Hometap provides homeowners cash upfront in exchange for a minority stake in their residential property so homeowners can pursue their financial goals.
Jeffrey Glass, Co-Founder & CEO, shares the details on Hometap and their culture.
In this Video
We discuss:
- The idea for Hometap
- How Hometap Helps Homeowners
- Why culture matters at Hometap
- What’s next for Hometap
Video Transcript
The idea for Hometap
All of these macroeconomic conditions have changed over several decades, but yet broadly the approach to helping homeowners hasn’t. And the types of products that are available for homeowners is really just minor permutations of existing products. And so we got very very excited about this idea of like can’t you democratize more financial options for homeowners? Can’t homeowners have similar options to what companies have in terms of bringing in an equity partner? Um you know why does everything have to be debt more debt or you know and higher interest. So that was like how it got started. And so we we started working on the idea the end of 2016. By 17, we were really excited about it and we launched HomeTap around this mission to make home ownership less stressful and more accessible. And we’ve been working really hard uh since 2017 uh to fulfill that mission.
How Hometap Helps Homeowners
If you think about what it means to be an existing homeowner today, your home, if you own a home, the good news is your home has likely gone up pretty significantly in value depending on how long you’ve owned it. So, that’s the good news, right? You go on to Zillow and you look like a millionaire because your home has gone up in value so much. Like, that’s the good news. Here’s the bad news. The bad news is many, many costs associated with home ownership. your property taxes, your homeowners insurance, your maintenance. All of these costs go up in connection with your appreciating home value. In some cases, they’ve gone up at a higher rate than your appreciating home value. And those are real out-ofpocket costs today. The the appreciation on Zillow is a paper. It’s a digital appreciation. It’s not even paper. You can’t even put it back in the file cabinets that you know we sold back in the 1980s. And so so the increasingly if there was a metric for what it means to be houser rich and cashstrapped like every day the US is hitting a new record of the number of homeowners and households that falls into that bucket. And so what is needed is a broad suite of financial innovation to deal with the realities of home ownership today and help take some of the pressure and the stress off of homeowners. Make it easier for people to move from being renters to owners. Make it easier for people to own a house and actually have a life at the same time. make it easier for people to seize opportunities, whether it’s fund small businesses or pay for their kids’ college or renovate their kitchen or deal with the challenges of like my friend whose mother-in-law was sick or you’re dealing with health emergencies or divorce or credit card stuff that got out of whack. Like we need solutions for that. And then at the other end of the spectrum of lifestyle home, like we need to build solutions that allow people to retire in place. Like what do you do when your income’s gone down but your property taxes keep going up or your homeowner’s insurance keeps going up or the maintenance on your house is going up? So like loans are are a very good smart clever solution for many situations and many homeowners. But just like we’ve seen, you know, in non-residential real estate, like there’s a place for equity based solutions, uh, and combinations of debt and equity based solutions and and and that’s what needs to happen to help help American homeowners. And, and frankly, this is a problem that exists beyond the the US borders.
Why culture matters at Hometap
I do link in my mind culture and team because I think what what makes a team work well together is a common set of cultural values that everybody believes in, buys into and tries to live by. And by having that common set of cultural values and a kind of a mission and and a set of goals that people are excited about, you know, that’s I wouldn’t say that is a guarantee of success, but those are the prerequisites for having a shot at being successful. And I I think also part of it is recognizing the fact that it’s never done.
Whats next for Hometap
We have a lot to do. uh we are looking to broaden our product suite. So the our our product is called an HI, a home equity investment, right? Our mission isn’t to be the world’s best hi provider. You know, I think we are, but that’s not our mission. Our mission is to make home ownership less stressful and more accessible. And so we have a broad vision of of transforming capital into solutions in order to enable homeowners to solve their challenges and seize opportunities. And so we want to expand our product suite across the life cycle of homeowners. We want to be able to partner uh with a broad set of players in the space where um the right product is offered to the right homeowner independently of whether it’s debt or equity. Uh so we’ve got a lot to expand on in that dimension. We want to expand into more states in the United states. Uh we continue to make very very sizable investments in technology to be able to enhance the customer experience to be able to deliver capital for them faster to be able to make um the user experience easier to try to offload some of the administrative work that they don’t like um on to us so that we can help take care of that for them. So there’s a lot that we’re investing in on that side as well.
