Evil Martians have been working closely with the Fund That Flip team for over a year, engaged in projects ranging from large-scale core refactoring to frontend optimization.
This project showed the crucial impact of continuous refactoring on any financial platform with a legacy codebase—even if it affects core systems that are so scary to mess with. Martians have been optimizing the backend and frontend of this Ruby on Rails application and introducing modern development tools and best practices that accelerated the development process and reduced time to run tests thrice. The project has brought some visible financial results for Fund That Flip in the market’s trying times.
Flipping the real estate investments market
Fund That Flip is a leader in online lending that specializes in funding rehab and new construction projects in the single-family residential market. The fix-and-flip real estate industry is now peaking due to high returns from investments and popularized in mainstream culture by TV shows like “Fixer Upper” or “Rehab Addict” and dozens of YouTube videos. However, securing the capital needed to finance projects for a real estate business can be an outdated and difficult process. Fund That Flip gives borrowers access to fast, reliable capital while simultaneously creating opportunities for accredited investors to build wealth by investing in loans through an online marketplace.
Matt Rodak and his partners launched Fund That Flip in 2014 after completing 300 flips on their own. In 2019 and 2020, the company was ranked on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private businesses in the United States. In 2020, the project was featured as the #17 Fastest Growing Company in America by Financial Times’ rating. Fund That Flip has received many other awards for accelerated growth and innovative culture, including those for industry thought leadership, great workplace, smart culture, and Founders to Watch Award.
Fund That Flip raised $2M in their Seed round and then secured $11M in Series A financing, which brings the startup’s total funding raised to nearly $13M. It was supported by growth equity firm Edison Partners, which has an impressive track record of investing in market leaders and many first-movers. With this support and a six-year Job Creation Tax Credit they got from Ohio Tax Credit Authority, the company was able to expand their Cleveland office to complement their New York headquarters.
Refinancing for rehabbing
If you ever experienced short-term loans for real estate purposes, you understand how painful the borrowing process can be. Traditional lenders like banks hold flipping as a risky proposition and are not eager to finance a purchase of a residence that is not primary. That’s why many of them force borrowers to fill out long-form applications and wait up to 8 months for a loan approval. So-called “hard money lenders” demand double-digit interest rates on such loans.
On the flip side, many would-be homebuyers in the US face numerous challenges. Millions of properties are demanding significant investment to meet buyer preferences while building materials costs are getting higher. Besides, the market is witnessing the rise of a whole new generation of real estate redevelopers who leverage financing to renovate aging or neglected properties to deliver a like-new home at an attainable price point. Flipped homes accounted for 6.2% of all home sales in the U.S. in 2019, an eight-year high, according to the ATTOM Data Solutions report. Finally, investors started to thrive on the emerging peer-to-peer lending and fractional shares of the loans due to the instruments’ high interest rates compared to other investment options and short time horizons (3-18 months).
All it takes to merge these factors is an online platform, offering simple and transparent processes for all participants and access to troves of data and proprietary risk models to gain insight into the house flipping financing aspects. And the team created a lending platform that solves all the problems they experienced over the years while rehabbing houses on their own.
