Jason Hartman starts the show by talking about investor empowerment. He shares that the team offers inventory, property management tools, and exclusive financing, which would greatly benefit investors. In the interview segment, he hosts Nathan Miller, founder of Rentec Direct. He shares their client-focused program and how they try to make the landlord’s life easier. Nathan also discusses their tool, Renter Direct, and what makes it accessible and easy to use.
Announcer 0:00
This show is produced by the Hartman media company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit Hartman media.com.
Announcer 0:12
Welcome to the creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You’re about to learn a new slant on investing some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world’s most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self made multi millionaire who’s actually been there and done it. He’s a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who’s owned properties in 11 states had hundreds of tenants and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to your financial independence day. You really can do it on now. here’s your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution. Real estate investors.
Jason Hartman 1:03
Welcome, welcome. Welcome to the creating wealth show. This is your host, Jason Hartman with episode number 792 792. Thank you so much for joining me today as we talk more about being an empowered investor. Yes, democratization. And to me what, you know, people like to throw that word around democratization, right? Well, first of all, if you think the US is a great country, and you like the model of the US, it might be important to realize that it’s not really a democracy. Exactly. It’s a representative Republic, right. So as people throw around this word, democratization, let me tell you what I mean, when I throw it around carelessly, I believe it means a flattening in empowerment. And one of our themes for the last, the last few meet the Masters events, maybe two or three of them. That’s our annual conference that we have is the empowered investor and investor empowerment. And I very much believe in that. I believe that we need to flatten hierarchical structures so that people have the tools, the power, the access to either do things themselves, or control things so that they can happen in a positive way. Of course, you know, commandment number three, thou shalt maintain control. And when I talk about that I’m referring to Wallstreet or pooled money investing or even crowdfunding, maybe, to the greatest degree crowdfunding in the sense that with those low regulated type programs, like crowdfunding programs, like I’ve said years ago, I mean, I love the concept of it. And I’m glad it’s out there because it’s led to a lot of new innovation, people coming up with new products, new services, and that’s all good. Does that mean that we as investors should be putting our money into pooled assets? I’m certainly glad Wall Street exists, because boy, we we couldn’t have large companies with really innovative products. If we didn’t have the general public funding those companies by buying their stock, right, that all started out as the joint stock company. That’s what I learned in school way back then. That was the first idea of, of shareholders in a company many, many, many years ago. So this is all good that this stuff is there but doesn’t mean you should do it. Doesn’t mean I should do it. No, not necessarily. Because of course when we invest in pool of money, assets, we lose control. We make the hierarchy larger. We are absolutely not empowered. We are disempowered. We do not have democratization, we do not have a flattening of heart. Hi arkell structures, we have an increasing of them we have more power in those structures. And that means the investor is less empowered. As you know, when I talk about commandment number three of my 10 commandments, thou shalt maintain control. When you relinquish control, you leave yourself susceptible to three major problems. Number one, you might be investing with a crook, and therefore you lose your money. We’re all familiar with Wall Street scandals. We’re becoming more familiar with crowdfunding scandals on places like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, and all these great innovative websites and business models. I love I love that they’re there, but I don’t know that I want to invest in any of them. I don’t know maybe. But you know, certainly there are problems and scandals out there with that type of stuff. So they’re everything has risk. Everything has risk. Even keeping your money in the bank is risky. And I don’t mean that in the sense that most people Think I mean it when I say that I assume, you know, when I say that you think I’m talking Oh, you know, the banks could collapse. There’s not enough FDI in survey FDIC insurance, and that’s all very true. But I don’t even really mean that. I mean, the implicit risk is that inflation will actually it’s not a risk, it’s a certainty. A certainty is different than a risk. In this scenario, you are certain you will lose money. And you are certain you will pay a bunch of fees to a bank that is ripping you off a bunch of banksters. Now, does that mean I’m No, I mean, I’m not in favor of banks. No, I’m glad they’re there. We got to have capital formation, just like Wall Street. I’m glad that’s there. Doesn’t mean I want to use it. Not necessarily. Well, you know, I have to use a bank. When you look at the various scandals in the banking world most recently, the scumbags at Wells Fargo. I mean, what a disgusting bunch scumbags at Wells Fargo. What a What a pathetic bank. I was just talking with one of our clients about wells the other day, and how, how awful they are. I mean, just just terrible. And many years ago, you heard me railing on Bank of America, Bank of America, really one of the most hated companies in America for a time, because of course, they they were stupid enough to buy countrywide and Merrill Lynch and everybody hated those companies, except when countrywide was doling out loans to anybody who could fog the mirror. That was a major contributor to the financial crisis, the mortgage meltdown, and then of course, Wall