EPISODES
Episode 23.
Daniel Mishin, Founder & CEO of June Homes
TAXIS TO UBER CAR lots to carve on ACOM. Don’t call a hotel to make a reservation, hop online to see what everyone is charging and make an informed decision. We demand efficiency and transparency in so many parts of our lives. Why do we not expect the same from our apartment or home rental experience? Daniel Mission of June Holmes walked me through how he and the team are revolutionizing the rental experience for renters and landlords. Thanks for listening. You’re listening to the real estate of things podcast. Welcome to the real estate of things podcast. I’m your host, Dalton Elliott, Daniel Mission, CEO and founder of June Holmes. Thank you so much for joining a great to be here in Alt not great love for realist of things podcast and finally, good to be here. Yet thanks for carving out time to chat with me and I’m going to kick us off with a deep question here. So let’s take it back to our more formative years, say eleven years old. When I was eleven, I was in eleven year old I would summer camp the citadel. I was just doing eleven year old things. You are not doing eleven year old things. You were doing like thirty, forty, fifty year old old things. So when you were eleven you started your first company, which makes me feel like I’m just the laziest weasel this side of the Mississippi. But walk me through being so young and and and getting that founder title earlier than anybody else I’ve probably ever met. That’s so funny, you know, by the way, I was doing all the typical things over about an eleven year old, and then there was this like basically start off intrepreneurial thing, which actually didn’t and everyone even thought that. It’s like me started in a company. It was not like, Hey, I’m going to start a company kind of think. It was like it just kind of happens like somehow. But I mean, the long story short is I was a kid growing up, basically regular kid, dude, regular things. Grew up in Ukraine and basically took my first trip abroad with my mom in to Europe, and on our way back to my hometown we got dropped and we essentially had no money left and we had like twenty euros and the only thing we could afford, and we were like late for the train because we had to like file police reports and stuff and because we were like we roly had so little money, the only place we would actually afford to be in is youth hostile. And basically that’s how, when I was eleven, I first saw use hostile and like that European backpacker, international costopolitan field, got back to my hometown and then basically beached really hard my grandmam to convit it to convert our typical Soviet style free bed compartment into a youth as still. Put a bunch of bug beds and see what happens. I was probably very convincing, probably more annoying that, and ultimately she she said, fine, you don’t like, go and try. And then, basically it was like summertime. I put a bunch of bunk beds, listened on the Internet and remember back in the day when you have to use like a dialing Internet, but essentially, like in order for youtube connect to Internet, someone had to hop off my phone. Goal that kind of that kind of experience. Oh yeah, so, using that type of Internet, I posted it online and it was, you know, the first WHO’s hustile in Ukraine, in that part of Ukraine, and it just took off, you know, in three months I made like three year for some bread. I was like I gotta, like me list it. That is wild. Yeah, if funny. You mentioned dial up Internet. I was talking with a couple of colleagues earlier who were five, once five years older, once ten years older, and we were like the kids these days, they don’t know anything about dial up. Like your only computer and somebody picks up the phone and the connection goes out. The the horrible things we had to live with back then. Ar It’s like hey, mom, I need to enter Internet. Please hop off the call. Exactly, exactly.
So, so that’s crazy. You at the young age, you were not only starting a business, which you know, like you said, you didn’t probably think about it that way exactly, but you were starting a business and also you were utilizing the Internet at, you know, still kind of a relatively earlier age of it, and that company, you know, where did it go from there? So your that was your first venture. The like. Walk me through the next bit of progression. Yeah, so it was. It was interesting. So essentially it was like the initial lunch was like quick and dirty. So essentially I had like two hundred dollar saved like from like settling, like I don’t know, sweets to my classmates. So I had like two hundred bucks and basically, like my initial large budget was two hundred dollars. So essentially what happened there is like I was like I doom really afford to buy furniture. So what I did is I essentially followed a bunch of guys in the street, bought a bunch of wood and made them like basically build a bunk beds because I literally couldn’t afford to do anything us. So we’re in the way. It started working. Basically, first summer made like a lot of a lot of money, metal of cool people and I was like hey, like, can I don’t a game like next year, like it was like such a cool summer experience. So and then a show. I went to school like did my regular classes for nine months in a year, and then next summer I was like hey, like I took too much of my classmates. They got really to this idea. So we rented an apartment. So not only we took my grandma’s apartment, but oil surrounded another one. So basically, like every year since, you know, while I was in school and then high school, who, which is basically expand and its back and expanded, like launch more hostels in different parts of my of my of the of the ridgin where I was based, and basically, like I was like my high school, high school years. So we felt like five hostels, bought a bunch of real estate and then I was like basically going into college. I moved to Moscow and in Moscow we went to like get a legal degree. Hate in my life. Didn’t want to study, didn’t want to