Empowering People with the Longest-Lasting Way to Own Homes

Ari Rubin
Flock Homes
Published in
5 min readJan 27, 2022

At Flock, we’re building the longest-lasting, most durable system of homeownership. We’re empowering people to join together to lower risk, reduce costs, and eliminate hassles of traditional ownership.

To start, we’re offering this to the millions of Americans who already own rental property. We’re solving a very real, tangible problem that most owners face: they don’t want to be landlords (and deal with property managers, tenants, maintenance, risks and liabilities), but they also don’t want to sell their houses (and incur the costs of losing their income and appreciation, triggering taxes, kicking out tenants, and more).

Our solution: to seamlessly convert individually-owned houses into passively owned shares in a professionally managed portfolio of homes. Some people call this an UPREIT. We call it, “The People’s REIT.”

We have an exceptional vision and we’re hiring exceptional people.

The Problems You’ll Solve

We’re bringing institutional-caliber real estate operations to millions of smaller investors. With this, our main challenge is to create systems that bring together many owners and houses in an efficient, responsible, and verifiable way. Transparency and trust are key to our success.

Empowering Individual Investors: We’re taking a complicated legal structure, long used by institutional investors for tax advantages, and creating purpose-built software to make it more accessible and seamless for individuals. There are many different steps to these workflows, from accommodating the myriad ways people own their assets to tracking all the pieces of information from different counterparties to ultimately executing a transaction.

On an ongoing basis, to operate this system, we’re providing owners with timely distributions, the ability to reinvest proceeds, and over time, the ability to borrow against their shares. We’re building a trusted network of third-parties to ensure the integrity of the system for all owners in the partnership. And on top of all that, we’re making these complexities simple for our owners.

Aggregating Assets: We’re building an asset management platform, but we’re different from most institutional investment managers. Our goal isn’t to buy low and sell high, but to bring homes at their fair market value and price in repairs needed to achieve consistent standards across the portfolio.

We’re bringing mom-and-pop owners the operating efficiencies, diversification, and sophisticated tools that large institutional investment managers have pioneered over the last decade. But, we’re aiming to expand on what’s been developed, and do it even better. We’re committed to more than just the financial performance for our owners: we treat residents the way our owners would want to be treated and optimize every decision to bring positive impact to the communities where we operate. The people putting homes in Flock aren’t large investment funds from halfway around the world. They’re doctors, engineers, retirees, and young parents who live in the community…sometimes even a few blocks away.

While we’re starting by offering Flock to a fraction of the population — already existing owners of Single Family Rentals in a handful of markets — everything we build is structured to scale for a far, far wider range of end users.

The Impact You’ll Have

Ownership is our core value at Flock. We offer all the benefits of ownership without any of the burdens. It doesn’t mean that these burdens disappear, it means that we take them on for everyone else!

You’ll wake up every morning and go to sleep every night knowing that people have entrusted you with a significant portion of their net worth. For many, it’s the vast majority of their net worth. Whether you’re inspecting a home, writing a line of code, or launching a new marketing campaign, you’ll know that the stakes are high and your work has real impact. At some point, you’ll even meet some of these people, and then you’ll really know it matters.

The People You’ll Work With

Our team is made up of software engineers, real estate domain experts, and growth leaders from some of the leading fintech and proptech companies. The common thread that runs throughout the team: we’re obsessed with our customers, the millions of regular Americans trying to unlock the value tied up in their homes.

We’re based between San Francisco and Denver, but have a number of teams that work remote-first. We convene as frequently as possible and put a huge emphasis on in-person interaction, but are mindful of the global pandemic and the flexibility afforded to work remotely!

The Benefits You’ll Have

  • Unlimited PTO
  • Hybrid remote work (coordinated by team)
  • Best-in-class health and dental care
  • Flexible health and wellness stipend
  • Equity in a rapidly growing startup

The Interview Process

We apply the same framework to every candidate to ensure a fair and efficient hiring process. The process is designed to evaluate how you think, simulate actual challenges you’ll encounter at Flock, and give both us and you the opportunity to see what working with each other is like. Our goal is to make sure there is a good fit — with the expectation that we’ll be spending many years together building a generational company.

The specific stages of the process will differ for every role, but we follow the same framework for every candidate:

  1. Screening. We’ll learn about your background, ask a few questions about your past experiences, and gauge for some required skill sets for the position. Expect questions that get into the “what” you’ve been doing.
  2. Open-ended questions. The best way to prepare for this is to educate yourself on our product and to think about the challenges that we’re solving. It’s fine if you don’t have all the answers yet (neither do we!) but show us you have a strong bias to action. Expect questions that get into the “how” and “what” you’ll be doing.
  3. Case studies. We’ll be evaluating your aptitude and your values and may invite a few team members/advisors to sit in on the final stage. Expect to get into both the “what,” “how,” and “why.”
  4. Offer. We’ll get back to you within a week of the final case study with a final decision. We have a formulaic approach to compensation and we’ll offer you the choice to optimize for cash compensation or upside through equity.
  5. Your due diligence. We’re proud of what we’re doing and will be entirely transparent and open as you make your decision. You’ll have the opportunity to meet the team, see what we’re really about, and make a highly informed decision about whether you’d like to join.

Want to see our available opportunities? Click here.

Didn’t find anything relevant but still excited about joining the team? Email us with what you’re most excited about building at careers@flockhomes.com.

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