Jerryck Murrey and his team are on a mission to address the housing crisis by helping employers offer housing as a benefit to their workers. After a year building out the product Murrey is hitting the road to fundraise a $1.9 million round.
Unlike company towns of the past, Murrey is building Annum Housing as a platform that would exist independently of an employer, so when someone leaves a job they do not lose their housing.
Instead, Annum works more like health insurance, he said. A company pays in and then that offsets an employee’s rent or mortgage or maintenance costs. If an employee leaves, they remain in the network but may lose the employer subsidy. If enough companies use Annum, people could regain the subsidy once they land at a new job.
Annum in turn works deals with different parts of the housing market, such as apartment developers and owners or with mortgage companies or contractors. The employers and employees only deal with Annum, and the Annum team handles the details.
Murrey, who is founder and CEO, has a background in real estate and structured finance. He started working on Annum full time last year but the idea has been building for years. As he researched he saw that people in human resources departments know that housing is a hinderance to hiring. And C-suite executives also know this. But neither group wants to get into the business of being a property manager or figuring out the fairness and equity of doling out housing programs.
“In health care, when we talk about people having better health care, we don’t talk about building more hospitals. It’s building more access,” Murrey said. “It’s giving employees autonomy while maintaining an arm's length with the employer.”
Annum has two basic ways it works with employers:
- One is a stipend function for affordability with which employees can earn up to $600 for six months through an accrual process similar to paid time off. Once the stipend is exhausted, it begins again. This option uses Housing and Urban Development standards as its base.
- The other is a marketplace where Annum has deals with different pieces of the market and offers discounts to members for maintenance and other housing services. Employees using this option are typically in high-cost areas and are making 145% of the area median income.
Annum has some early partnerships set to launch this fall in Montana. It has already housed a few people in that state, Murrey said. Early interest in the startup’s product has come from education and health care industries, which are two areas of the economy that are seeing their workers pushed out of high-cost areas but whose jobs require them to be in those communities.
The Annum team is five people. To date, it has been funded through a $175,000 angel round raised last year, he said. Now that the team has landed on an approach they think is scalable, Murrey is out pitching investors.
Murrey is based in Medford. He said in the current funding environment he is seeking backers from all over. He noted he has some interested groups in California, but he would also like to raise money locally as well. He sees opportunity for Oregon investors especially as Oregon’s rising cost of living is causing crisis in more and more communities.
