Chris & John
- Nov 24, 2020
- 2 min read

Ep 104: Treating Real Estate Like Stocks and Bonds with Gary Beasley

Property investment is a big deal. But what if you could treat single-family with the same liquidity as you would, say stocks and bonds on Wall Street? Gary Beasley is the CEO and co-founder of Roofstock, an innovative, tech-enabled marketplace and transaction platform designed to democratize access to real estate investing. We open the show by taking a look at Gary’s professional history and his evolutionary journey in the $2 trillion single-family rental sectors. Gary walks us through the various enterprises he’s been involved with over the years, as well as the unmissable opportunities he grabbed along the way. In particular, we hear about how he and his partner saw the opportunity to pioneer a new asset class, and how they became the first to own 1,000 plus single-family homes in the USA. Digging deeper, Gary exposes some of the shortfalls of single-family investment but outweighs the negatives with an extensive list of why single-family investing is a surefire way to generate wealth. As our conversation develops, we touch on the administrative aspects of single-family “stocks”, the best ways to vet management companies, and why quality-over-cost is your best approach. We wrap up our chat by taking a quick look at the property trends that have come out of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as a glimpse into what the future holds. Be sure to join us today!

Key Points From This Episode:

Introducing today’s guest, Gary Beasley.
Hear about Gary’s professional history in real estate
Gary tells us about Roofstock and how they’re different from other real estate platforms.
Find out how Gary made success for himself in single-family investing.
Gary talks about the advantages and disadvantages of single-family.
The evolutionary process Gary and his partner went through to create a new asset class.
Contrasting the difference in ownership between multi-family and single-family.
Why treating real estate as stocks is a good business philosophy.
Roofstock’s method of assisting clients in getting better pricing.
What Roofstock looks for when vetting property managers.
Why quality is more important than price when finding property managers.
Gary talks about real estate trends born from the pandemic.
Hear about the issue of tenants not paying rent, and the data behind it.

Tweetables:

“Roofstock is a platform that allows investors — retail or institutional — to buy and sell properties through our platform with tenants in place.” — @garybeas2013 [0:03:54]

“During the housing downturn, you could go and buy a bunch of multi-family, but you couldn’t buy homes at scale. We were the first to do that.” — @garybeas2013 [0:08:05]

“At one point there were 16 million rental homes around the country, and nobody owned more than 1,000 of them. We were the first to get to that number.” — @garybeas2013 [0:10:30]

“We want to democratize access to real estate investing, which means breaking down barriers and giving people opportunities. They don’t need to be a large institution to get started.” — @garybeas2013 [0:17:10]