No one wants to fall behind on rent, and being evicted for lack of payment would be a catastrophic event for the 40 percent of Americans who rent their home. Presenting today as part of the Disrupt NY battlefield, Domuso provides more flexible rental terms for tenants, while helping property owners and managers to more efficiently collect rent.
Up to 60 percent of Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and lack savings to deal with a significant illness or a disruption in work. When those life events occur, tenants can find themselves unable to pay rent, which is usually the single largest expense they have to grapple with.
Meanwhile, property owners don’t have great tools for collecting rent payments or dealing with tenants who fall behind. Many still collect paper checks and send mailed paper notices when rent isn’t paid on time. Worse, with little flexibility in the terms of most leases, eviction notices can be sent as little as 10 days after failure to make rent.
Domuso provides a modern digital platform for collecting rent payments, allowing property owners to accept credit and debit card payments, ACH and to scan paper checks. That means much faster payment processing for rent payments made on time.
But for times when tenants might fall behind, Domuso also provides installment loans that allow residents to pay over time and reduce the costs associated with eviction for both the tenant and property owner. The financing option also comes in handy for new tenants who might not have the upfront cash to pay first month’s rent, last month’s rent and security deposit all at once.
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CEO Damian Langere founded the company after spending years investing in real estate. Starting with a single property, he began acquiring and renting out multi-unit residential properties and learned firsthand the challenges that property owners face in collecting rents from tenants.
The company is going after property managers who oversee more than 50,000 multi-family units in the U.S. It’s specifically looking to sign up those which control portfolios of 50-500 properties and could best utilize digital payment and financing options at scale.
Since first making the platform available in beta, Domuso has signed up more than 100 multi-family properties who are using its platform. By the end of the year, Domuso is hoping to have more than 500 multi-family properties signed up, which would yield more than $100 million in monthly payment processing volume.
Q&A
Q: Where are you in terms of launching?
A: We have 20,000 users on the platform.
Q: What has repayment been like?
A: Building a repayment model takes time. At the end of this year we should be profitable.
Q: How many users until you get to break-even?
A: We think we could get to profitability at 100,000 renters. Anywhere you go in the world, this is a heavy pain point.
Q: Do you need renters and property owners ?
A: We serve both, but the customers are the property owners who then make this available to their tenants.
Q: What percentage has need to pay late?
A: We have 4,000 payment users. Of the cohort of 20,000, 4,000 are using the credit portion to make payments.
Q: How do you profile someone who loses their job?
A: We already know the tenant, we have his payment history. We know he intends to pay. It’s just a matter of giving him the flexibility if he doesn’t have the cash for one month.