Baselane Bank

[00:00:02] Speaker A: This is Short Term Rental Management, the show that is all about short term rental property management with your host, yours truly, Luke Carl. Short Term Rental Management. Today we're talking about banking, a subject that I am very passionate about. I have talked about this subject many times on the program and today we have a representative from an actual bank on the show. It's a bank that's new to me. I've heard of them, don't know too much about it, but it is a, you know, a modern, cool, hip way to do your banking, which is, of course, what we recommend around here at STRM and we've talked about many times. So without further ado, I have Saad Dar. You are from Baselane. How you doing, buddy? [00:00:51] Speaker B: Doing well. Thanks for having me on. [00:00:53] Speaker A: Cool. So just briefly talk about or not briefly, I don't know how much you want to get into it, your actual real estate investing career. I would assume that's what led you to this business to some extent. So talk about your real estate investing, if you don't mind. [00:01:08] Speaker B: Happy to. Yeah. My. Yeah. So I'm Saad Dar. I lead growth and partnerships at Baselane and I invest in long term and short term rental properties, mostly long term. I started with my partner about, I think, three and a half years ago, right before COVID started. We kind of incorporated and of course Covid happened. So. Yeah, but it's been three and a half years. We have about a total of 18 units across, I think nine doors, mostly in the Philadelphia area. And we like to execute what's called a BRRR method, as I'm sure you know. And we buy, you know, small single family or duplexes, we renovate them and get them stabilized and then refinance. Recently we've gotten into the STR and MTR space and I'd like to be pretty transparent. It wasn't by choice. It just kind of happened because we're in Philadelphia and the Airbnb laws change in Philadelphia and we got delisted and so we had to figure out what to do and we kind of pivoted and switched to the 31 plus day stay model, which we have a couple of units that are in that model today and that's been doing really well. So, yeah, that's a little bit about me and my background on the real estate side. [00:02:27] Speaker A: Okay. And so you were in finance or Fintech previous to coming over to this bank. Correct. So was it. Am I safe to assume that your passion for real estate investing and your knowledge in fintech is kind of what led you to this bank. [00:02:43] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. I actually was working at a company called Plaid before, which is, I'm sure anybody who's listening has used Plaid at some point to connect your bank and your wallet, like your Venmo or your cash app or other things like that. And yeah, I started investing in real estate. I was just very frustrated with the lack of technology in real estate. It felt like it was the kind of like left behind sector lot also like the healthcare, where we just don't have all the modern day technology needed, especially for the everyday investor like myself. And I'm sure you know, there's about 12 plus million small mom and pop investors in the US and I think they're all underserved. And so that's why I decided to join Baselane. I met the founders a year before I joined and you know, kind of talking on and off about what the vision of the product was. And for me, what was the most exciting thing is that it could help me run my entire real estate business on one login. Right? I mean, in one platform you can do your banking, your bookkeeping, all your property management stuff like rent collection and stuff like that, and simply manage everything. That was sort of the first motivation. And what really got me excited, which is where Baseline is headed, is giving again, everyday investors like me and others, the data and the insight to optimize and to scale. Because the other stat is that the vast majority of small investors, whether it's in short term rentals or long term rentals, they don't own more than four properties. So the vast majority of listings on airbnb in the US of the 750,000 owners, landlords, whatever you want to call them, hosts, own no more than one to five listings, right? So that's the supply. On the long term side, when we talk about the small mom and pop, a very, very high percentage, more than 80% owned one to four units only, meaning most people do not get beyond that number. And for me, what that means is they also probably don't get to their real goal of financial freedom and independence and being able to retire early. Right. Because you have a long term portfolio and you only have four properties. I mean, unless they're making a killing of killer, I mean, you're not going to retire on that. And so coming back to that idea is that if we empower the everyday person with data, with insights and the basic stuff they need to understand like, okay, what did I book month on month for each door? And is it really what I thought I was going to get and then giving them the confidence then to go do the next deal and the next deal. Right. So that's the other personal motivation for me to be at Baselane is to help myself but also all the other small investors to have that insight so we can all scale. [00:05:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I love it. I preach that often and I agree. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that real estate's expensive. Average Joe is not going to be able to come up with the kind of money it takes to get four down payments in their lifetime. That's a lot of money. But we are getting to the point where it's getting a little easier to set up systems and get to that. Which is exactly what you're talking about with baseline. Yeah, Just on a broader picture, you know, it used to be in the past, like if you were a high rolling person with, had a lot of cash and was doing real estate, you know, on a large scale, hundreds of units, that kind of thing, then you would either have third party property management and they would handle all the money. But I think we're also getting to the point now where somebody like that who's in the multifamily space or the retail space and has hundreds and hundreds of units, we're seeing more and more of those folks managing in house and self managing is not the term that they would use, but it really is what it is, you know. But if you get to that level where you have hundreds of units, you can hire a property manager that works for you, only pay them 100 grand a year and that's going to be less