Street was playing the game in the background and we didn’t know all that that was a secret unless you were an insider, right? But not only the to the banksters not pay you any money, any interest. And you know, one of my banks sent me this just yesterday, I opened the statement, and it showed on the statement, the various interest rates they pay Based on the balance one has in their account. So from zero to $5,000, they’ll pay point 1% interest, and then it goes all the way up to $1 million up to essentially infinity, almost a trillion dollars. Okay. And if you have that you’ll get half a percent. Yeah. So basically, if you have more money than God in the bank, you get point 5% point 5%. So you getting ripped off there for sure. But you know, where they really rip you off is on the fees. Many years ago, I was talking to my mom about the different big banks. And you know, my mom, she pays attention to a lot of this little stuff. I honestly don’t. We could certainly argue what’s a better philosophy Now you might think in trinsic Lee that. Paying attention would be the better philosophy but you must remember when you pay attention to one thing You can’t pay attention to another thing. So you might open one door, but you’ll certainly close another. There’s always a trade off in everything. By the way, just so you know what, it’s coming up here. Okay, why I’m talking about all this because I am going on a bit of a tangent. I agree and admit and understand that but you keep telling me you’re like my tangents. So I do. I try to do them once in a while. I try to give you at least one tangent a week. That’s in the monologue. Now, there may be other tangents in the guest interview as well. And our guest today is the founder of a company that offers some cool self management, investor empowerment services. Remember we talked about cozy remember, in 2016 at our meet the Masters event in San Diego, California, well, La Jolla, California to be more specific. We had one of the founders of cozy co z y.co come down and talk about their fantastic tools that help investors manage their money. properties and collect rents. Well, today we’re talking with another company that has some cool tools. In fact, you might even think they have more tools, because they offer some tenant screening and things like this. And what we want to do, and we’re, we’re doing this, okay, it’s a process, folks, it’s not going to be like one episode, all of a sudden, you’re going to see the empowered investor. You see that as a process. And this today, this episode, our guest today is part of that process. And we learned about this product from one of our clients, forgive me, I can’t remember who it was, but you’re probably listening out there. And I thank you so much for telling us about this company. It’s called rent tech. And they got some cool features, so we wanted to put them on the show and let you hear about it. Because what we want to see happen is we want to see it be commonplace for property managers to offer alla carte services to investors. We don’t necessarily want to see progress. Managers go away completely, even though we do talk about teach people about, and in some cases, depending on the investor recommend self management of one’s properties, which, oddly, oddly, can actually be easier. And certainly, you’ll save money if not make money. It was long as you do it right? And don’t have some oddball problem that maybe a manager could have resolved for you that you can’t resolve yourself or maybe you’re not paying attention. So that’s why you have the problem, right? So everything look at everything requires attention. So before I forget, on this massive tangent, we’re going down this funnel here, paying attention. Yes, attention span, the most scarce commodity in today’s world. attention span, span of attention. The scarcest, most valuable commodity in the world today. more valuable than diamonds, more valuable than pretty much anything. And by the way, diamonds, it’s Valentine’s Day. Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody. I hope you have a very romantical Valentine’s Day. Just a disclaimer there. romantical is not actually a word, my ex girlfriend Hillary used to say romantical. And I thought it was cute. So that’s what I’m using romantical not an official word, but maybe it’ll end up as a word. If I say it enough. So the banks don’t pay any money. My mom pays attention to these little nickel and dime fees from these banks. And we’re talking about all the different big banks and we’re comparing them as I’m having this discussion with my mom. And she says, Well, I used to bank at Wells Fargo, but they just feed you to death. It’s this little fee, that little fee that little fee that little fee. It’s ridiculous, right? So even though they don’t pay you any interest on your savings, which is a whole discussion really about monetary policy and the whole banking system. To the cartel that is a scam. And, you know, the interviews we’ve had with G. Edward Griffin, of course, we had him speak at our meet the Masters event recently. There’s all of that stuff. Right? The the banking cartel in general. But then there are individual banks that stick you differently, right? And if you look at banks like wells, I would say they probably have the most real estate. Is it really necessary to have a, a Wells Fargo branch on, you know, every every mile? It’s not exactly how many there are, but there are so many of them. You’ve got to just think that real estate is costing them a fortune. Because every one of these offices in addition to the real estate costs, they have to be managed, maintained and certainly staffed right. And that’s very, very expensive. We went virtual with this company. My role My company is when virtual in 2012. We gave up our last office, the lease ended and we thought what we needed Office for you just don’t need it anymore. And I was having these battles with my staff of, hey, come into the office and it was like they just don’t want to come into the office. Why am I trying to force them cajole them, convince them to come into the office, they want to work at home, they want to have flex time and, and it works. It worked. It’s worked great for us. So my mom and I were comparing a