It might be difficult to find a more active player in the single-family rental operations business than Pure Property Management.
General partners Mike Catalano and Joseph Polverari launched the firm in 2020, the company now manages more than 15,000 single-family residences in over 50 cities and metropolitan areas within 16 states. Catalano came in with a background in property management, while Polverari had spent his career in tech.
“The idea [behind Pure] was pretty simple,” Polverari told Multifamily Dive. “If we could leverage technology to acquire businesses rapidly, we could build a pretty interesting business, overlay some systemic optimization and grow. So we raised a little capital, mostly from friends and family, to get started and started building technology.”
The founders recently launched Pure Institutional Management, a division dedicated to institutional investor clients and their residential portfolios, while also closing a $50 million financing round to help fuel acquisitions. They expect to operate in 25 states by the end of the year.
Here, Polverari talks with Multifamily Dive about the importance of technology, overbuilding in single-family rentals and Pure’s exit strategy.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
MULTIFAMILY DIVE: What technologies are you bringing in when you acquire new companies?
Joseph Polverari: We use it to streamline the workflow. If you observe how people manage a property, it's quite inefficient from a technology perspective. Most of the companies that we acquired have between six and 10 different IT systems, and the interfaces between them are human beings. It causes people anxiety to keep up with managing all those systems and doing all those different things.
We orchestrate workflow in a way that helps automate the process and we take a lot of effort out of the process. So it gets to the point where you can manage it a lot more efficiently. Then, as we go forward, we've got additional enhancements to the technology footprint of the platform that will actually further automate the process.
Is this tech resident-facing or does it just meet back office needs?
It faces three constituents really. One is the resident first and foremost, which is the most important. The second is the owner and the third is the property manager.
For the resident, it’s streamlining the communication channel. They can communicate by text, by phone or by email. It all lands in the same place and it gets addressed the same way.
I’m getting a lot of announcements about new single-family rental communities. Are you concerned about the space getting overbuilt?
Yes. In any market where land is cheap and zoning regulations are not strict, in the back of our minds we think “This can get overbuilt.” It's a question of what the velocity is by market. But, we haven't seen it yet.
We're always looking at it and we really pay attention to markets that we're in and want to enter for those signals of overdevelopment.
Do you venture into apartment management?
If you think about multifamily as thousands of units per location, that's really not our sweet spot. Our sweet spot is multifamily that is 10 to 200 doors. We see a lot of opportunity in that market because it's not far off from managing single family.
Once you’re getting up into the really large multifamily properties, those tend to be owner-operator managers themselves anyway.
What is the endgame? Do you want to accumulate an extensive portfolio and sell?
We don't think too much about the exit. We think about building the best company that we can build. Right now, the model is working better than we expected. It's getting very efficient. It's very scalable, and we know exactly how it operates.
We want to build simply the biggest, most profitable company in the category. It's not a huge competitive set in terms of folks who want to be professionally in single-family property management and build a big-scale organization. We do.
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