Doorvest is a full-service real estate platform that allows our customers to remotely purchase single-family rental homes that generate rental income from day 1.

Our team sources the property, manages the renovations, facilitates the closing process, and finds qualified residents for a completely hands-off experience.

Three months after reserving a property on Doorvest, customers receive an entirely renovated home with an average cash-on-cash return of 6%.

Our mission is to advance financial security for everyone.

Through investment homeownership, Doorvest has enabled customers to gain access to an asset class (real estate) that 90% of millionaires ascribe as their wealth-builder. Our process is so simple that almost 70% of customers were first-time homebuyers, and 27% have returned for more homes.

Doorvest was built for customers every step of the way. Justin and I didn’t mean to start a company—on the contrary, we had been investing in rental properties ourselves while working at startups in the Bay, and we began to advise our friends and colleagues 1:1 on how to do the same. Over time, we realized that there was a pain in our community—namely, the difficulty of acquiring real estate for busy working professionals.

Unlike many incumbent real estate companies, we lead from demand rather than supply. To build Doorvest, we tested our funnel stage by stage. Do individuals want to go on our site? Check. Do people want to submit their information? Check. Are passive income, real estate, or rental homes even compelling to them? Check. We went deeper down the funnel until the demand met the supply, which is the actual real estate. Being relentlessly focused on the customer experience, obviously, led to customers.

We’re helping our customers make one of the largest purchases of their lives, and we operate the real estate for them. But in addition to owning a physical asset, they also get immeasurable, intangible benefits: the empowerment, the psychological safety, and the momentum to keep advancing toward financial security.

But our community is more than our customers (or Doorvesters, as we call them). Our community extends along our entire supply chain: the residents who live in the homes we service, the general contractors and subcontractors who help us renovate homes, our partner title companies and mortgage lenders, wholesalers, and more—not to mention our investors, advisors, and team.

Over time, we hope to positively impact all our stakeholders across the supply chain. We want all these individuals to participate in the upside of the value that they helped create.

If you look at our cap table, even prior to Wefunder, you’ll see that we’ve taken on an enormous amount of really small checks from those in the community: either our customers, or folks that we advised on a personal level before Doorvest existed. We've always felt strongly about including as many people in our journey as possible, so even if it required more admin work, we've taken small checks from the beginning. When we heard about Wefunder, it was a natural fit.

The reason it’s rare to see startups taking so many individual checks at our stage is that it’s normally a lot of work to pull off—but what’s cool about Wefunder is that they consolidate all the investments into a singular vehicle with one signature.

Secondly, Wefunder, through Regulation Crowdfunding, has provided a vehicle for unaccredited investors to invest in private companies—a detail that’s really important to us.

At our All Hands, we presented all the comments that investors posted on our Community Round. Seeing that level of buzz and faith in the company made the team really excited… it affirmed that we’re building something gamechanging, and not just trying to buy up as many houses as we can.

Honestly, it was surprising how gratifying it was to pull this off. We're so proud of how we’ve opened up access, down to the way we decided to pare down investors [once we were oversubscribed]—we chose not to cancel any of them, but rather just pare down the last few. That way we could just maximize the amount of people who were involved.

It was so affirming to see that people believe in what we're building. After this round, we plan on doing a crowdfund with every round that we raise in the future.

In many ways it’s still too early to know the second-order effects that will come of this. For now, we can say that other founders in our industry cold-invested to strike up a connection, and we’re still following up with each of these instances individually.