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57 instance, rising interest rates, etc.—while they may affect single-family home sales, in terms of individuals who are looking to buy a property, it raises the expense for them. For the specific markets where SFR is strong, we think it doesn't change anything. We think it may actually take a few of the individual investors out of the market and leave that space open for institutional investors. Do you think pandemic factors such as increased migration are helping drive increased build- for-rent activity or is that down purely to continued housing demand and insufficient inventory across the board? Yeah. I think that was one of the factors. Certainly, when people are looking to move jobs or be flexible, they aren't sure where their next job is. ey aren't sure if the town they move to is where they want to live for the rest of their life. So, they're maybe unwilling to buy. But I think there are other factors as well, including the ability for any investor, from a single person all the way up to institution investors, to be able to continue to identify properties on a local, regional, and national scale. And then, through the rental process, to gain some tax advantages, but also to be able to gain the best rental income possible from the markets they've located through House Canary or other services. Beyond just the increased access to relevant data for investors, how else is tech transforming the SFR space this year? I think the friction experience is the number-one thing in terms of the end-to-end transaction. Where people are recognizing, if we are going to expand, if we're going to scale, we need the right data. We need the right valuations. And we need to be able to do this in a kind of seamless way. We can't be patchworking data from multiple different sources. It's too much. Overall, that's the story, being able to pull in more accurate data, more accurate valuations in a single location and to be able to get a global picture of what the market actually looks like. How are ongoing affordability and inventory issues impacting SFR investment? So, I'm going to answer that from an oblique angle. e ability for any investor to be nimble is going to be critical. I don't know if you're familiar with the term target fixation, but it's where fighter pilots are so fixated on shooting down someone that they fly into the side of a mountain. ey lose situational awareness. at's going to be the key for our investors: when they're in a market and they've invested the time, money, and effort to be in that market, there's also going to come a point where that market is just too competitive, and they need to look elsewhere. And if they don't have the national footprint for the data to be able to look elsewhere, that's going to be one of the things that narrows their field of vision. And to the fighter pilot analogy, that takes away their situation awareness because they don't have a bigger picture. GAGAN SHARMA President and CEO BSI Financial Gagan Sharma is a seasoned entrepreneur and executive with 20+ years of experience in financial services and technology. He enjoys solving challenging customer problems in the financial sector and has a proven track record of bringing startup concepts to life and scaling for success. Since leading an investment group to acquire BSI from a bank in 2006, he has transformed the company from a small loan servicer into a fast-growing and leading nationwide mortgage fintech, fostering a 70x growth since the acquisition. Prior to BSI, Gagan dropped out of e Wharton School to start, scale, and sell a successful global financial services and technology outsourcing company. Sharma has an MBA from e Wharton School at e University of Pennsylvania and a B Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. What is the current state of the single- family rental marketplace and what are the headwinds and opportunities you're seeing? From our perspective, within the SFR marketplace, the biggest change that is clearly happening is the change in the interest rate environment. Because of inflation, rates have risen and we are seeing our clients raising rates. e markets still have a significant appetite for loans and assets focused on the single-family rental side. at is probably the biggest risk that we see. Inventory shortages are an ongoing thing. It's hard to tell what this change of rates does to buyers and sellers. e assets that many of the investors are buying, they're competing oftentimes with the homebuyers as well. So, that's a little harder to tell as to how exactly that's going to impact the flow of inventory. But from a lending perspective, we see activity is still quite high. How have the pandemic and technology changed in the way you do business in 2022? One is using digital to provide a better consumer experience. e consumer experience could be the end renter, the borrower, the consumer who is renting the property, or it could be the investor who owns the property. Everything has gotten so much more digitized, especially over the last two years. e last two years have seen an acceleration that would have otherwise taken five or seven years unfold in only two years thanks to the pandemic. Everybody was forced to do things in a much more virtual manner, so that led to an acceleration of a lot of trends. e other thing that I would say is there is a lot more data and information available. Even the small to mid-sized investors are able to access information and be smarter about how to make investment decisions and where to make investment decisions. What do you anticipate in 2023 and 2024 for the SFR sector? e way I would think about it is, it's an evergreen asset. ere is going to remain a significant demand for single family rentals. e consumer wants rental housing, so that's going to continue to be there. We know interest rates are going to be higher. Investors that have adequate cushion built into their operating models, will be fine. What we don't know yet is, will the rising rates push the economy into a recession? If we have a recession, then it's a very different market. We don't know yet as to where that is going to end up at, but otherwise I feel this asset has gone through so many different recessions and ups and downs because the consumer demand is there. And it'll always be there.

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