For years, Lexington, Kentucky-based EZ Turn has been making a name for itself as a market leader in the student housing industry.
Now with the help of a new offering and a rebranding campaign, the company has jumped into the multifamily rental property space under the name of EZOS.
“We are constantly evolving, changing, adapting and building our platform,” EZOS Co-Founder/CEO Chase Minnifield told me.
Essentially how the product works is it provides property management staff a portal to communicate with tenants and third-party vendors when it comes to routine occurrences such as inspections and maintenance requests.
In the multifamily space, EZOS has rolled out an AI-powered lease auditing tool that can audit hundreds of leases in a matter of hours instead of weeks.
“We just needed new ground to sell in. .... The ability for us to augment the labor of auditing leases has been a big hit so far in the multifamily sector,” Minnifield said.
The company, which made the pivot in focus and branding in January, has a headcount of 10, with many of employees living in the Central Kentucky region.
EZ Turn was founded in 2018 by Minnifield, Lincoln Otaga and Hayden Bush. Otago, currently serves as the COO, while Bush is the company’s CTO.
Minnifield — who is a Lexington native and former star athlete at Henry Clay High School, who played football at the University of Virginia and several seasons in the National Football League (NFL) — met his co-founders through doing business with University of Kentucky’s student housing department through one of first ventures he launched, Helping Hands Security, in 2015. Otaga was working at a UK-affiliated property management company at the time.
The company’s revenue model works by charging $1 per unit that is listed on the platform, which at last count is around 80,000 units in a total of more than 360 properties.
The platform has approximately 290,000 users, including property management staff, tenants and vendors. EZOS currently has an approximate annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $750,000 — with the hope of that number expanding to up to $12 million in five to six quarters.
Up until this point, EZOS has raised approximately $565,000, although they have bootstrapped a lion’s share of their funding. Previous investors include Keyhorse Capital and angel investors such as Brian Luftman out of Lexington and Roy Toutant out of Louisville — as well as a few of Minnifield’s former teammates at Virginia and in the NFL. The company is currently in the midst of a $1.5 million seed round, of which they have already raised close to 90% as of a recent date.
“We are looking to utilize that as we scale into conventional multifamily markets, which is obviously differentiation from our initial product offering in the student space,” Minnifield said.
Minnifield said his company plans to use the influx in capital for increased sales and marketing efforts, as well as building out the AI technology that is used for auto scheduling and maintenance capabilities.
“We have a vision that our software will be able to handle all the administrative tasks for property managers at the property site level in the next couple years,” he said.
Further down the road, Minnifield left the door open for EZOS expanding into other verticals such as commercial real estate.
“We believe everywhere there’s pipes and water and bricks, we can be serviceable in that market,” he said.