couple of the big banks Chase, bank, I mean, Citibank. Sorry. That’s what my friend calls it. Can we bleep that? bank? bleep it again. Okay, we don’t want to get an adult rating on our show here with my cussing. So you have wells, B of A B bank. Sorry, the bank didn’t mean to pick on you. I don’t actually don’t think you’re that bad. We used to bank with you and we thought you were okay. I think B of A was really the big hated Bank A couple of years ago. Wells Fargo is the big hated bank now because they’ve had all these scandals recently of opening up multiple accounts for people in the US. Ghost accounts. You may have all sorts of extra accounts at Wells Fargo, you don’t even know you had. And then of course, there’s Chase. And mom was comparing these for me, and she really checks this stuff out. So I kind of trust her opinion about it. And she says wells just fees you to death. And she says, I’m banking with BFA, and I said, BFA, aren’t they just terrible? Everybody hates Bank of America. Now? I guess they don’t hate them as much as they used to. But they’re all you know, the bottom line is everybody talked to they’ll say they all suck. Because there’s not enough competition. There’s too much regulation in the banking world. Same with cellphone providers, they all suck. Everybody says all of them suck. They’ll say like T Mobile is the best in terms of their plans and their billing. I think I think T Mobile really has the best concept. And maybe Verizon has the best reception, I don’t know. But Verizon is expensive. That’s sort of the premium service and then you travel internationally and Verizon is terrible. At least But that’s my understanding of this. So so they all have their advantages and disadvantages, right? But this is unbelievable, this thing I got that just shows the bank will basically not pay you anything. And it actually pays you less than they say Why? Well, of course, you have taxes, and then you have the hidden tax inflation you have to pay tax on interest income, but you also have to pay tax on inflation is, is the value of your money is inflated away into nothing. And we’re gonna see more of that. But as a real estate investors, following my plan, we actually love inflation. So that’s our home run strategy. And then you have all these little nickel and dime, frickin fees. These banks just fee you to death.
Jason Hartman 15:43
And according to my mom, who’s kind of an expert in this wells is really the worst of the big banks. They’re the most abusive in terms of feeding you to death. What this basically does though, is this pushes all sorts of people who did the right thing People who saved people who delayed gratification, and you know, people that really kind of deserve a break. This is usually older people that have done the right thing all their life they saved and they thought they could retire, and invest in a bunch of bank CDs and ladder, those CDs. If you don’t know what laddering is just being it, don’t google it because there’s another bunch of evils committed. Ellison Microsoft commits them to just understand that everything big is bad. And democratization means big goes away, and the small guys empowered and that’s what our guests will talk about today. Because this is one of those empowerment tools. So you’ve got all this. And now all of these older people are having to invest in all sorts of speculative, risky, risky things that aren’t really conservative enough. And when you have a change in the economy, they could lose they could lose really bad and it’s really sad. It’s not fair. But the world isn’t fair. Okay. You know, the other night I was in Los Angeles, I was in Los Angeles last last weekend, I got to hang out a little bit with Mr. CeeLo Green, the cool musician and he’s like the coolest guy. Really funny too great sense of humor. You probably imagine that CeeLo Green would have a great sense of humor. I got to go to the Beck concert in Los Angeles that was awesome to Beck was really great. I mean, he was good. Music was really, really good. Went to the Beck concert on Friday. And then I went to CeeLo greens Grammys party on Saturday. I hung out with him a little bit, had a great time. Met a cute girl there, by the way. And after the party, we were hanging out and she was ranting on and on about how evil Donald Trump is. And you know, it took like everything I had to restrain myself and not get into a political argument and ruin the mood. See, some things are more important than politics even though you understand that I’m not it Exactly a Trump supporter. Okay. Although I think he’s better than the criminal known as Hillary Clinton. Oh, okay. Gosh, another tangent here. Let’s not do it. Stay out of it. Jason. Okay, so went to that. And then I went to another event on Sunday night, the city gala event, and john travolta was there. And, you know, I was right next to him. And he gave a little talk. And one of the things he talks about is how he’s the eternal optimist. He said, you know, no matter what character he’s playing, what role he’s playing in a movie. john travolta believes in the innate goodness of people, he said that, you know, like, right in front of me, you know, just a few feet away. And well, you know, it I really felt that he believed that, and I believe it to
Jason Hartman 18:48
sort of, but not completely, you know, to deny that there are truly bad evil people out there is just is just, it’s childish. It’s immature. There are Really bad, really evil people. And I think most people are pretty good people. I think a lot of people can become good or evil in this in a situational environment. You know, certainly I could come a little evil and I think I’m a good guy and I’m optimistic and you know, but someone really takes advantage of me or takes advantage of someone else. You know, I’m a big fan of the underdog. I you know, I spend a lot of my life as the underdog maybe that’s why I have so much compassion for the underdog. You know, I see someone take advantage of someone or bully someone that really bothers me, let me tell ya, I could become really upset about that, and really go to that person’s aid. Right. You know, that’s one of the things I’m doing in my real estate business. I think it’s part of my a big part of my mission, to