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» VISIT US ONLINE @ DSNEWS.COM 63 myself more and understand more about it," Brien said. "And so I ended up getting involved with doing due diligence on new properties and spending some time in the office with them, managing some of the properties." By the time Brien retired from football in 2005, he had been investing for almost a decade. While playing for the New Orleans Saints, he got an MBA in real estate finance. Brien said he has carried many insights from the world of sports over into business. "Just by being around all those different coaches, I picked up a lot about how they treat people, how to build camaraderie, how to build a team, show people you trust them, show people you believe in them," he said. For Mynd to tackle the market they're targeting, a solid team will certainly be necessary. THE PLAYING FIELD e property-management industry is larger than a layperson might expect, according to co-CEO Wiel. "In our sector, which is buildings that are 50 units and smaller—so, apartment buildings up to 50 units in size plus all single-family homes— we think it's about a $27 billion-a-year industry in the U.S.," he said. "Just the fees collected by third-party property management companies." is isn't implausible, since IBISWorld's industry research pegs the entire industry's revenue at $73 billion. "It's a big industry," Wiel continued, "but there are no large companies in the space. Which is fine, but there are also no companies in the space that have really embraced technology." Mynd and its investors are betting that technology will have the same transformative effect on property management that it's had on other industries. ey're drawing on their experience with Waypoint to support their thesis. "e conventional wisdom was, you have to be really hands-on with single-family rental, and that's why people had done it with 50 units or 100 units, but nobody had done it with 5,000 units," Wiel said. "[At Waypoint] we sort of respectfully disagreed with the people that were telling us that, and said, 'We think with technology, if we create an end-to-end cloud computing, mobile computing infrastructure, we can systematize and automate a lot of the business, and really empower our property managers to be much more efficient and much more diligent about the follow-through.' Because things are automatically happening and there are lots of systems in place to make sure everything's being done really well." It took some time to nail down a solid strategy, but eventually it paid off. "It was over the course of seven years that we did this," Wiel continued, "with a lot of trial-and-error and figuring out what works. But once we really got it figured out, we realized, 'Wow, this is a total game-changer. We're able to do this much, much better, and we're able to bring the costs way down, and do it all with fewer people, and our people are much more effective.'" After leaving Waypoint, Wiel and Brien saw how they could leverage their experience. "We looked around at the overall residential landscape in America," Wiel said. "ere are over 30 million units that are in buildings 50 units and smaller, plus single-family, that are owned almost all by individual investors, who are either hiring a third-party property manager or self-managing, most likely because they can't find one they can trust." e fees for managing a fraction of those units could rise into the billions, and Mynd's founders aren't the only ones who've noticed the tempting breadth of this market. Wiel named startups OneRent and Castle as competitors, along with the traditional property-management firms Renter's Warehouse and HomeRiver. OneRent in particular seems to be offering the exact same services that Mynd's initial product will offer. Brien and Wiel said their competitive selling point will be their years in the industry and their takeaways from having built Waypoint's internal property-management systems. "at's a big moat," Wiel said, "to have the combination of deep property-management expertise and deep technology experience, which is the core of the partnership between Doug and me." And the potential of that combo seems to be huge, according to Brien. "We're saying that we're going to manage hundreds of thousands of units," he said. "It's really our experience at Waypoint that gives that goal credibility." He also cited "synergies" between the co-CEOs, and both men noted that they have complementary strengths. Brien

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