With homeownership rates at their lowest levels in 20 years, renting continues to grow in popularity. But investors looking to seize the opportunity and expand their rental footprint face a complicated mortgage process that hinders easy scaling. Especially for smaller investors, it can be tough sledding. HousingWire sat down with B2R CEO Jason Hogg to find out how his company is making that process easier and more transparent for investors of any size.
HousingWire: For all kinds of reasons, the popularity of renting has just taken off. What kind of unique challenges do residential rental investors face?
Jason Hogg: Over time, the mortgage lending industry has evolved to primarily serve the owner-occupied buyer and the commercial buyer. The industry also remains 
mired in paperwork, forcing buyers to endure a cumbersome, frustrating process every time they want to apply for and secure financing.
Today, technology remains woefully absent from the process. The lenders serving owner-occupied and commercial buyers try to twist their products to fit the financing needs of the single-family rental investor, but continue to come up short.
The needs of the SFR investor often don’t align with the narrow box offered by traditional lenders and that’s where we come in.
HW: How do B2R and Dwell Finance try to meet those kinds of challenges? Does size matter when you're developing these products?
JH: At B2R and Dwell Finance, we’ve taken a clean-sheet approach toward developing products and technology that meet SFR investors’ cash flow, proceeds and structuring needs. This enables us to offer a full suite of business lending solutions.
Dwell Finance offers products that are designed for smaller professional investors who renovate and resell properties, need bridge-to-term financing or want to unlock equity to continue to invest. At the other end of the spectrum, B2R serves larger institutional investors and offers tailored solutions that can help them more effectively leverage existing portfolios.
Our products are designed to sustain each stage of portfolio growth and we aim to create long-term partnerships. Our goal is to support our customers from the purchase of their first rental property all the way through to their 50th and beyond.
Underpinning all of our products is the Dwell Finance platform, which looks to create a better, customer-focused experience by automating the application process and providing tools and resources that help investors get more out of their rental portfolios.
HW: How does B2R’s recent acquisition of assets from Dwell Finance benefit your clients, particularly when it comes to technology?
JH: We are incredibly excited to add Dwell Finance to the B2R family. The acquisition of the Dwell Finance business has allowed us to open regional offices, expand our suite of lending products and build the first SFR financial technology platform vertically integrated from origination through securitization.
We know that the lending industry is wildly behind when it comes to meeting customer demand for technology and we are changing that.
Through the Dwell Finance platform, we can automate the application and decisioning process and manage the customer lifecycle in a way that is low-friction for the borrower and offers transparency around where they are in the process and how to work together.
The platform will continue to make it easier and faster for our customers to access the resources they need to continue to grow their businesses.
HW: What kind of products do B2R and Dwell Finance offer for buy-to-rent investors?
JH: Our focus has been to offer a full suite of business lending solutions that meet our customers’ needs throughout their business lifecycle.
Starting with our smaller customers, Dwell Finance provides short-term and bridge products that allow them to grow their businesses and then graduate to our term portfolio products.
In addition, B2R offers tailored lending solutions designed to help effectively leverage existing portfolios, completing the product spectrum from the small professional investor to the large-scale institutional investor.
