A New Direction
We started Castle with a simple mission: to automate landlording.
Most landlords buy properties for the same reason they’d buy stocks or bonds: as an investment. But unlike stocks and bonds, which you can buy with a single click and then forget about entirely until it’s time to sell, real estate comes with a job. And though it’s often a great investment, it’s a lousy job. Landlords and tenants suffer because the rental experience is messy and over-complicated.
Our first plan was to solve this problem with software tools for landlords: starting with rent collection, and then expanding to cover every touchpoint of landlord-tenant interaction. But over the past several weeks, it’s become clear to us that to achieve our vision of fully automated landlording, we’ll need to go beyond software alone.
That’s why we’re introducing the new Castle: full-service property management you’ll actually like. For a flat fee of $49/unit/month, we’ll handle everything that needs to be handled, from collecting rent and keeping the books to managing repairs and even finding tenants.
Current property management companies have two critical flaws: they’re expensive (usually around 10% of rental income), and they fail to provide owners with a clear picture of what they’re doing and where their money is going. Landlords we’ve talked to have described their dealings with property management companies as feeling like “scams” and “ripoffs”—and those are just the phrases we can print on a family-friendly blog1.
We’re going to change that.
Castle has simple, fair pricing: just $49/unit/month. Our work is the same whether your property rents for $500 or $5,000, so charging a percentage of rental income, like almost all other property management companies do, just doesn’t make sense.
We’ll also be the most transparent property management company you’ve ever seen. The Castle app will give landlords a full behind-the-scenes look at what’s going on in their properties, so they can understand where their money is going when they use Castle’s services.
Down the road, we’re bursting with ideas about how we can grow and scale by using technology in ways that traditional property management companies have barely scratched the surface of. But that’s for another day. For now, we’re focused on getting our first units under management.
Oh, and if you liked using Castle to collect rent? Don’t worry—you still can. Even better, it’s completely free, for as many properties, tenants, and payment cycles as you want.
We’re super excited about the road ahead, and can’t wait to get going. Stay tuned!
- Disclaimer: this blog not guaranteed to be family-friendly.↩
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