How Doorvest Selects Investment Homes For Our Customers

One of the biggest misconceptions about Doorvest is that we’re like the competition — showing homes straight from the MLS or other open markets. Well, we’re not. All homes you see in Doorvest are exclusively owned or are already in contract by Doorvest.

And a lot goes into making sure that we acquire the right homes — from sourcing, underwriting, renovation scoping, and more. And the best part? All homes are hand selected by our internal Acquisitions team with decades of experience and enhanced by the power of modern technology and data.

This article will discuss the high level of our Acquisitions strategy and process for Doorvest homes to ensure that our customers have the best chances at a long-term investment strategy in real estate.

Sourcing and Partnerships

The first step of the process is to actually get homes in front of our team, which arguably, is one of the most difficult parts to do at scale. Fundamentally, real estate is scarce; making the sourcing of homes fairly difficult given the scale we need to support the entire Doorvest community.

Wholesalers and Large Institutional Sellers

One of our biggest sources is institutions or larger wholesalers who can bring hundreds of deals per day to Doorvest. Working in tandem with our Product & Engineering team, a number of APIs and manual processes are developed to pull these deals into our system for our Acquisitions team to hand pick.

We love working with these institutions as they are able to provide the scale we need to grow efficiently and are constantly working on more partnerships (which for context, can take months to nurture).

If you are a wholesaler who wants to work with us, contact our Acquisitions team: acquisitions@doorvest.com.

Direct Buying

For some homes, we go straight to the source - the homeowner. Part of our team is dedicated to talking to homeowners and understanding the sale of their homes. These homeowners detail their home’s current condition and provide us with their asking price, and we’ll counter with an offer.

We can even offer homeowners cash closings within 10 days.

Have a home you’re interested in selling to us? Send a request to sell.doorvest.com.

Underwriting

Underwriting allows us to assign a certain value to a property. For Doorvest, each home goes through 4 progressive rounds that each dig deeper to ensure the value we assign it is as tailored as possible. Let’s start at the first round!

Buybox

It all starts with what we call “The Buybox” - the base model of a home that we would accept.

For example, with the goal of sourcing long-term real estate investments that are more passive, we typically aim for homes that are at least 3 bedrooms, and 2 bathrooms, with median size lots for the area they are in. Why? These homes are more attractive to good quality residents who will maintain the home such as young families starting out, and who are more likely to stay for more than 1 year to reduce turnover.

While our complete buybox parameter is a Doorvest secret, our team goes through dozens of checks to ensure that every home acquired will be a high-yield investment for our customers.

Data

In order to understand the condition of a home, the neighborhood, and other factors that could potentially impact the home’s performance, we pull in hundreds of data points from multiple sources that range from valuation, rental potential, neighborhoods, crime, appreciation histories, and more. By doing so, our team is able to make accurate decisions.

On top of that, our internal tools automatically filter out homes that do not fit our buybox to maximize the efficiency of our team. For context, per 1000 homes, we may only accept upwards of 10 or so under current market conditions, which makes our process incredibly meticulous.

Expertise

Our Acquisitions team is one of the biggest teams at Doorvest, and has decades of real estate experience combined to ensure we provide top-quality estimates. As a fun fact, many of our Acquisitions team currently own and operate rental properties or work directly on their own real estate deals too!

Renovation Estimations

Our Acquisitions team also works closely with our Renovations and Estimation team. Enter - the second round of determining an acquisition.

Once we’ve decided to acquire a property, we will schedule an in-person viewing with one of our partners. Our Estimation team will then physically go into the home and provide us a detailed scope of work, which then helps us to determine how much we expect to put into the renovation of this acquisition.

Offering and Purchasing

With a clear understanding of the home, combined with an in-person viewing estimation, we’re ready to make an offer on the home.

By this point, the home goes through the third round of underwriting by our senior Acquisitions managers. If they give the green light, we make an offer.

If the offer is accepted, it gets passed off to our Transactions Manager who will bring it to closing. Once that is completed, our internal Renovations team begins the work.

Creating the Home Profile

The last and final step? We bring it all to you.

The Home Profile is now created and shared with all of you via our proprietary matching algorithm. Learn more about how Doormatch works!

Conclusion

At Doorvest, our mission is to advance financial security for all through investment homeownership.

Our end-to-end solution breaks down the extreme barriers associated with doing real estate by yourself, especially if you are a first-time homebuyer or investor in this asset class.

As we continue our quest, all of the behind-the-scenes work our team has dedicated is to ensure that your experience in homeownership is as seamless as possible — as well as your barrier to entry will no longer be visible.