than you would pay some third party manager who's dealing with other people's portfolios also and doesn't pay as much attention to you. And it's getting, it's getting more and more common. And I think a lot of that has to do with cool softwares like yours. [00:06:54] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely, I think. Well, first on the point of lack of cash, I do think there are things that are happening right now that are making it easier, like the new Fannie Freddie product. So if you're in a two to four unit, right. You can get in with 5% down, owner occupied, live in one of the units and rent out the second, third unit or fourth unit and probably offset your rent through that and improve the value of the property, hopefully as you appreciate it, through renovations and things like that as well. So I think there are ways to get in with less cash and I really like that program and I think it hopefully helps a lot of People just get started, right? But when it gets into the property management side and the sort of debate on self management versus outsource, the other reality is for the smaller investors, which is where Baselane is focused. Right. Anybody who's usually between one and 20 doors is, let's say our target, you know, audience and user. We have larger users but you know, there's just less of them. Right. In the market. The, you know, the cost is also prohibitive. Right. Like can you afford property management? That's the first step, right. If you're just starting out, the typical property manager long term is probably like 8%. Unless you have tons of units, it's not going to get lower. Right. For a while. And I know in the short term rental space we're talking about, I don't know what you've seen these days anywhere from 10, 20 plus percent for property management. So I think the first question is can you afford it? Is their margin enough in your market to do that? And if there isn't, then what do you do? Right. And that's where I think people are moving into self managing. And you're seeing, I'm sure you've seen it like tons of VA action. So people are using virtual assistants offshore, they're trying to set up systems and online processes like Baselane, so they have the ability to run it smoothly and not kill themselves while doing that. So I think that's another trend. We can talk about it more. But I think that's another area where because of the, you know, increase competition and then lower margin for like an Airbnb, people then have to get creative and figure out how they're going to make money on it. [00:09:15] Speaker A: No, 100% agree. I've been that guy since day one. You know, I've always said I can't afford a property manager because I couldn't, you know, I mean we were scraping and scrapping and kicking and screaming to get down payments when we first started and luckily we've killed ourselves and worked harder than 20 people combined and built it into what we have today. And it's a wonderful thing. But I started out by, you know, self managing long term rentals from three hours away and having to drive down there at a day job, had to drive down to these properties to show units and then I'd have to deal with an eviction and go to eviction court from three hours away while I had to get back to work the next day and all that kind of stuff. I did all the stuff that most people wouldn't want to do, but I really just didn't have a choice. I knew this is what I wanted to do and I worked harder than everybody else and it paid off. It's as simple as that. You know, I mean it really does boil down to the fact that we're dealing with a multi trillion dollar industry here in real estate and there are ways to make money in this industry besides cash flow, you know. So I mean, absolutely, we see it all the time. A lot of the people that you're talking about, sod, they end up becoming professional property managers. And I like to think that my show has a little something to do with that. Maybe they learned a little nugget here that they could take and use that to help manage other people's properties. Because there is a massive void for good property management in the entire world really. There's just, you know, it's a gig that for whatever reason people get comfortable and they just don't try that hard. And I understand it's only 8% of the deal and you know, I mean you're only maybe making the property managers only making a couple hundred bucks a month on one house. So it's hard to get motivated you, you know. But anyway, fantastic, fantastic stuff you did. You mentioned Fintech earlier and talk, talk a bit, a bit about the, the software if you don't mind. Do you call it a bank? Do you call it a software? Let's start with that. [00:11:08] Speaker B: Yeah. So Baselane is an all in one. We call it a banking and financial platform which has the banking, the bookkeeping and the property management features like online rent collection. And now we've added a lot more property management features like lease creation, we're building, tenant screening and so on. And so by the end of the year you're going to be able to, you know, find a tenant, screen them on Baselane, get the lease signed and set up online rent collection. If you're doing long term for short term rental owners, really the banking and the bookkeeping is more relevant unless you're doing the, you know, midterm rental type, stay where you want to collect the rent yourself, for example, and you can set up a, you know, let's say a couple of months lease or something like that and collect rent that way. And so that's kind of the high level and we can dive into, you know, more specifics of why this is unique and how this helps the everyday investor really run their operations smoothly. And for us the focus has been really on two things. One is saving time and the other is saving Money at this stage. Right. And for the small investors, both of those things are really, really important when they're getting started. So the ability to save time is extremely important because most of us have day jobs and we're trying to, like you said, manage these properties on the side and do all of these things. And so time is the most important commodity. And so for, with Baselane, what we find is depending on how many units you have, you're going to be able to save two to eight hours on average per month, easy on just all the grunt work that you do, you know, trying to manage a property. And one of the examples I always give is that if you have, let's say two properties or three properties, you're trying to figure out, okay, I got money from Airbnb