basically girls get a legal degree. And essentially, probably six months into my into my into my college life, I was like screw that, I’m going back to new business. And essentially, like I too, that company that existed, reincorporated and build it properly from there, and I did. I builded it until I was twenty five. Start Twenty three, in which one night I just exited and it was just a complete for all of Conster, almost for bankrupt. Then signed a hundred meal door jade joy aventure with the largest is right, the Russian privately fund. It was like a whole, like, you know, son up life. I’ve been down every day. Yeah, that is that’s a wild ride and to have that experience at such a young age incredible. You. By the time you were college age, you already had business experience that folks who had graduated college would take years and years and years, years and years even have the chance to really tap into. So you were ahead of the curve. And that brings us to the fact that you have stayed in this space, right. You have stayed in the real estate space. You’re not just your whole career but really your whole life. And take me to June Holmes, right. I you know often times, I know a lot of you, hear about startups all the time, right. You hear about new business pitchers, new ideas, and I feel like a sixty year old man in some ways. I look at something like, I don’t know, that’s kind of yeah, but you know, digging through your website, having some conversations with you, like y’all are really revolutionizing the space. So tell me about June Holmes, and then a little bit later in the episode I want to talk about Noga and her hell’s kitchen multi family fro eject. But first tell me about June Holmes. What’s your purpose with some mission? What are Y’all doing? Yeah, that’s a real good question. And, by the way, about like staying in real estate. I tried to quit and I failed quitting. So it’s like like real estate is just such a such an amazing, interesting entire universe of things that it’s like you can, you could literally do it for your entire life and basically keep learning and keep betterating and keep basically building something that’s that’s like you were and better than anything that’s come before. So for me, like there was a time when I was like I’m Never…
…gonna do this again, I’m going to go into tech investing, and I’ve done tech investing for a year and then I’m like, you know, I actually kind of like the the intersectional Internet and physical spaces because it’s so big, it’s such a massive opportunity. It’s, you know, it’s the single larger as test class in the world. It’s where a majority of people started their wells. It’s just such a major, big market that like there are so many pockets of opportunities in it that I feel like you could build multiple, multiple indoor companies like uniquorns and no lover Cool. Right now it’s all about deck reports, given the old of the tech fibulations that’s happened. So like you can build a lot of decker cords in like real estate space and really make a difference. So that’s about that. That’s to address the the part about quid and realist die. I’m with you in this is, admittedly, where we sit today. This is my first venture into real estate, like I started at lemoon capital six weeks after graduating college. been here seven years and so the private lending kind of non owner occupied investment space is stopped one for me. But yeah, just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. So just over and over, I feel it. And given the two guys like invest all over the country and you do so many different things and you have something you and then you can you have exposure to so many different deal types and that’s the types. I’m sure like you keep learning even after seven years and see like so many new thinks that are just popping up in different parts of the country. Yeah, it’s non stop and that is that’s that’s one of the more fun engaging pieces of it. Right. I was talking with one of my sales reps earlier and he’s like at every day is different and like like the could the core fundamentals stay the same? But yeah, you every deal is different. Every deal use unique. The winds are constantly changing. Right, we’ve been in a downward rate environment, just historic lows, and right, really we are at the tip of the iceberg for that start shifting back in the other direction and up into the rise. So that throws, you know, a bunch of nuance into the situation now. And Yeah, it is. It’s fast paced, it’s it’s such a broad space, like you mentioned, that you know you if you are in it, you enjoy it, that it’s easy to see how you can stay connected and just have so much diversity and pivotability and I don’t know if that’s a word, but you know you’re there’s just nothing but upside and opportunity, and so it’s it’s a fun space, for sure. Yeah, I know, for sure. People to really sounds like a real word to me. So I’m I’m loving at homes. Tell me, tell me. Well, I mean, look, it all started when I when I came to to New York and essentially tried to be a render and my experience was just miserable. Like I’m essentially came from from part of world where I felt like I was already quite successful. I felt like hey, I have money and have reputation, it’s not going to be difficult for me to rent a department. Come on, that doesn’t sound that hard. How, how wrong was I? You know what I mean? Like every single detail was so fundamentally flawed, you know, and I was like hey, like, I go online and I’m seeing all those fake listings online, like, basically it’s like complete mess. There’s no predictability, there’s no quality, there’s something expariency, photos and miss leading, you know, looking at photo and I’m like, Oh my God, this is such a beautiful place. I show up its and it’s a show and it’s a shoebox, you know what I mean. And basically, like like that party then, like touring those apartments, applying for apartments, requirements, credit rating that hasn’t been updated in the last forty years, those requirements, forty times rent to income ratio based on nine hundred and thirty seven studies, and we live in two thousand and twenty two, and like whole idea just doesn’t really make sense anymore. It’s some guy who felt good at that number eighty years ago in a completely different economic cycle. That doesn’t account for Free Lancers, GIG economy, people making money from multiple different sources at the same time. You know, people coming, people being much more global than they have been in the past. So to me, like when I when I essentially cake care and I experienced the product as a render, I was just blown away by how bad it is. I just like every single pot about it was terrible. So the question was like, how do you fix this experience with consumers and do it in…
