Editor note: In our 2022 Startups to Watch feature, the Silicon Valley Business Journal and San Francisco Business Times present startups and founders doing unique things in the San Francisco Bay Area. Doorstead is one of 20 that we have profiled — to read more about our mission and the other startups we're featuring, click here.
Owning real estate can be lucrative, but many small landlords struggle to turn a profit.
"We spoke to an owner who was overpromised the monthly rent on her unit by a property manager and as a result the property sat vacant for six months," Ryan Waliany said, and eventually "had to sell her property in order to cut her losses."
Doorstead provides property management for single-family housing and guarantees property owners income until it fills a unit. There are around 20 million rental properties around the country, 72% of which are owned by individual landlords and half of them struggle to make a profit despite generating billions in revenue — $350 billion in 2018, alone — according to Pew Research. The company says it's on track to manage $2 billion of that pie by 2025 and has attracted investors from other notable Bay Area companies, including Eric Wu of Opendoor.
The founders have collectively founded nine other startups and also previously worked for Uber, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Maywood Construction.
Doorstead
- Founded: 2019
- Founders: CEO Ryan Waliany, COO Jennifer Bronzo and CTO Philip Lee
- What it does: Provides a property management platform that guarantees owners income and cuts down on vacancies
- HQ: San Francisco
- Employees: 100
- Total funding: $17 million
- Investors: Madrona Venture Group, M13, Hustle Fund, Lior Ron (Uber Freight), Eric Wu (Opendoor), Tom Willerer (Opendoor), Jason Droege (Uber Eats), Court Lorenzini (Docusign), and Gokul Rajaram (Doordash)
Describe what your business does for someone from Mars? Doorstead provides a new class of full-service property management that takes on the heavy lifting: from getting the property ready for rental to screening and signing tenants to managing maintenance and more.
Doorstead gives property owners cash-flow certainty by letting owners know what and when they're going to get paid upfront (ex: $3,400/mo starting in 28 days). Owners get paid no matter if the property is vacant or filled, and Doorstead covers the difference if necessary. With the added accountability from our guarantee, Doorstead fills vacant properties 26 days faster, yielding 7% more rent for owners.
Does Doorstead only manage single family homes, or apartment complexes, too? Doorstead manages single-family residences, which can include single-family homes, duplexes, triplexes, townhomes and condos. We do not plan on adding multifamily apartments at this time.
How different is the company you have today compared with the company you first envisioned? We initially wanted to build technology at every step of the property management lifecycle. However, we quickly realized that more efficient technology was not a clear value proposition.
How did you build out your team and what lessons did you learn? One of our advisors mentioned the importance of hiring “player coaches,” and since we’ve gotten that advice, we’ve had much better success at finding the right people who can manage the chaos and complexity of building a startup from the ground-up. Today, our team is composed of 16 former founders and veterans from Uber, Opendoor and Facebook.
Who was the first person or organization you asked for money? We announced that we were starting our company through a blog post, and we received dozens of emails from prospective customers across the US who wanted to sign up for our service.
One of the people who reached out was an acquaintance of ours from college, and he resonated strongly with our product and value proposition as a landlord. Soon after speaking with him, he not only became one of our first customers, but also wrote our first check into the company and introduced us to our first engineering hire. We now manage a handful of his properties.
How are your going to scale your business and grow over the next 12 months? In 2022, we plan to launch Doorstead nationally in 10 markets across the U.S and double our team to 200 full-time employees and contractors. We’ll be launching the ability to request and sign a guaranteed rental offer within seconds on Doorstead.com, scaling our workforce platform, and investing in our national infrastructure.