payments, I have to pay out the mortgage, I've got a, you know, there's cleaning bills, I've got these supply refreshes I have to do. And you have to reconcile all of that spend, for example. That's just one of the things you have to do inside of your banking account. We're able to do that for you, pretty much automated, right? Because the way you, if you, the way you set up Baselane, you can automate all of those things. So all that grunt work, all that manual work goes away, for example. And so we can walk through that in more detail as well. [00:13:24] Speaker A: Would you say you're specifically geared towards self managers or. Not necessarily. [00:13:31] Speaker B: I think it's choose your own adventure. Right. So if you're self managing, that's totally fine. We recently added a feature called multi user access where you can give a team member, a property manager, a co host, access to, you know, an area that you want without having access to your banking, for example, and the money movement part of it. Right. So for example, if you have a virtual assistant or a bookkeeper and you want them to do certain things, you can add that team member and they can come in with limited access and be able to manage it. So it really depends on who you are. We have folks that are, we have, you know, a one listing owner, we have people that have 20 listings on it and we have co hosts as well that are managing other people's accounts because they're managing 20, 30, 40 properties and they set up accounts at the owner level and so they can route the money through Baselane and figure out all the math and then send that over to the owner. [00:14:25] Speaker A: For example, would you say this shines for more so for long term? Because I have heard mention of tenants paying Rent directly on the dashboard? Or would you say that this would work just as well for co host situations and hosting in general with short term term or. [00:14:42] Speaker B: Yeah, both. Definitely both actually. I mean, we've seen the data and in the beginning we didn't really realize this, but a very high percentage, high double digits of all the, you know, deposits that are coming into baseline banking accounts are coming from Airbnb directly. So what that means is people are going to their listing on Airbnb and they're specifying where the payments go and they're know, choosing baselane and they're able to deposit those funds directly into baselane. And yeah, so we see both and I think it makes a lot of sense. I mean, what I do with my Airbnb is a good example. We have, I think seven listings on Airbnb right now, and for each of those listings we have different virtual accounts or sub accounts. I know you're familiar with that term, but for people that are listening in the modern banking systems like baselane, you can not only have a main account, but you can have sub accounts where you can connect the listing or the property or the unit to a specific sub account. And that allows you to do cool things. So, for example, I can specify from Airbnb listing number one, go to Basin account number one, and then if I map and tag that account as that property, everything that's going to happen with that property is going to stay in that account. So I'll collect all the money in there. I'll pay the mortgage from there. I'll pay the utility bills like Internet and electricity from there. I'll pay my property manager if I have one from there. I'll pay my cleaners. All of that can be done through that one sub account. So everything is organized and your bookkeeping is kind of getting done because you don't have to figure out now, which property is this for? It's for that property 100% right. We also have virtual debit cards. So what I do is I have a cleaning card, I have a supplies card, you know, just for refreshing, you know, toilet paper and things like that. And then we have a maintenance card for repairs and stuff like that. Those cards can be issued to your property manager, for example, or if you're doing it yourself. And within those cards, you can specify what listing it's for. You can say, hey, this is for listing number one. And then you can also pre specify the category that it's for again. So if it's cleaning fees, all you have to do is select cleaning fees. And so think about that. If you have, I don't know how many units, 2, 3, 4, it gets pretty complicated even there, right. If you have 10, 20, it's even more complicated. With this setup, you're going to be able to just not have to do any bookkeeping on that because you're going to just set up those rules and it's going to already automatically do the bookkeeping for you every month so you know exactly how much you spent at the listing level. [00:17:24] Speaker A: So are you, are you implying that there's a possibility that I could eliminate the need for a bookkeeper with this situation? [00:17:34] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I think it depends on who you are and what you have going on. But again, our entire system is built for real estate, right? So we don't have anything else in there. So the bookkeeping and all the categories that we have are 100% dedicated to and pre configured for real estate, long term, short term, et cetera. And so you're going to be able to, you don't have to do anything to set it up either, by the way. They're all there. They're already pre mapped to a schedule E so you can generate a tax package for your cpa. And so because it's dedicated to real estate, right. The banking and the bookkeeping work together. And if you set up the banking in the way that I'm talking about with listing level accounts, and if you set up the virtual cards with the major expenses that you have, you're going to be able to just auto tag most of those transactions. Now I'm not going to claim that there won't be manual transactions that you have to tag by yourself because let's say there's one off things like on Amazon or something like that. Right. The system will not know what you purchased on Amazon unless you use a virtual debit card. And you pre specify the amount for that. Right, but that's pretty easy too. You can upload receipts with pictures, you can split transactions if you need to, you can multi tag transactions. So let's say you're somebody that's just getting on and you have like 15 Home Depot transactions, but it was for that one property that you were getting ready. You can just select all of them and tag them in one go, for example. And so it is pretty simple. We don't have double started journal entry accounting. It's, it's just click. And so that's specifically designed