CP 50: Protecting landlords and tenants with Dwellsy CEO, Jonas Bordo

Join Duc Ong and his co-host, Steve Fierros, as they chat with Jonas Bordo about protecting landlords and tenants from frauds and adapting to the rental market’s challenges caused by the pandemic. Jonas is a landlord to more than 100,000 people and CEO and co-founder of Dwellsy, a free rental listing site where owners and property managers can get high-quality leads for free and where renters can find a rental and make it home. He created Dwellsy after seeing how difficult it was for renters to find rentals as scams exploded in number on Craigslist. He also saw how rapidly rental inventories shrunk, and marketing costs grew for multifamily and single-family owners and operators because of pay-to-play ILS platforms significantly raising their prices. All the while, lead quality on rental listings sites plummeted. In this episode, also learn more from Jonas about the demand for reputation management in the rental market!

The Demand Reputation Management in the Rental Market

Apartment communities often struggle with reputation management, specifically in terms of the traditional rating approach. In contrast to restaurants and stores with multiple opportunities to get a good rating, apartments and other residential home rentals only have opportunities to do the same. Even worse, there would always be a bad day for the few tenants who do rate these places, where they would have maintenance issues, and the landlord would not be around to fix it, and the like. In turn, Jonas would often find that apartments’ reputation scores only map out how hard the rental listing platform or the landlord is working on reputation management, instead of how good that landlord or that community is as a place to live. Right now, there is a demand for reputation management, and rental listing platforms like Dwellsy need to thread an approach for it. They need to provide an accurate picture of what it is like to live in an apartment community and what its landlord is genuinely like, but that would require nuance and critical thinking.

About Jonas Bordo:

Jonas Brodo is the CEO and co-founder of Dwellsy, a site where renters can find rentals all in one place, and landlords can list and lease their vacant units for free. The company believes in the radical concept that accurate, organic search in a free eco-system creates more value than the pay-to-play model embraced by all current rental listing services. 

Outline of the episode: 

●    [01:26] What prompted the creation of Dwellsy.

●    [02:28] Monetization on a free platform like Dwellsy.

●    [06:21] Protecting renters and landlords against scams that are common online.

●    [09:31] The effects of Covid on renters, landlords, and the market as a whole.

●    [14:09] How Dwellsy adapts to the challenges caused by the pandemic.

●    [18:28] The importance of reputation management in the rental market.

●    [21:53] The best business book, recommended by Jonas Bordo.

●    [22:33] Jonas’ superpower of being critical.

●    [22:58] The most significant lesson Jonas learned over his career.

●    [23:31] Jonas’ advice on how to work towards financial freedom.

Resources:

●    Jonas’ Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonas-bordo

●    Company Website: https://dwellsy.com

●    Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/DwellsyRents

●    Twitter: https://twitter.com/dwellsyrents 

 

Connect with Cashflow Project!

●       Website

●        LinkedIn

●       Youtube

●       Facebook

●       Instagram