help people not get bullied, in essence, in a way call it bullying by wall street, Wall Street is screwing people and that’s why we have the better alternative, we have income property, the most historically proven asset class in the entire world. And then we take tools that empower investors so that they can be more direct in terms of their management of their portfolios. And they can do that without a lot of time without a lot of effort. And so we are continuing to develop and explore and share tools like that with you, our dear clients, and our dear audience, our dear listeners. Let’s do that today. Let’s get to our guests. But make sure you go to Jason hartman.com. Check out some of the properties there. Remember our financing program by the way, just before we get to our guests one one more thing. I know it’s always one more thing, isn’t it? Last week, I announced our financing program and a lot of you had great interest in that. And basically just to state it again, we have totally exclusive financing. not available anywhere else. It’s here only it’s exclusive to us. Why is it exclusive? Well, cuz it’s money coming from another one of my companies, okay? That’s why it’s exclusive on any of the properties purchased through our network with a minimum loan balance, okay, you gotta have a minimum loan balance. Someone asked me about this just today and the loan amount can’t be too small. Okay? So we’re going to set a $70,000 minimum loan balance okay on this. So, you can buy basically buy a property, put 25% down, so very low downpayment, and this is private financing. I mean, you will not find any deal this good anywhere else. Unless you’re just talking about your typical Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac agency loans and those are the best. We’re not here to compete with that. You can’t beat those loans. Why? Because they’re subsidized by the government. Of course, you can’t beat them. Right. 6.5% five points. 75% loan to value ratio 30 year amortization, all due in seven years. So balloon payment seven years you’ll have to refinance the property. Hopefully you’re doing my refi to die plan, you only have to have a FICO score a tri merge FICO score of 650 or higher. So very easy going on the credit score, if any of you did a strategic default during the Great Recession, Hey, no big deal, your credit score is probably good enough, you know, subject to appraisal etc. Fees are very reasonable, just about $1,000 or so and fees. And there you go. So take advantage of that. And remember, that is something that is exclusive tests not offered anywhere else. $70,000 minimum loan amount. So if you buy a property for 100,000, you’re fine. Okay, so, and that’s, you know, our average sales price is somewhere in there about 100 hundred and 20,000. I’d say. Ask your investment counselor about the financing Also, if you’re interested in being a patient investor in buying notes, you can do that through us. So ask your investment counselor about that as well. And that’s not a bad strategy to diversify some of your real estate holdings with some paper assets. Of course, I think that the actual properties, the ownership of the actual properties is the best. The nice thing about the financing when you’re the lender is it’s it’s simple. It’s easier. It’s much simpler than actually having the property but in terms of having the property, which is the best investment, I believe, we make that simpler than any other method, right? So that’s the thing. All right. So that’s it. Let’s jump over and get to our guests before we go any longer here, and let’s listen in but go to Jason Hartman COMM And check all that stuff out as well as our great home study courses.
It’s my pleasure to welcome Nathan Miller to the show. He has failed Founder and President of rentec direct, this is a software that can help you manage your properties. As you know, I am one of the people out there and there are more voices than just my own. I’m glad to glad to see I’m not alone in this that wants to really disrupt the property management industry and offer people new tools and new options. And, you know, hopefully we’ll see property managers start offering all a carte services, we’ll see more people self managing properties, long distance, which as I’ve mentioned many times before, if you told me you could do that years ago, I would have said, You’re crazy, but I’ve done it myself many times. And we have many clients that do it as well. You know, properties. They’ve never seen tenants. They’ve never met, managing them from a distance and it’s working quite well. Nathan, welcome. How are you?
Nathan Miller 24:46
I’m very good. Thanks for having me. Jason.
Jason Hartman 24:47
Yeah, good to have you on the show. So you’ve got a nice product. I actually learned about it from one of our clients who said it was a good product, and I checked it out and I thought I gotta get you on the show to talk about this. What Does your product do? Who is it for I know that you have property managers using it, but you also have individual investors using it as well.
Nathan Miller 25:09
Absolutely. Yeah, in fact, the bulk of our clients are investors or small time landlords that have from you know, two to 20 properties that they manage. And that does make the basis of our client base. So, our product was designed initially, you know, I woke up one day having trouble with my own rentals, I was, you know, doing the traditional what probably 90% of all landlords out there do today is I was plugging figures into Excel and keeping paper receipts. And once I got you know, a few properties that I was managing like that, it became a lot It was a lot of work, you know, keeping track of what you know what sink need to be fixed, or did I you know, record this receipt, right? Did I put it in the right box, and then Excel, you know, it’s Excel, so it only goes so far. So I, at that point in my life, I was a still am, but but a software developer. And I just knew that, you know, there had to be more landlords, landlords out there like me that were having troubles. And I decided to go ahead and write this program to help landlords. That was the whole focus behind this. And I use myself as a model for developing the program in the first place.
