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JPMorgan Chase is launching an entirely new business venture with designs on becoming a dominant force in a $500B industry.
The banking giant has launched a pilot of a rent collection and management software platform named Story, with a full rollout expected next year, CNBC reports. Targeting landlords of all sizes, Story is designed to fully digitize rent payment and invoicing for landlords, a surprising percentage of which rely on physical checks and basic software tools such as Microsoft Excel or Quickbooks.
Of about 12 million rental property owners in the U.S., most have portfolios of 100 or fewer units — even as the share of units owned by institutional entities and private equity has risen in recent years — and 78% of owners still rely on physical checks and/or money orders, according to JPMorgan data reported by CNBC.
Rental management platforms are fairly common in the proptech ecosystem. Perhaps the biggest name in the field is Buildium, which was acquired by RealPage in late 2019. But Buildium and competitors have failed to build sufficient scale to scare JPMorgan away from making a big play in the sector, CNBC reports.
After its wide release, Story will gather data to build offerings for landlords and property managers such as insight on where to raise rents and where to invest more. A tenant screening tool could also be in the works, CNBC reports.
RealPage's YieldStar algorithm is a much more widely used tool for automating rental rate setting than Buildium is for collecting rents — to the point it has come under fire in the form of an exposé by journalism nonprofit ProPublica and a class-action lawsuit for being used as a tool for collusion in keeping rents high even as units sit vacant.
Though JPMorgan calls itself the biggest multifamily lender in the U.S., with $95B in loans to 33,000 borrowers as of the first half of this year, it intends Story to be a product for more than just its debt business relationships.
With the bank's commercial lending division Chief Innovation Officer Sam Yen leading, Story is a fully fledged dive into proptech for JPMorgan, CNBC reports.
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