for people, everyday folks that are not accountants and financial, you know, analysts. Right. And so that's why I think you can do that. And if you're using other software, you know, like a QuickBooks or something like that, which is not designed for real estate. And we talk to people that, you know, talk about that a lot. And even at the SCR wealth conference, I did that. I walked around and asked people, like, what they were using. What I found was most people, they know they have to do it, the bookkeeping, because they want to know their performance and they know it's important. But the vast majority of people are not doing it right. And so to me, that's super dangerous. Because if you are investing in a business, which is what you're doing, and you're investing a lot of time and money into it, tons of time and money, then you want to know how it's going and you want to make it better. And I'll share, I'll share a quick stat with you if you like. We just did a survey on this with our audience, but also on Bigger Pockets. So we asked users the following statement. You know, do you agree with this or not? I know exactly what my return on investment is for my rental properties and 72% of people either disagreed or strongly disagreed that that statement was true. Right. We asked, you know, the other statement was, I know the profitability of my rental property, like take home cash net net. At the end of the day, 57% of people strongly disagreed or disagree with that statement. Right. So we want our Bigger pockets to see maybe it's just our audience and maybe Bigger Pockets folks are doing it better. This is live on BiggerPockets as a forum poll right now. And on BiggerPockets is a little bit better. But 45% of people, almost half the people, are not tracking their cash flow. They disagreed or strongly disagreed or were neutral, which means they're probably not doing it. Meaning it seems like it's crazy, right? Like, you got up one day and you decided to do all this work and spend all this damn time furnishing a rental, which sounds insane, and for anybody that did it, it's so painful, right? It's not fun sometimes to do that and so much work. Then you had to go find the tenants on Airbnb or direct booking or whatever. Then you had to figure out how to convince them to book and all of these things. And I mean, what do you do then? You don't look at your numbers, you don't look at your earnings, and you don't figure out if you're making the money that you wanted. To me, that is insane. And that is why I'm out here is talking about that. [00:21:54] Speaker A: Well, the other side of the coin, my friend, is the guy that knows every detail about all of his numbers. And he is horrible at the tenants and the guests and customer service. You know, it's very rare to find somebody that can handle all of the aspects of all of this that's going on here. It's old school. Brandon Turner, you mentioned bigger pockets. And Brandon always said, you know, hire people to do the stuff that you're not good at. Which is why I hired a bookkeeper. Bookkeeper was my first hire. This was years ago when there was no softwares. And it was a painful process for me. It was because it's hard to get the attention of a good bookkeeper when you only have two or three properties. For one thing, people don't realize that when you first start and you hire a bookkeeper and it's $500 a month and you're sitting there, I'm gonna tell you, this is how it goes. You are stressed out. Oh, my God, I can't afford this bookkeeper. $500 a month is like a third of my cash flow or whatever. But I have to do it because I'm too busy with my job, going out, making down payments. I've got kids this, that and the other. And I know that I'm just not that great at the numbers. So I have to hire this person. That bookkeeper's on the other end of that, saying, dude, this is only $500 a month. How much attention do you want from me? You know? [00:23:13] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So this is a huge problem. And I think, you know, there are, you know, so that's why Baseline can help you, right? I think if you don't know accounting and bookkeeping and you want the easy button, that's the easy button. And you. The reason I talk about the banking first. And that's why Baseline created the banking, the business checking account. The way it is is so the bookkeeping gets more automated. Right? That was the whole point of that, is because that's where all the money comes in and goes out. And number two is also. We don't have time. Look, I'm a former cpa, by the way. I didn't tell you this earlier, right. I'm a former CPA and I used to prepare financial statements for large companies for a living. I don't have time to do this. It's just again, you have your full day job, you have kids, you have real estate stuff going on. You don't have time. And so that's why what we're really trying to do here is give you the easy button and help you save that time and get that time back. Because everybody that we speak to has the ambition to say listen, I have two listings. I want to get four, I have four, I want to get to 10, I have 10, I want to get to 20. And my next question is, okay, like what's your ROI? What's your cash on cash return? Okay, what's your net cash flow on those four that you have right now? Right. So let's just do the math to understand what this is going to look like for you. And that's what we want to help with because most people are not able to do that. [00:24:33] Speaker A: Fear not. Saturation. When you are the cream of the crop, you will rise to the top. Come learn from me. The best in the business. Voted 19 time World's Greatest Landlord Luke Cashflow [email protected] where you will learn to be the best in your field and the world's greatest landlord. We are teaching all the best practices in the world of vacation rentals and we would love for you to join [email protected] but I would assume if I wanted to hire a bookkeeper it would be their life would be a little easier because I'm using this bank. [00:25:20] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. So I think that's where you know, I think there are more options today. So let's say you are using baseline banking and you know a lot of your expenses based on the setup that you do are getting pre tagged and automated which, which is pretty, pretty easy to do. You still have that last mile problem maybe of some things that are manual and if you have a larger portfolio you're still going to need to go in there and tag those. Right. Because they're just things that are hard to automate