Jason Hartman 26:24
Yeah, fantastic. So did you have a background in software? or What was your background before that? I mean, I know you were an investor. But what else did you do?
Nathan Miller 26:31
Well, my primary occupation at the time was running an internet service provider. It was a company that was founded here in Grants Pass, and we provided internet access nationwide by the end of it. But what I did there was I did a lot of development. I started with some low level programming, and I taught myself a lot got into some higher level database programming and PHP development. And that’s kind of where I got my base knowledge on that.
Jason Hartman 26:59
Yeah, okay. Okay, good. So tell us what what this product does and how much it costs, you know, how are investors listening can use it.
Nathan Miller 27:08
Okay? Well, the basis behind the program is to make a landlord’s life simpler. That’s what I wanted. When I started developing it was I wanted to save myself time because I was spending hours and hours and hours a week, you know, managing these properties. So I want to save myself time. So that is what the program does. And some of the ways that does it is it’s going to automate a lot of your tasks such as you know, sending out notices to your tenants, keeping track of you know, which tenant owes you and giving you a ledger for every single tenant. So it’s very clear when you you know, login and look at the program, you know, who owes you money and who doesn’t. It’s also going to help you with your maintenance tasks. In fact, a number of years ago, we added in a tenant portal so tenants get their own login, they can log in with their mobile phone or on their computer and if they Have a maintenance issue, they can just report it online, then that goes into your database, you can, you know, then assign it to one of your vendors and get it, get it taken care of, you don’t actually have to talk to the tenant because they could send you a picture. They can put the details of the problem up there. And it just the nature of saves you a lot of time. As time went on, we discovered you know, and this is mostly from feedback from a lot of people that were using the program, that there’s a ton of things that can save people time. So we’re very, we’re very client focused company, in that we keep track of every single request that comes in. And where I was getting with that is, you know, back, this is some time ago, but but we had a lot of requests for automating payments. This is probably five or six years ago, automating payments and so we integrated a CH payments into the system. So a tenant can pay their landlord doesn’t matter where the tenant is. They can be, you know, in New York and you can be on La, you can be anywhere and the tenant plugs in their bank account information and it pays their rent every single month for them directly transfers that money over the AC h system to the landlord’s bank account. As long as
Jason Hartman 29:15
they have money in the account
Nathan Miller 29:16
as long as
Nathan Miller 29:20
it’s um, it’s actually you know, I look at the stats that I’m always very interested in the banking aspects and how, you know, how much a CH we’re helping with on a monthly basis, and I don’t see many bounced a CH payments. I think there’s there’s a, you know, there’s a few reasons for that. But I think the automated nature of it when people know that it’s coming out, you know, on the sixth of the month, or the seventh of the month, and their paycheck always goes down on the fourth. That makes rent always the very first priority, it comes out first.
Jason Hartman 29:50
Now, you know, we’ve had people from cozy coo z y on the show, and I know you know about cozia it’s one of your sort of competitors, not exactly a competitor. They process rent payments for free. And you know, many of our clients use cozy and like it.
Nathan Miller 30:07
Is it the same type of system? And
Jason Hartman 30:09
is there a charge for processing those rent payments? Is it an AC? h? Is that what cozy does? You know? I don’t personally use it, but many of our clients do. What’s the difference? if any?
Nathan Miller 30:19
Yeah, well, we’re all using the same system. It’s all a CH system, where it transfers from one account to another. We they make, you know, they make their revenue on the credit card payments that happened to come in. Because those those do actually have a markup. We make our revenue on adding You know, we’ve had a much larger software package then than they might in the it’s a complete accounting package. So So are we charge I think 50 cents for each a CH that goes through.
Jason Hartman 30:52
And who do you charge the landlord not that it’s a big deal. It’s 50 cents, but I just want to know,
Nathan Miller 30:55
usually the landlord pays for it. However, it’s the landlord’s option. They Have the tenant pay for it? If they want, they can mark it up if they want. But we always, you know, we try to recommend that landlords just absorb that. because like you said, it’s only 50 cents. And the convenience of not having to take a stack of checks to the bank or cash for people to pay in cash still, it’s just overwhelmingly more more convenient. So it’s worth the 50 cents.
Jason Hartman 31:18
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So with your system, people cannot pay by credit card, but with cozy, they can use a credit card, right?
Nathan Miller 31:25
Well, actually, we accept credit cards as well. So both systems accept credit cards.
Jason Hartman 31:30
Tell us what happens when you do that. I mean, gosh, you know, I’m actually I mean, I own lots of investment properties, but I actually rent my own beautiful home, because it’s a great deal to be a renter, actually, when you when you rent a high end property. So I would love to pay my rent with a credit card and I would get so many airline miles, it would be unbelievable. But what you know, what’s the charge for
Nathan Miller 31:51
that? Well, your charge is gonna be about just under 3%. And most now almost all landlords do pass that on to the tenant. Yeah. So there’s your rewards are only giving you about 1% on average, and you’re paying 3%. So it’s not really worth it. But sometimes people are in a bind, and it’s a way better than a payday loan. Yeah, absolutely. That’s for sure.