…a way that scalable? They do it in a way where you can do it without actually raising prices, because for us as what was really interesting for me is that there is a whole luxury market the West, luxury housing market, there is corporate housing market, there is furnish your intell market then is way over price compared to basically local apartment rentals, the traditional consumers are dealing with. So what really was interesting to me is how do you fix apartment renting? How do you create a new way of friends and apartments without charging the PREMIOM to majority of consumers, given how cons how price sensitive consumers are? So essentially we are a manage marketplace. We have two sides of our market place. We have landloads and tenants. So the tenant side. June homes essentially has built a brant with three core pillers. We are number one. Flexibility. Any apartment is available between one to eighteen months. Complete Flexibility and the duration the longer you state, the chipper it gets. customization. Every apartment can be rented, furnished and furnished to partially furnished. Tenant goes to the website. Right on the website they can pick how they want their apartment delivered. On the day of their moving they get that apartment delivered the same way that they have selectly got on the website. And three, complete focus on being extremely customer centric and built an extremely good customer service for tenants. Every single part about the process is reinvented in joine homes compared to traditional market. You go online, you find a department, you always see photos, videos, three detours, video walkthroughs on this description that say what are the pros and the console each apartment. If you want to book a tour, you can book a virtual consultation, video call without representative within fifteen minutes, when someone is going to walk you through the apartment, explain to you in the floor plan and walking sort of the neighborhood answer any questions application process. Instead of going and looking for a printer and a scanner to basically scan be a base stops, which you know where you can get a scanner? These days, people don’t bring things anymore if no one knows where it nowhere to go and print them. You Open an APP one Jew homes up, you take a photo of your base stuff and you know exactly how long is it going to take for us to approve your application. There is a timer that says your application will be approved within three hours, no matter what. Seven you know, like things that we as consumers are so used to everywhere else outside of real estate. We’re bringing to real estate. When you submit a Maintenen sticket in June homes, you essentially go online. You hit one button in your APP when you know exactly which state your uplict your ticket is. APP ticket was assigned to a maintenance vender. Maintenance vender is commuting. Here’s the maintenance vender on the map community your location to fix your pipe. WHO’s which is going to happen in three hours from now here’s here’s a part of a completed job. Please rank at one to five stars. Things that we are used to and the mechanics and they used to as consumers when we order food, when we travel, when we order transportation, when we purchase things online. We’re bringing those same mechanics and applying them to real estate in a scalable and constifuation matter and building a lot of technology to basically streamline it and make it it may make a financial efficient. So that’s the tenant side, just extreme focus and providing great customer service, much higher customers sat astraction rating, much higher a time for new were rating because of all of that. So that’s that’s that’s one side of the marketplace. The second side of the Marketplace Allan Moms and essentially what we realized is that most of our landlords a moment popular words. They’re very traditional, smaller landlords that own one to three buildings. But when we realized is that those landlords are really forced with a hard choice. They either become a full time landlord and they give up their idea of using real estate as a bust source of income and they have to pick up phone calls at four am, they have to go and basically make repairs. They cannot travel because, you know what, if something breaks like, what am I going to do that? So we essentially focus on those landlords and we provide them with and and we essentially give them handsoff approach to manage their real estate without charging them typical property management fees. So if you’re a landlord and your workers judent homes, you have over the keys to us and we essentially handle everything from upgrading new units these in your units,…