away. And so for example we have a full time employee that we hired in the Philippines and she does a lot of things right. She manages some of the mostly long term rentals but she also part of her scope is to do the bookkeeping. And what that means is every week, really daily she'll go in and anything that is coming in that's untagged or that's new, she will go and get the receipt for that and you know, upload it and tag it basically. So it's super tight basically. So again you can have that sort of a VA model offshore, you can have a local bookkeeper that's working with you. We just launched the multi user access so you can invite them to be a team member on Baselane and they can log in and take care of the bookkeeping for you. Right. And also, everything is exportable. Right. So you can, you know, get it into CSV if you want to just download everything, all the transactions and look at it that way. If you want reports like your NOI or your. Just a cash flow report, you can do that as well. [00:26:46] Speaker A: Yeah, that was a big qualification for me when I was looking for a bank, a virtual bank. Again, what do you call this? Do you just call it a bank? [00:26:56] Speaker B: We call it a banking platform. So technically, you know, just to be super clear, we are not a bank like a traditional bank. We are offering a business checking account through a sponsored bank that we work with called Threadbank. Right. So if you kind of think about it, Baselane is built on top of Threadbank. And so Threadbank is the institution that has the banking license or banking charter in the US and we have a partnership with them, basically. [00:27:26] Speaker A: And that's what they do. Right. Thread bank is they work with a lot of other fintech companies and you guys built your platform with them underneath you, basically. [00:27:38] Speaker B: That's correct, yes. [00:27:39] Speaker A: They're in Tennessee. Yeah, I think so, yes. It doesn't even matter. Right. Like, they're just the bank, and that's where the money is technically stored. But how does that all work? Like, is the money. You know, when I. When I have money in my bank account with you or any bank, it's being used elsewhere. Right. They're investing it for micro amounts of time and things like that. [00:28:01] Speaker B: So I think generally, like each of the, I guess, banks that are the sponsor banks, they have like their own, you know, balance sheet and what they do with their investments. You know, in terms of deposits. I don't know the details of what Threadbank does, but, you know, from a overall sort of perspective, they're in pretty good standing, very good standing, and that's why we work with them. Everything that is related to Baselane, you have a relationship with Baselane, right? We run the entire operations. We run the support as well. And then, you know, because of our relationship, you're not really ever interacting with Threadbank, you're interacting with Baselane. And all of the deposits that go into a baseline business checking account are FDIC insured through that partnership that we have with Threadbank. Right. And in fact, we've gone and offered another product which allows you to insure a lot more because some investors just had a lot more cash deposited, so they needed more protection. And so that's, you know, now you can get up to $3 million of that if you, if you need to. [00:29:08] Speaker A: And from on a bit from a business standpoint, if I wanted to open a bank tomorrow, why not just go through the process of becoming your own bank and becoming FDIC insured internally rather than doing the third party? I mean, there has to be a. It's too much, it's a waste of time. I mean, what is it? [00:29:26] Speaker B: It's, it's, it's, you know, it's, you definitely can go and apply to get a banking license in the U.S. it's just, you know, a lot of work and very costly to do. So. Okay, you're building it from the ground up and you have to build a lot of infrastructure that you may not have. [00:29:44] Speaker A: Got it. Well, let me get back to a thought I had a minute ago. And then we changed subjects. But the offshore user thing is very important to me. When I was first shopping around for an online bank platform, I found that most of them, and this was probably two years ago or so, and I think this space has gotten a little bit more sophisticated. But I found that almost all of them that existed, which there wasn't many, would not allow non US users on my account. I was not allowed to add, say my personal assistant or say I had a bookkeeper that was in who knows where. Canada, even, even in Canada, India, Mexico, whatever, you know, let's say I had because, because a guy like me, I've always been virtual, hasn't it. To me, I don't give a. I don't. Has nothing to do with where you live. I just want somebody that can fill this role, you know. So to me, by shopping in other countries, I get to, I get a larger pool of employees to interview. That's my, that's, to me, that's the benefit of it. But when I was first shopping around, I found that most of the options in the fin, in the fintech, the banking platform space would not allow overseas users and that I crossed them right off the list. I mean, like first bank of Kansas City, they're a pretty big name in this space. And it's a random thing because it's just a little tiny bank literally in Kansas City. But they are very sophisticated in the, in the technology world. And I was very close to going with them. And all of a sudden at the last minute they were like, no, you can't have an out of, out of the US user on your dashboard. I'm like, it blew my mind. I'm like, are we living in the 40s here? I mean, what is the point? So when you're shopping around, if that's important to you, there are, to my knowledge, not that many that will allow that, which I think is bs. Really? Yeah. [00:31:43] Speaker B: It is a challenge, though, I think, because of fraud and security concerns. Right. So nowadays fraud is very sophisticated and it always gets smarter. Right. And when I say fraud, I mean that there's active groups of people that are going to try to do malicious things with banking and financial institutions like, like they do with other institutions. And so I think there are definitely reasons for that in terms of safeguarding. But, you know, let's talk about that. [00:32:12] Speaker A: Because that's something that I don't really think about. I just assume that a bank is going to protect my money. And that's the whole point. So what, what does that look like? What is fraud? You know, as. Yeah, I would