Jason Hartman 32:11
Okay, good. So what else does it do? So, you process payments, let’s maybe take it in chronological order if we can, because now we’re already in a payment processing. But what about Tenant Screening? You know, how do you pick a tenant? Can you help with that?
Nathan Miller 32:24
Oh, absolutely. In fact, that’s, as you know, it’s the most important part to rent in your home is picking the right tenant, the wrong tenant can be catastrophic. So yes, that was another you know, user request as they were asking for us to provide Tenant Screening so we did we connected with some of the nation’s best databases in order to get the get all the major stuff out there we so anyone on our system can pull a nationwide credit report using TransUnion. Nationwide, the criminal which covers all 50 states, and then eviction report, it’s
Jason Hartman 32:57
only gonna it’s only going to be training union it’s not gonna be other credit bureaus like experience. Yeah now and there’s
Nathan Miller 33:04
a reason for that TransUnion tell us about You bet. TransUnion is the only credit agency that is that appreciates landlords and allows landlords to pull this data for Tenant Screening purposes. The rest of the agencies want the tenant to be involved. So you see a lot of services out there. Unlike ours, ours is where the landlord will go up and they order the report and they get to view the report in about 10 seconds. All they have to do is plug in the tenants name and social and it shows right right up there for the other systems out there that use like Experian, for example, they’ve got I think it’s called Smart move. And there’s a lot of smart move type systems out there, where the landlord instead of just ordering the report and viewing it right away, they send they put in a request and it sends an email off to the tenant and then the tenant logs in and they do some identity verification questions set up an account of the experience. And then once they’ve done that and approve the request, it then forwards a copy to the landlord. And both systems work and the smart move system works well for, you know, really low quantities. But if you’re doing, you know, three or four applications, that gets tedious, and it can take a long time to receive those results back when the tenant has to be involved in all those steps.
Jason Hartman 34:22
Okay, so I assume you make money on the tenant screening, right? How much do you charge for them?
Nathan Miller 34:26
Well, we charge if you come to us and you have one property, and you’re not using our software tenant screening for all three, the credit eviction and criminals can be about $29. And we do have a markup in that. If you’re using our software, then that goes down to $15 for those three, and then in that particular case, between me and you and your entire audience. There’s a very, very tiny markup in that we just give that as a convenience for the most part.
Jason Hartman 34:53
Yeah, I would agree like my mother, she self manages all her properties, long distance by the way, and has been doing it for many, many years. That way. She pays I think $10 per applicant. And how does that work for couples or singles? You know, is it? Is it $15 per person? Or
Nathan Miller 35:13
it would be Yeah. $15 per person is typical.
Jason Hartman 35:16
Yes. Okay. And does the tenant pay for that, like through a portal? Or do does the landlord have to collect that somehow? And, and, you know, and can the landlord then collect whatever they want? I mean, look, folks, a lot of landlords make money on this. And so do property management companies, just like you do as a software company, you get a little markup on it, too. But what how does that work mechanically, does the tenant go in online and go to a portal and pay to you know, be evaluated for the property or have a beta?
Nathan Miller 35:48
Okay, well, with our service, the tenant doesn’t have to be involved at all other than they need to fill out you know, a rental application with the landlord. And that can be a rental application in person you know on the kitchen counter at the property. Or it can be an online application. And we provide that also. So, so we take the online application, for example, and we walk through the steps so that the tenant will go up to, you know, a landlord who’s using rentec. Direct, they’ll look through their available properties, they’ll select one, they’ll apply for it, where it will ask them for all their end from all the information you would find on a typical application. And then if the landlord chooses, they can charge a fee for accepting that application. application fees are typically anywhere from 25 to $50 per adult, depending on the area. And at the end of the application, they’ll pay that fee with their credit card online, times the number of adults that will go back to the landlord and the landlord, then we’ll run the tenant screening which cost them $15 per adult. So the the application fee is usually always more than the tenant screening fee.
Jason Hartman 36:53
So we went over application we went over screening, we went over actual rent payments What happens after that? How about tracking and things like that?
Nathan Miller 37:03
Financial tracking? who owes
Jason Hartman 37:05
Yeah, well, and tracking, you know, does it track lease expiration dates? Does it track your insurance policies, property management contracts if you have a property manager, and that’s actually one of the things I wanted to ask you, you know, can this be used for an investor who has a property manager? Or is it really for an investor who’s self managing only? You know, maybe talk a little bit about the mechanics of that.