…managing new units, and the way we make money is on the spread between the rent that you were looking for as a landlord and the revenue or can generate from our tenants because we provide them with so much more flexibility, convenience and additional services. That’s June in a nuts show. That is a lot and, like I use the word revolutionize earlier, and not just pulling that word out of thin air. I think back to when I graduated college, by then girlfriend, now Wi’ve we’ve rented for a couple years and then we bought a home. But that one experience of getting our first apartment was an absolute manual, clunky nightmare from showings and scheduling. It took weeks to find a place that you know was good and ticked all the boxes because you had to schedule and appointment to show up get in there. There was no virtual option. And then the process of okay, this is the one we want. Thought we were going to be quick, good to go. Absolutely not right, like it takes days at going back and forth and documents, and then it’s are you got to go get a cashier’s check, and it’s like well, I’d never got a cashier check of my life. What do I do? I gotta physically go to the bank to this, go to that. Right. And then the maintenance ticket piece. Right, for us it was sending an email, and then you’re just throwing that into the darkness, like who got it? When’s it going to happen? Nobody knows. There’s no visibility, there’s no trackability. All of these things go back to buy point of like whenever I first learned about June Holmes and what you and the team are doing, I was like this, this is the idea, this is the way it should be. We can you you posited it well and that we expect this level of service and efficiency everywhere else in our lives. Right. That kind of Amazon. I think there too to blame in a lot of ways for so much of this like quick, efficient, you know what’s going on from start to finish, you have a rating system, all this. This thing has, you know, really changed the way that we view so much of the world and our expectations, and it’s just shocked me whenever I ran across you all that I was like this is such a no brainer, but it’s just not happening outside of you and their crews. so that’s absolutely crazy. And we know market wise. Talk to me about where you all are focusing. Yeah, where you focusing right now? Imagined, like what was you were just saying, like this is actually a really interesting so imagine if, like, you book a united flight and then, essentially, like, in order to make a change to the fight, you need to email united and you have no idea what they’re going to apply. That’s like that’s that’s not an analogy that I’m making this like all the time because, like, look like we wouldn’t dig this, like we as consumers would not accept this. Like we called their call center and if it takes them all at sixty seconds, Surpi, we like, when the Hell is wrong with you know what I mean? So, like we ask consumers expect excellence everywhere else and then there’s this huge black box which is a partner renting and you’re like, okay, it’s just the way it is, and everyone’s like, it’s just the way it is. It’s just the way it worse, everyone’s used to it. But truth be said, the minute to start carrying and and we have a whole theory that, like real estate investors, for the most part, their job is not to be extremely customerception. Their job is to find good opportunities, negotiate those opportunities, purchase those opportunities, barber with with with with partners, like you guys refinance do the financing part, but they’re not like experts in customer service. That’s not what they think about seven for the most part, and they shouldn’t be. There should be a layer of companies like Jun homes that have hundreds of engineers working full time on making sure that tenant experience is excellent and making sure that a little button next to the payment sign is in the right place and it’s the most convenient place on that screen for that button. That’s that and that’s the separation that needs to happen. and Multi family is really behind other industries in that. If you look at hospitality, for example, and hotels. Right company that owns a Marriot next to Charlotte International Airport is a different company than manages that Marriyo.
You have separate, clear separation through ownership and service, and multi family does not have that separation. Multi family has owner operating model, which are actually not that. It’s not the same business. Those are two completely separate businesses. So when we think this industry will transition is it will shift from owner operator model where there are vertically integrated companies that do everything from like acquiring real estate, finding that real estate, all the way until, you know, customer satisfaction service, and that will become a think of the past and it will, in our opinions, switch to a model where certain companies are going to become really good and they’re going to focus on buying that real estate efficiently, quickly, doing deals, doing what they’re good at, and then there is going to be a layer of companies like June homes that are excellent in providing customer service, that can increase your rents by providing better customer service, that can increase your tenant extension rate by providing invest better customer service that can decrease operational cost by dispatching jobs more efficiently two different vendors, versus having a super seating idle and the property do nothing for most of the day or having the leasing manager seating of the property do nothing most of the time. Ninety percent of the time those those resources are idle. If you look at a large building and you have at leasting manager, they’re they’re not doing anything most of the time, except occasional tours that most of them happened at the same time during the day, pick ours after work. So what Junos can do, because of scale and because of technology, is gout costs and basically become much more efficient to its expenses, but also increased Tenn for retention and increased town rates. So this is where we think this is going to go June. Are Twenty other companies that may exist in the space. Will become a layer of service between levelers and tenants. At that layer of service will essentially become the the intermediary between talents on let words, just like an happen in hotel. Yeah, that makes sense, and one thing that has been over the last couple of years a hot topic is kind of generational preferences in renting versus owning right and the idea that younger generations are perhaps going to be renters for longer and of a larger portion of them than previous generations are going to be lifetime renters, just for