assume you have an entire fraud department. How do I know I'm protected? [00:32:25] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So we have our own, you know, security procedures, which we obviously can't talk about publicly for the obvious reason. And we have a dedicated team on the fraud side as well that is looking at, and mitigating and preventing fraud and. Yeah, like that, that's super important. Right. For me, I use baselane and all my money's in there from the real estate side. Right. We want to make sure that's the number one priority. And in terms of access, we will do certain things that you can see really all banks are doing these days to protect the end user. For example, having two factor authentication. I don't know about you, but on all of my accounts, where there's deposits and somebody could potentially take over and move money, I have two factor authentication with my phone number on it. Even if I'm moving $5, it's going to require a code. And that code only comes to me. And you can, you know, you could. There's different ways to do that, but the phone is one way to do that, for example. And so it's. It's become quite common. And I think most financial institutions offer this today. If you're a trading account or investment account or a regular, you know, business checking account, like baselane. So, yeah, that's super important for us. And that is key to, you know, everything that we do. It's kind of like built into everything that we do. [00:33:46] Speaker A: Okay, that's great. It makes me feel comfortable. I'm gonna sleep well at night. But talk to me about the tenants paying. This is getting a little Bit more on the long term rental side I would assume. But is there any correlation here between you and a property management software? It almost seems like you're trying to bridge that gap between a bank and say like Tenant Cloud or Apartments.com or what used to be known as cozy or all these long term rental property managers where a big bulk of their job is to have a way for tenants to pay rent directly on that platform. Can my tenants pay rent directly on your platform and how does that work? [00:34:33] Speaker B: Yes, yeah, definitely. So on the quote unquote property management side of things, more for long term or midterm rentals, you can do a couple of things. So you can today, what's live today is you can create a lease and get it e signed. We partner with Rocket Lawyer and we have an API integration where you can do this for any state and get it e signed for your tenant. We're in the middle of literally building tenant screening. So that's going to be live in like two months or so. And that'll allow you to, you know, wherever you list your properties, have that application, have the screening done. And we're bringing something that's actually more robust than the average tenant screening because I don't know if you know, but there's a lot of tenant screening fraud these days as well, income reported fraud and things like that. And so that's coming. Then you can, you're going to integrate. [00:35:24] Speaker A: With TransUnion or something like that. [00:35:26] Speaker B: We're going to be integrating with a new partner that has better technology potentially as well. But you know, there are a couple of options. I can't really publicly share right now what the partner name is, but in this space there's only really a couple of big players like you mentioned that offer this service. And then you can collect rent. So you can invite your, you can set up your lease terms, you can invite your tenant. It could be a month to month, it could be a three month lease, it could be a one year lease, a two year lease, whatever. And you can add, you know, your rents, your security deposits, your one off fees, parking fees, anything that's additional in there. It's pretty dynamic and flexible in that way. And invite your tenants and on the tenant side is super easy, right? We want to make the tenant portal super, super sort of like dummy proof almost. And so that they log in, they set up their payment method and they pay. They can do auto pay or manual ach credit, debit card, all those options are available for them. And I think what we find in that Part of the world is that on this side of the house is that for those that are not doing online, they might be doing online, but we still see a lot of Zelle Cash app and I don't know if you've seen that, but tons of people are still, you know, using those sort of what we call P2P peer to peer type applications to collect rent. And they're not really designed for rent. And so there's a lot of education that's going on that we try to do. But also explain that with something like Baselane, you're going to automate your rent collection, we're going to send all the reminders, you're going to auto assess the late fee. Because often if you're using something like a Zelle, you're not going to be able to charge a late fee. Right. You're going to have to go and then manually check and then manually send another request and do that. And then three months later, if all of them are kind of late, you're going to just lose track of it. And it's also easier for the tenants. They can kind of set it and forget it or they can just have one place to go quickly log in and pay. So it's pretty simple, straightforward and we really pride ourselves on the design and the easability factor of it. And so that's our current property management suite of products. We're also building what we call report your rent rent reporting. So basically tenants are going to be able to report their rent to the bureaus and build their credit score up as well. And that is a win win. Right. The landlord benefits because the tenants paying on time. Hopefully the tenants are building up their credit. And so we're actually, literally, our team is building that right now. [00:37:55] Speaker A: Yeah, listen, if you're, if you're listening to this and you happen to have a long term rental or two or ten guys, just do not take it from an old landlord here. Don't let your tenants pay rent on Zelle or Venmo. It's not smart for a number of reasons. And I, dude, I have this conversation constantly and people are like, what are you talking about? I don't understand. That's how people pay me for everything I do. And first of all, I'm not going to get into the taxes and the legalities. That's not my business. But I'm going to tell you right now, if you're doing it that way, it's unprofessional. You're going to get stomped as a landlord by doing that because they're not going to take you seriously. They're just going