Nathan Miller 37:30
Okay. Well, it’s your first question. Yes, it will track I think everything you mentioned there, all those tools have been built in. And for a landlord with a property manager or a property sorry, a property owner that has a property manager. It’s not really designed for that scenario. What would typically happen with a property managers they would then send the landlord a, the information they need to fill out their schedule, he attacks time and the landlord then Are the owner doesn’t then actually need to run an accounting package to the scale,
Jason Hartman 38:04
right, but they still want to keep track and kind of know where they are, you know, and, and throughout the year, make sure they got the money from the property manager each month and the amounts were correct. You know, I understand the schedule, he attacks time thing, but, you know, are there some functionalities there? I mean, you could I assume you could just run it as though you were, you were just managing yourself, right? I mean, why couldn’t you do that?
Nathan Miller 38:30
You could, you could definitely set up an account on our system, even even a free account because we offer accounts free for anyone less than 10 properties. You could set that up and plug in your values every month. But but but now that I think about it, we do have you know, we’ve got our landlord product, we call it rent tech pro and then we’ve got our property manager program designed for the small to mid size property managers we call rentec pm and with the rentec Pm product, if a property managers managing a property for As an investor, they can actually turn on an owner portal. And then the owner, you know, in this case would then log into the portal, and they see all the transactions that happen with their properties. So that might be the connection we’re looking for there.
Jason Hartman 39:15
Yeah. Okay. Interesting. And tell us about the pricing of these two different products.
Nathan Miller 39:20
Okay. I mean, in general, you know, when people ask me that usually say it’s about $1 a unit, it’s going to vary a little bit, if you have, you know, five units, you can use it for free, even up to 10 units, you can use it for free. If you have, you know, with the entire
Jason Hartman 39:33
functionalities,
Nathan Miller 39:34
we’ll know it’s going to be a limited functionality, we can’t throw we can’t pay for you know, the AC h connections and let’s say there’s a few other things that are in there the stuff that costs us money and the advanced features aren’t going to be in the free product.
Jason Hartman 39:47
Okay, so let’s not talk about the free product cuz everybody’s gonna want the other features. So is it is it does it start at $65 per month, you know, if you have one to 100 units, that’s what it looks like. on your website, or is it different? You know, just for we’re talking about the investor product, not the manager product yet the entry level product here?
Nathan Miller 40:07
Oh, sure. No, if you, if you have 100 units, that’s gonna be the price. But if you have fewer than that, let’s say 25 units, you’re only paying $15 a month.
Jason Hartman 40:16
Okay, so so 15 bucks a month for up to 25 units with all the features, right? Yes. Okay. Now what if you want to use the property management product, the property manager product, which is the next step, you have basically three products a free product that doesn’t have all the features a paid product that’s very reasonably priced, by the way, and then a property manager product, right? Yes. Okay. And so tell us about the property manager product, the cost and benefits of that
Nathan Miller 40:44
what you get, okay. Okay, sure. I mean, the property manager products to be about 20% more than then rentec Pro. And property managers tend to you know, they’re managing more properties. So if you had a property manager managing 50 properties, for example, I just typed it down on My computer here, it’s $35 a month, whereas the landlord version would be $25 a month.
Jason Hartman 41:07
Okay, so certainly, you know about all of the, the property management products out there, you know, the bigger robust software’s like building them, and yardie and all the others I can’t even think of right now. But, you know, weird is you’re like, why wouldn’t someone use those? Or why would they use yours? I mean, yours is a lot less expensive for a property manager. Because our clients listening, they see their statements and they see yardie and they see building them on there, you know, and what, what we’re What is your angle? That’s not their angle, right? I mean, are you just less expensive?
Nathan Miller 41:44
Okay, well, that’s one of them. And I would say we’re less efficient or less sorry, we’re less expensive because we’re, we’re more efficient, less expensive, because we’re much more efficient. We’ve done we have customers come over from, you know, our main competitors in this market are building them and AppFolio And daily, we have clients sign up, as you know, they probably have some of ours too. So we trade clients. And that’s because the three platforms are actually very feature compatible. All three of us do the same thing. You know, for example, you know, we came out with Doc, you know, DocuSign, electronic signatures, you know, a couple years before billiam, but they might have came out with text messaging, you know, before us, but we just bounced back and forth, like feature wise. So I wouldn’t say like either of those platforms are bad, they actually are great platforms as ours because we all you know, we all do the same things. Where, where the difference is, is in how the tool works. I think all three platforms work significantly different. And I might be a tiny bit biased, but I think ours works more efficiently. We spend a ton of time every feature we develop, we spend a ton of time making sure that that feature is going to be the most efficient for our clients. When I look at you know deploying a feature, you know, if there’s, you know, five clicks with or you know, could just be two, if we can work on it to make only two clicks or two pages instead of 10. If there’s anywhere way we can shrink that down, we don’t release it until we do. So that’s one area we really stand out is making the program very efficient. And it’s gonna take less time to do everything in our system that it would you know, some of our competitors systems. Another huge differentiator that I believe in this is a maybe more personal belief is simply business or feature. You know, all of our clients out there, they all started generally with nothing or with a couple hundred dollars in their pocket, and they, you know, they built, you know, their small Empire, whether it be, you know, a series of properties or a property management business that, you know, they all started it on their own, usually, I would say 95%, maybe 99% of them. They didn’t receive millions and millions of dollars of like venture cap, venture capital funding or something. So we’re the same way we’ve grown the exact same way, not a single day, have we ever taken out a loan or had to? We’ve been profitable since 2009. And we’ve grown 100% organically. And we do that, you know, I take pride in that because these other companies can’t do that they couldn’t. And so I feel like we’ve got a bit more camaraderie with with our clients, because we do business the same way as they do.