flexibility and all the other reasons. But what are you seeing? As you know, you talk about Jen Z and the tail end of millennials. What Dad are you seeing out there? What are the expectations and how does that differ from previous generations? Is it? Is it that this this generation is grown up with you know, iphone came out in two thousand and seven right, I got by. I was talking with my wife the other night. We got iphones. Are Excuse me, we got our first cell phones. They weren’t iphones just yet. And middle we are in middle school. But a friend of ours who is right years older than us, she’s like, I didn’t get a first cell phone till I was in college. I was like, there’s a distinct difference whenever you like get cell phone plopped in your hand in middle school versus college. And then today, you know, looking at the kind of the JEN Z like you, you have a cell phone as soon as you can can use a cell phone, you’re on your parents cell phone, you have a super computer in your hand at like two years old. You have a little life bad when you are for that exactly. And so it seems that it seems like everything that the June Holmes is aligned itself to be aligns with the demands of a new renter group. That’s that’s coming online. That is that right? Yeah, what I would say is actually three faults. So part one question of what was around home ownership versus renders, and I don’t think it’s actually a better preference. I think it’s no matter if this generation be financially small screwed than any other generation history. People can’t afford anything. Student that is so high that basically people literally trying to meet to make ends meet. We have seen, and in June Holmes, young professionals working at the most steages…
…global companies coming up with Ivy League degrees from the best universities in the world, living with roommates and hardly making it work. That’s how bad this generation is financially screwed and they they can’t afford purchasing purchasing that real estate. They are forced to stay in rents for longer. Average first home buy an eight went from thousand and forty seven in the last thirteen years. So over a decade it almost it almost doubled between the the number of the number of years that someone reads your in their lifetime. Average consumer in the US spends twelve percent of all the money that they’re going to ever spend in their life, between death and between being born, between birds and death, on rent. That is the single largest expense we’re going to ever have in our life. Yeah, which is crazy and like you get no points on that. You get you get no return on that. It is just a check that you sent in the black box and you have no idea what’s happening there. So to me this is like this is just such a pragmatic thing that’s happening here that it needs to change right now. SAP is to change yesterday, because it is just this generation can’t truly afford to to buy. This generation is forced to stay rents for longer and they want this experience to be to be different. So I think that’s a part one. Part two is, does is this generation really that different than other generations? Their stender is higher. That’s really what it is. It is just having a much higher standard. You know the things that we discussed with Amazons, with with apple, with, you know, a lot of great companies, a lot of great services that we use. The standard is rising. What people don’t understand is that this status quote can be challenged, that the way we rented apartments for the last twenty years is not optimal. It doesn’t have to be. That point, the rules are completely arbitrary. Come to consumers who rent, who staying in twelve month cycle, don’t realize that they are actually ended. Their releases need the least favorable time support them, because there are always ending it at the highest peak season because the landlook gave them concession so they can end it in June. But those consumers are getting what much more to get it? They’re starting to realize that the reason I have a sixteen months least with four months conception versus a twelve months straight least, it is because of my landlord wants to put me in the right cycle that’s most favorable for them. There’s something to challenge that and they’re not really accepting that anymore. There’s something to realize how the game works. So it’s this this shift with this generation. It’s a shift to transparency, it’s a shift to trust, it’s a shift to making things work the way they’re supposed to work, the way they work everywhere else. So I don’t know if it’s really just, you know, just really the the generational thing, but I think the expectations are definitely going higher. Yeah, there’s with more information at your fingertips means forced to transparency, more knowledgeable consumer, and that’s like, that’s an arguable that in today’s world, that you have the capability to be an exponentially more informed consumer than at any time in history. Right you just have so much data and and mations fingertips and June homes is at the forefront of that. Daniel, we cannot stop here. We have to get another episode up. We’re going to make this a too harder. We got too much to discuss. I have to hear about Noga and the Hell’s kitchen story to so stay with us. Tune in next week. We’re going to have another episode, Daniel and I Daniel, thank you so much. CEO and founder, June Holmes, thanks for joining this episode. Thanks all. Good talk to thanks everybody for listening and take care. Are you a real estate investor looking for the right lender that can finance all your deals and help you scale. Lima one capital has the best suite of loan products in the industry bar none. Whether that’s fix and flips, fix and holds, building new construction or buying rental properties. They have incredible financing solutions for it all. A reliable common since Linder is one of the most important parts of your investment team, and that’s exactly what you get with Lima one. Let Lima one capital show you how they’ve helped…
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