will make it easier for everybody to invest in rental properties.”CoreLogic economist Ralph McLaughlin said the tax breaks involved in Opportunity Zones will be a game-changer for the home investment market.“It’s going to direct a lot of money that’s never been in real estate into real estate,” he said. “That’s going to lead to an increase in small investors who haven’t really worked in real estate before.”Back to Dallas-Fort Worth, demand for housing is far outstripping supply, Hicks said.“It’s a real tight supply right now,” Hicks said. “There are a lot of investors looking for properties and a lot of people moving into Dallas. There’s just a lot of demand right now.”