to look at you like you're just some regular dude that drives down the street in a Toyota and has Zelle or Venmo. And they're not going to treat it like a professional relationship. You have to be. There needs to be a middleman, okay? And if they're paying you directly to your Venmo, there's no middleman. And therefore they can come directly to you with every comment and thing that they don't like. And they will do that. They will come back and back him. Oh, I've got this guy's Venmo. I'm going to text him and say that I need a new. The dishwasher's busted. Which again, we want that. We want to fix the dishwasher. But they're just going to come with all this red ridiculous stuff. And next thing you know, they think you're best friends and they're walking all over you. [00:39:22] Speaker B: So they're going to ask you, hey, you know, I'm, I'm late. I got $500 right now. Can I send you that? And then, you know, send you the other, you know, 600 later. And if you don't have your right processes, I'll say it this way, anybody who's been through eviction or like notice to quit process, you know what it's like in your local area. And that does not fly in the courts, right? They can send you a dollar in some cities and they're good. Oh, I sent the landlord a partial payment, right? They could send you a dollar and that might delay your eviction process. Even if they send you 400 out of like 1200, it doesn't really mean anything for you. Cause you still have to pay the mortgage. So I think, like, it's a. It is very. I love what you said. It's about being professional and running it like a real business. Because if you're in this game to try to retire early or to generate $10,000 a month for your family, it's not going to happen just because you're by collecting rent on Zelle. Right. And that's why we built Baselane for a true all in one. And you're right, we are smashing a few things together. We've got a banking product. You have your bookkeeping and your analytics. We've got all this property management stuff. Because what we find is people need all of that. And it's all in one login, right? Instead of using four different logins Five different tools for that. All those things log into baseline. You can do all of that. And really, it's about being professional. And for me, I'm very passionate about it. I felt very strongly. That's why I joined the company, because I was. I was. I started investing in real estate. I thought it was a joke, the amount of. I don't know about you, but I've met a lot of unprofessional people in the industry, right? Every, every, every part of it, real estate agents, contractors, property managers, everybody was just. There was just a weird dynamic going on. And for me, it was like, this is really impossible to win if you have all of these people working with you, right? So you need something that helps you. And that's why I'm passionate about baselane. And I think I'll say this, like, if you are still doing things manually and you're like, hey, I have one property, I have two properties. I'm good. I don't need this. If you ever go to, like, a Reddit forum, you'll see a lot of that. You might be good, quote, unquote, but you might not be really able to scale. You might not be really able to professionalize and get to 10 doors, right? And maybe if you do more to you, but I'm sure it's going to be painful. [00:41:48] Speaker A: 100%, dude. 100%, man. It's like that in every business, though. It's just to defend real estate a little bit here. Any business you get into, there's very few people that are good at it, you know, so it's like I always say, if you want to fly with the eagles, don't swim with the ducks. All right, so where is. What's. What's the future of this? I think most people, you know, people that are listening to this podcast are hip to it and they'll check you out and that kind of thing. But where. Where are we going with this as far as, like, my mom or, you know, like, people that are used to driving by the Chase bank and thinking that that's just the way things work? Are we getting closer to the point where the brick and mortar is not that significant, and do we need to just get rid of them? [00:42:40] Speaker B: Wow, that's a big question. I think I'll say a few things from my personal opinion. I guess I think that's just to be fair. I think there's always going to be brick and mortar, right? There's a value to that. I'm sure all of us have personal bank accounts with a brick and mortar bank somewhere. So I don't think that's going away anytime soon. There's a value and a service that they provide as it relates to real estate and running real estate business, I think. And we know that the incumbent banks have not innovated, right? They haven't really provided any service or any technology that allows real estate investors to do all the things they need to do. And so I think there, there is going to be a shift and it's already happening, right? Like, why do we get, you know, thousands of landlords using baseline banking right now? They might still have an incumbent bank account because they need it for some other reason, but for their real estate purposes and for the real estate side of things, we offer all the things you need, including wires and checks and all of that stuff. And you can go to an ATM and draw cash if you want to, but I never do that. I don't know about you, I don't even carry cash anymore, right. I just have my wallet and my phone. And so I think there's less value there. And when you have stuff like this and, you know, we're one of the players in this space, there's other technology that's being introduced here. It's not, you know, it's not just one platform that's building. There's insurance, for example, is innovating and getting above and beyond what the large insurance companies provide, right? So there's technology entering this space and it's making it easier for people. And so I think in the real estate side, it is more valuable to have a platform like what we have. And obviously I'm biased, but it's because there's technology, there's innovation, there's features you're getting that you're not going to get elsewhere. I was reading a Reddit post last night because I'm always on Reddit. I just like to read what people are talking about. Somebody says, hey, this is an example of what's happening in this space. I need a insurance policy on a 4 unit, and I'm having a hard time with these. I won't name the names. Some incumbent large insurance companies, well, guess what? You can log into Baselane and get a quote in three minutes on an insurance policy. And