At PadCrush, we believe that homeownership isn’t a affordability issue. In many areas that suffer from hypervacancy, there are plenty of qualified renters. The major problem comes into play when it comes to buying a home in the same area there are many barriers. Barriers such as qualifying for a home that cost $25,000 - $80,000. When we attempted to buy our first property, we contacted our bank only to discover they don't underwrite smaller loans. Banks aren't motivated in underwriting/approving mortgages for smaller mortgages due to the current profit structure. So what happens to a neighborhood that has been deterioting for decades with an average home cost of $45,000? Unfortunately, there is no system in place to sustain itself or self fix like neighborhoods in surrounding suburbs? The result: the neighborhood steadily deterioriates starting with a couple vacant homes and as more time passes it turns into complete neighborhood deterioration.
Number One- The upfront costs of purchasing a home, including down payments and closing costs are commonly rated by renters as the primary obstacle to owning their own home.
Number Two- Hypervacancy is defined as a neighborhood that has deteriorated to the point where a given property is just as likely to be abandoned than occupied. These neighborhoods have suffient inventory and viable renters/potential homeowners but the barriers to homeownership has resulted in these areas continually to decline.
We wanted to build sort of a Mint.com that buys your fixer upper and rents it to you helping you get mortgage ready through technology. This was our way of providing a path to homeownership while simultaneously fixing the hypervacancy problem. We dissected the reason renters weren’t transitioning to homeownership and realized that the biggest obstacle was the down payment portion of the transaction. So we decided to start a company that provides a pathway to homeownership with an easy-to-use platform that helps you visualize your progress and offers tools to help get you mortgage ready all while doing what you're already doing...paying rent.
We’re a team of entrepreneurs, carpenters and realtors, all of whom are laser focused on building world class tech-driven real estate platform that makes home ownership accessible.
We bought our first property with the primary goal of buying an abandoned property to rent out. The initial goal was to turn over 3-4 abandoned properties per year as a local effort in Chicago, IL The first property would allow for testing if we could prove out our business model of 3-4 homes per year. We also wanted to establish working relationships with some of our in the field partners. We successfully rehabbed and rented our first abandoned property according to all of our timeline projections. Unfortunately after our first property there was a strong sense of doing more. We fixed this one abandoned property but there were still an additional four abandoned homes on the same block. From there we decided to make our startup a national company and launched PadCrush in 2020.
We built this startup around the needs of renters looking to become home owners. We set out to build a platform that motivates renters by helping them to visualize their goal towards home ownership. The platform collects/tracks monthly rent all while giving savings updates, friendly advice and full transparency of your progress. Our platform is currently in BETA.
Robert Holland is the founder with over 10 years of entrepreneurial and real estate expertise. Robert describes himself as an entrepreneur, advocate for the disenfranchised and community contributor who enjoys helping others make meaningful progress. Our goal is to completely hack the housing sector and fix up areas like Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, Atlanta, etc. "What we're doing just makes sense, these neighborhoods have plenty of vacant homes with plenty of demand. We want to help create a pathway to solving this problem for good." -- Robert
