🏘️ r/RealEstateInvesting

This week is Reddit week again. In case you missed the first issue where we unbundled a subreddit, check it out here.

This week, we've done research in:

r/RealEstateInvesting

This subreddit is "focused on sharing thoughts, experiences, advice and encouraging questions regardless of your real estate investing niche! Structured Deals, Flipping/Rehabbing, Wholesaling, Lending, Land, Commercial Real Estate and more!"

According to the explosive growth of this subreddit, people seem to be flocking into the real estate investing (REI) space:

One important caveat: This subreddit (as many others) is very US-centric. This is important to consider for a topic so dependent on local factors. Keep this in mind if you're located in another country but still want to use the knowledge from this report to build something in your country.

So let's have a look at the problems we found in this community:

💰 New Investors

Problem: New investors have a tough time starting out.

How much cash do I need to get started? Can I afford this property? What makes a deal a good deal? How do I find good deals? ...

New investors have a lot of questions and they're looking for answers. Reddit is one place to get them, sure, but Reddit’s design doesn’t necessarily fit the needs of such niche communities. That's where there might be an opportunity:

Solution: New Investors Club.

You could start bringing together New Investors in a separate community, e.g. a Slack channel. This community could be centered around one very specific topic, like "Making your first deal" or something similar. You can bring people together by providing value up front, e.g. by researching everything you can on the topic and summarizing it neatly in a report that you hand out for free to your community members. Once you have new RE investors in your community, you'll engage with them and try to find more problems to solve and co-create solutions with your people.

🤯 Tenant Management

Problem: Investors often don't know how to deal with tenants

My tenants want XYZ from me, should I do it? What caveats do you add to your Lease Agreements? Is my tenant a jerk or am I a bad landlord?

Many RE investors have these types of problems with their tenants. One solution to those problems is to ask the Reddit community for help. But same as with the New Investors Club, you could probably build a better solution than a subreddit:

Solution: Tenants Management Community.

We would start by offering investors a "Tenants Management Knowledge Hub" where we curate the most helpful posts on the topic in one place. Then you can follow a similar procedure as with the New Investor Club: invite investors to join your community by offering the knowledge hub for free. Then find out more about the problems they have with their tenants and see whether you can provide a solution for them. Build the solution together with your community, and off you go.

🤔 Property Management Software

Problem: Managing multiple properties and keeping an overview of all of them is tough.

We discovered this problem here. Many investors own multiple properties which they need to manage simultaneously. Keeping an overview of all properties, creating reports, bank account reports, etc., and consolidating all in one place takes time. For non-institutionalized investors, there seem to be no adequate solutions.

Solution: Property Management SaaS

There seem to be existing software solutions in this space: TenantCloud, Quickbooks, or Appfolio. But the user complaining about this problem wasn't happy with any of them. Building a solution for this specific user-type (personal investors managing multiple properties) could be an opportunity. Disclaimer: The post is 2 years old already, so it's possible that there are better solutions for this by now.