Jason Hartman 44:27
Yeah, you’re, you’re you’re scruffy.
Nathan Miller 44:31
We’re very scrappy, and we’ve done it and we’ve become very successful at it. And so another thing that differentiates us is, you know, we make it easy for people to use us we, we don’t have any terms, no one ever asked to sign up for a year. Or any you know, it’s everything’s month to month. We have no setup fees. We’ve got a free trial. We want people to be able to come in use our system feel the same way. I do that it’s makes their life easier. And if by the end of those 30 days, it’s not easier than they should keep exploring, because not every system works well for everybody. And we have a huge market of landlords out there. You know, there’s something like 20 million, you know, landlords in the United States,
Jason Hartman 45:19
and words, that’s amazing. I mean, that’s really an amazing number. I know I’ve, I’ve talked about those numbers before and they’re, they’re, they’re mind boggling.
Nathan Miller 45:27
Yeah, it’s staggering. And, and, you know, 19 million of them aren’t using software to manage their properties. So I don’t really feel like I’m competing against, you know, our competitors. sure they’re out there, and we trade customers sometimes, but, you know, we’re more going and trying to help the people that aren’t using anything right now. And, you know, that does tend to bring us a lot of the smaller ones, a lot of the, you know, property investors that have five or 10 properties, but that’s okay. We’re totally good with that we’re 100% committed to that market, which is also unique to us. And we’re not changing. We’re gonna stick there.
Jason Hartman 46:02
Yeah, I love that market too. Well, how do you handle support and help and training and stuff like that? I mean, do you do people can people call you or how does that work?
Nathan Miller 46:12
Absolutely. And in fact, that’s probably another way we stand out. If, you know I keep a very close eye on like online reviews, there’s all these third party sites out there. There’s like dozens of them now, but a few of the standout that keeps track of reviews of sonar competitors and we consistently rate higher always like five stars all the way across the board when it comes to our clients support. And reason Reason being I here’s what I attribute it to, is I’m personally involved with every customer service person we hire. And one thing we’ve done, it’s been challenging, you know, to always find them, but we hire people that have been in the property management industry, they’ve owned properties or ideally worked for a property management firm at some point and bring them into the market. Customer Service. So not only do our customer service reps know, our program really well, but they know the business really well. And to, you know, answer your question, yeah, we have an 800 number people can call. We’ve got live chat. We’ve got that on our website. We’re actually just next week. This is this is brand new news. Haven’t even released it on our blog yet. But we’ll be adding live chat support an app. So anytime someone’s working on a ledger or looking at a screening report or something, when they have a question, they can just click the button and get ahold of one of our one of our people. Everyone’s right here in Grants Pass to ask the question. So yeah, support wise, we’re probably the most available company for support. Fantastic. And
Jason Hartman 47:43
when you mention app, can they use the entire product inside a mobile app? Or is that just like the tenant portal or what Tell us about that?
Nathan Miller 47:54
Okay, the all the portals that you know, as a tenant portal and owner portal, and then the app application itself is a web based application. So
Jason Hartman 48:03
while that’s a SaaS product, so is there are there when you say app, you know, most people think of like a smartphone app.
Nathan Miller 48:09
Do you not have an app? We don’t have a specific application. Okay, we got it. Yeah, we’ve made everything work on phones. So it is responsive, and it works fine up there. But we don’t have a specific application for it.
Jason Hartman 48:19
Perfect. Sounds good. Well, Nathan, thanks so much for joining us. And I wish you the best in really empowering investors. This is my big goal to empower investors to get away from Wall Street Wall Street’s a scam, you know, invest in real estate, it’s the most historically proven asset class. There’s just so many great tools now to do it. Technology has enabled and empowered investors in so many ways, and you’re one of the people doing it. So thank you for your contribution to that. And thanks for joining us today.
Nathan Miller 48:47
Of course. Thanks for having me, Jason.
Jason Hartman 48:51
Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss any episodes. He sort of check out the show’s specific website and our general website. Hartman Mediacom for appropriate disclaimers and Terms of Service. Remember that guest opinions are their own. And if you require specific legal or tax advice, or advice and any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to iTunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you’re using and write a review for the show we would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.