we went and built a partnership with our partner Obie, which is a insurance underwriter in the US very familiar with them. You can log in, get a quote in three to four minutes. And you don't have to deal with anybody. If you have questions, you can go ask people. And all this Stuff and that's, if you ask me, where we're headed. That's where we're headed. We're trying to build technology that is going to allow people in the real estate space to run their entire business on the platform. So that's, that's the vision of baseline. Right. We want to make it easy for real estate investors to thrive and scale and achieve their financial goals. And that's what we're building. And it doesn't get built in a day. It takes time to build good products. And so we built a banking. It's fully functional, it's got all the features you can imagine. We built a bookkeeping and that's going to get better. We're going to add more automation to that with machine learning and more reporting. On the property management side, we're probably the furthest behind. We're building a lot of, as I mentioned, tenant screening, the ability to report rent, flexible late fee structures, eventually flexible, you know, in the gig economy, flexible ways to pay rent. Now there's this trend to be able to, you know, pay rent weekly, for example, or bi weekly instead of monthly. And so those kinds of things will be on the roadmap for us for most likely next year. And yeah, our goal is to be able to help people run the entire real estate business on one platform. And that's what we're working on. [00:46:30] Speaker A: I dig it, man. I think it's cool. I think it's cool. You mentioned cash and you know, I think we both also have young children and we just got back from Disney two days ago and I stopped at the bank on the way down there and got a decent, you know, fairly sizable amount of cash just to have it on, you know, a little what I like to call wham, walking around money and you know, for the valets and all that kind of stuff or if you're at the park and you need cash for whatever it is. Anyway, long story short, I, because I never use cash. Ever. I left it in the closet of the hotel room. [00:47:06] Speaker B: Oh no. [00:47:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Luckily we had some friends. Our Disney planner actually was at the hot same hotel for two more days and her husband is old, he works for the short term shop and he's an old friend of Avery's and they grew up together and so they were still there and so he was able to get it back for me. So. Yeah, but you know, just cash is just not a thing anymore. You know, it's weird, my kids don't know what cash is. You know, they're like, what is this I need daddy, I want to go to the toy store. They do have debit cards, My kids have debit cards. But they don't realize that the debit card and the cash is the same thing. They're too young, you know, and they think the cash is weird. [00:47:50] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's the thing. I mean, I think there's still a large percentage of cash, you know, usage. If you look at the statistics overall, I haven't read them recently, but if you go abroad, you need cash, like in certain countries for sure. But yeah, like I don't. I carry maybe like 20 bucks on me just as an emergency thing. But usually it's just a digital wallet and a couple of credit cards, couple. [00:48:14] Speaker A: Of buttons on the side of your phone. [00:48:16] Speaker B: You know, that's literally what it is. Right. And so, yeah, I think like, as it relates to banking and the need to be able to go to brick and mortar, it's becoming less important. Although I'm sure that, you know, for personal use you still need something. But for the, on the business side, like I can't remember the last time I used cash for real estate. [00:48:37] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, right. To buy real estate. Yeah. [00:48:40] Speaker B: I mean, never actually never happened. It was always a wire or an ach transfer. [00:48:46] Speaker A: I'm going to walk into the title company with a briefcase full of hundred dollar bills. [00:48:51] Speaker B: You could do that. Yeah, but I've never done that. [00:48:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:48:54] Speaker B: And it's also dangerous, right? Like you don't want to have cash involved in real estate. There could be theft, for example, if people that you're working with, property manager, whoever are dealing with cash. And so there's no reason for it. [00:49:05] Speaker A: Yeah. So they should pay online on your dashboard. All right. Do you have some sort of a code or something that we can give folks that are listening to this or just go to baselane.com or how do we do it? [00:49:18] Speaker B: Yeah, right now, baselane.com, i'm happy to send you a link after if you want to post it in the show notes. We can direct people that way as well. And so if you go through the partner link with you guys, you'll be able to get a special signup bonus. And so we'll be sure to send that over. [00:49:34] Speaker A: Okay. And just to be clear, the short term shop does not take any affiliate cash of any kind, but we're happy to connect you with Baselane because I dig it. I think it's a pretty cool, pretty cool vibe you got here. What did we learn today? We learned that if you are taking rents on Venmo, then you've never been to Eviction Court. [00:49:58] Speaker B: We did learn that, yes. [00:50:00] Speaker A: Yeah. But I dig it. I think it's a great idea. And you seem to be a very dynamic, dynamic individual and I would love to do business with you guys. So if you're interested in a new bank, please check out Baselane. By the way, I did want to mention and we'll put it in the show notes. I have other podcasts on this subject. January 30th of this year, as a matter of fact, 2024. If this comes out in 24, which it should. I did a short podcast on all sorts of different banks in the space if you're interested in that. January 30th on the short Term Rental Management show. Anything else we need? Saad? [00:50:38] Speaker B: Oh, I'm super thankful to really get to spend some time with you and meet you and just learn also about your background and get a chance to talk to your audience. [00:50:47] Speaker A: No, it's my pleasure. We met at briefly met, I believe, in Nashville at Bill Faith's conference and great to have you on the program. It sounds like things are going well with the business and we're happy for you. So that's great. [00:51:03] Speaker B: Thank you so much. [00:51:04] Speaker A: Thank you, brother.