Service Through Entrepreneurship: This Soldier Is Revamping Military Family Wealth Creation
Dear readers,
Welcome to another edition of Profiles in Innovation, where we interview the brightest entrepreneurs and VCs from Princeton and beyond!
For this issue I was lucky enough to speak with Princeton graduate-student-turned-entrepreneur Nicholas Leiter. As a student and a military officer, he has taken the initiative of starting a company with the mission of helping military families create wealth through home ownership.
Two Active Duty Soldier Scholars
Nick is a Coast Guard helicopter pilot, homeowner, and property manager. He bought his first home in 2007 and shortly thereafter faced an underwater mortgage due to the financial crisis. In 2011, he had orders to a new duty station. Nick and his wife faced a challenging personal finance decision-point: sell and take a $20,000 loss or assume the burden of property management? Rather than taking a loss, they opted to act as their own landlords and have tolerated the headaches associated with property management.
His co-founder, John, is a Navy surface sailor, home seller, and forced renter. He bought his first home in 2014. Sixteen months later, John and his wife received Permanent Change of Station (PCS) orders overseas and confronted a common dilemma: manage property from the other side of the world or lose out on the upside of long-term homeownership? DIY-renovations and favorable market conditions allowed them to break even, but he knows others are not as fortunate.
Read on to see how they have leveraged their resources and experiences to turn this idea to a reality.
Servant Leadership: The Business of Helping Military Families
Nicholas’s company, UPROOT, exists to serve the military and veteran communities where he claims that the traditional mortgage industry cannot. They aim to help military families access real estate wealth and create the opportunity to turn each required move to a new duty station into an investment opportunity. His company facilitates a homeownership system with the military family’s unique needs in mind. UPROOT aims to provide the wealth accumulation benefits typically associated with long-term homeownership to military families. The company does this without tying up family VA loan entitlements in a single property so families can purchase a home at every duty station and create a diversified real estate portfolio.
According to Nicholas, the mortgage industry is not designed for military life and fails to be an accessible way for military families to build wealth. He started his company with the intention to address this problem.
The Lesser-Known Sacrifices
Active duty service members and veterans make many sacrifices to serve their country — frequent deployments, dangerous tours of duty in combat zones, and the PTSD that goes along with the last 15 years of the Global War on Terror. But there are also more insidious sacrifices that military families make that you will never hear about on the CNN or Fox News and you won’t see highlighted in a Hollywood action movie.
“My co-founder John and I have both wrestled with homeownership amidst multiple PCS moves over a combined 20 years of service. We met at Princeton University this year where we were inspired to search for entrepreneurial solutions to solve issues facing the military community. We are both currently serving on active duty.”
These formative experiences in the real estate world highlighted the realities of military homeownership. UPROOT was founded to revolutionize the mortgage industry and ease some of the burdens inherent to uprooting a family.
Using Data to Determine the Market’s Needs
Based on an UPROOT survey of military families (550 respondents), military homeowners own their home for approximately 5 years, compared to the national median of 13.3 years. This means three things: One, the time horizon to build equity is short. Two, home-owners are more susceptible to fluctuations in the housing market. And three, if the home ownership period occurs during a dip in the market then a military homeowner may not realize the appreciation benefits compared to those with a longer time horizon. It becomes clear that if someone is constantly buying and selling a home, they are not building wealth in your real estate asset like someone who lives in the same place for 30 years. Using market data to determine what exactly the niche needs is pivotal in the creation of a successful startup.
Great Ideas Come from Deep Reflection and Spontaneous Creativity
“This idea was formed in response to a systems disruption assignment for a social entrepreneurship class during the fall semester. I was really struggling to come up with an idea. That night, I attended a campus workshop on creativity taught by psychologist and creativity/innovation expert Keith Sawyer. Until this night, I had always assumed that being a “left-brained” individual (logical, analytical, objective) meant that I would never be artistic or creative; however, Keith spoke about creativity being a trait that is nurtured through a deliberate process. He recommended a mental exercise of pairing two unrelated, distinct concepts that normally would never be associated with each other to think about the creative possibilities. I went home inspired and intrigued. That night around midnight, I jumped out of bed with the first iteration of UPROOT’s business model as a direct result of that exercise. I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks after all!” — Nicholas Leiter
To find out more UPROOT’s website can be accessed here: www.uproothomes.com
That’s all for this issue. Talking with Nick showed the potential for addressing a market need while providing value for consumers and helping a community. This kind of social entrepreneurship drives both the economy and society.
