Buy or sell a home while lounging on your couch? It's possible
In the current financial market, real estate is still a focal point for investors.
A real-estate investment company called Roofstock uses a technology that allows the buying and selling of properties completely online.
“Can you imagine a company that helps you buy and sell investment properties?" CEO Gary Beasley told FOX Business’ Stuart Varney on "Varney & Co.” "You don't actually have to see the homes you're buying. You don't have to live in them either, but you can invest in them."
And Beasley said you don't have to be rich to do it.
“A lot of homes on our site will trade for $100,000 to $150,000," Beasley said. "So the reason people are able to afford less expensive markets is that you could start with maybe a $20,000 or $25,000 investment using debt.”
Beasley notes most homes are in cheaper real-estate markets such as the Midwest and some southern states.
“These are markets like Atlanta, Florida, Texas, the Carolinas and places like Indianapolis where you can buy a really nice home … and get a really nice rental yield,” Beasley said. “So you have someone else paying your mortgage, paying down your debt and generating some free cash flow every month.”
There’s no physical grunt work in finding a property. All transactions are completed online — essentially a ‘one-click real estate’ approach.
“I don't want to say it's quite as easy as buying a book, but that's the idea."
"What we've tried to do is work towards sort of an Amazon one-click for real estate investing, so all the documentation is online," Beasley said. "The diligence is actually done upfront unlike in a traditional transaction where you put something under contract and then you have a bunch of time for diligence."
Beasley said Roofstock has the virtual tours available and the properties have been inspected, so it's easy to do all the underwriting from the comfort of your own home.
Roofstock has witnessed increasing interest, especially from millennials, who are an age group notorious for renting.
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“I'm seeing increasing interest from millennials really for a lot of reasons ... only about 20 percent of millennials today want to buy a home to live in, whereas three years ago, that was 40 percent," Beasley said. "And so we started asking that question of why this idea of decoupling where you live from where you own is very powerful — sort of paying for what you use.”