After finding himself awash with hundreds of transactions, local realtor Josh DeShong looked to create what he describes as the “eBay for residential real estate investors.”
Following a nearly seven-month beta testing phase, DeShong has launched Trelly, an investor-to-investor real estate investing platform, on the Google and iOS app stores.
“Our mission is to give everybody access to investing in real estate,” DeShong, who also serves as CEO, said. “Our beachhead is really just solidifying this already existing investor-to-investor market.”
Acting like a “B2B version” of the multiple listing service marketplace, Trelly users list their properties on the platform for other investors to bid on. DeShong said traditionally investors would use Facebook groups and other online networking sites to conduct transactions individually. The platform serves as a real-time marketplace, typically with between 10 and 20 properties available at any given time.
Trelly currently operates in the Dallas, Houston and Tampa Bay markets and is planning to launch in Jacksonville and Nashville in the near future. When eyeing potential markets, DeShong said the company looks for things like homeownership rates, occupancy rates, affordability, and average homeowner makeup.
“It works kind of like eBay, investors are bidding against each other for the house and the supplier… keeps whatever their arbitrage is,” DeShong said. “We've turned it into an auction.”
Since it began beta testing in March, about 700 transactions have taken place on the Trelly platform, representing a gross merchandise value of more than $170 million. So far, the company has been bootstrapped.
DeShong got into real estate in 2006, starting Josh DeShong Real Estate as a way to support himself and his mother, after she lost her job. He started investing in real estate assets in 2012 with two houses. By 2014, his portfolio included more than 100 properties. He said throughout his real estate career, he has closed on nearly $2 billion in real estate transactions. DeShong is also the founder of real estate investment firm Myers Home Buyers, which focuses on distressed residential properties. Those businesses, along with Trelly, make up the Trelly Group.
“I had a mentor who said, ‘If you don't focus on assets or products, then you're not going to ever build anything that's scalable. That pushed me to focus on assets,” DeShong said. “We stopped flipping houses and just started focusing on supporting the investor and making sure they had constant inventory.”
Also part of Trelly’s leadership is CTO Stephen Chiang, a former Microsoft project manager and Google software engineer, as well as COO and CMO Kimberley Pfeiler, who most recently served as the executive director for the Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others. Former Intuit Executive VP and CTO Tayloe Stansbury serves on the company’s board. In total, the Trelly Group team has about 55 employees.
DeShong said Trelly plans to stay focused on residential real estate assets as it eyes new markets across the country, with plans to grow its user network before looking at monetization strategies for the platform.
“Our goal is growth… we're going to focus on residential for a very long period of time,” DeShong said.
