Roam lets homeowners sell their below-market mortgage so they can move without giving up their 3% rate

founder. So, let's bring him in. How you doing? Hey, John and uh Jordy. Great to meet you guys. Uh by the way, if you're wondering, I say my name like Ronic. It's like ironic without the I. Ronic. Okay, great. Uh thanks so much. Uh would you mind I tried to give the pitch. I probably botched it.

Would you mind giving me the pitch uh for Rome just from the horse's mouth? Yeah, it's basically you can buy a home with a 2% rate. You know, the basic problem we're solving is that today there's millions of sellers who are locked up at home because they have this 2 or 3% rate.

They don't feel like there is a value or ability to be able to move. And 75 million uh families in the US cannot afford a purchase because of how high rates are. So, we help buyers wind back the clock and purchase the home with the seller's mortgage included. That's amazing.

uh is this a uh a regulator regulatory innovation or a technological innovation? Why didn't this exist a decade ago or is it just a function of we didn't need it when rates were low? Yeah. So actually, you know, these were very popular in 1988 when mortgage rates went from 2% to 15 to 17%.

And at that time all mortgages were assumable actually.

And you know for uh other reasons because of the savings and loan crisis we ended up regulating it such that all the other homes had to have their loan paid off uh when the home was sold so we could avoid you know everyone just purchasing the home with sellers mortgage but what remained were these FHA and VA loans so the government back loans and there were 1.

5 trillion of them basically if you think back to the low rate years of 2020 and 2021 when everybody was getting a 2 or 3% mortgage that remained assumable but the problem was nobody knew how to find them because no seller knows what type of loan they have and if they know what type of loan they have they don't think there's a marketing advantage to it and even if you know by the grace of God you could find one of these loans it was impossible to transact on them because the banks made less money on it so we thought we could build a platform that basically vertically integrated all the problems within that you know uh purchase process and give it to consumers as a simple tagline buy a home with a 2% rate come to Rome and you know you can find all the homes that are relevant.

Yep. Uh yeah. So break down uh I guess what what like the obvious thing is just like for Rome to be you know truly uh you know widely just incredible, right? You just need scale, right? You need options, right?

when people go and they're looking at a specific some people want to go down and you know I have friends that want to move to to where I live and like they're trying to buy one of like60 homes and like 90% of them aren't on the market. Maybe some are for rent and some are for sale.

So how do you think about just getting um getting it feels like it's a supply problem in terms of just getting the supply on and then once you have the supply then the demand is just obviously there. Yeah. So, we actually did something pretty scrappy.

You know, I think had we waited for every seller to come on board, it's like any other marketplace issue. If you wait for all of the supply to come on board and opt in, then try to aggregate all the demand, it's going to take like 5 years, you know, and by that point, consumers have lost interest.

So, what we did is we actually in a pretty novel way found every home in America and then every mortgage record in America and cross-pollinated it. So, we just loaded up all the supply on the site. We didn't I love it. Like, yeah, I'm on board.

So you solve the supply side because you can uniquely show all of those homes and then you just hammer demand and you're basically like hey do you feel priced out? There's nothing wrong with that.

All of us feel like we can't afford to purchase a home today and there's a better way you can actually afford to do it and it's credible and legitimate and trustworthy and in cases where you know for instance like the banks wanted to drag their feet on closing some of these transactions.

So you know we were like let's just pay for it. like let's say that if it takes longer than 45 days to close, we'll pay for the seller's mortgage until it closes.

So, it's kind of a combination of using technology to find all of the homes that are relevant, taking advantage of some of the partnership stuff and getting some of the mortgage lenders to come on board and see that there's value in this.

And then also just like really pushing on the experience, you know, like I tell the team every day like if somebody doesn't want to close one of these, I will personally call and we will make sure that this gets cold closed, you know?

It's like just uh do people ever realize that that they have an like an assumable mortgage and then try to sell their house for more because they're like look your car your carrying cost is going to be a lot lower. You should be able to bond market pay more right.

Uh I know John has a very low uh low mortgage rate and I was like he was like you know if he ever moves he could be like well pay me more. Yeah pay me more because your carrying cost is going to be lower. Yeah. Yeah. where does the value actually transfer or acrewue?

So basically an independent group of economists recently studied Rome and it's always fun you know when you like start a company you're like okay we have like these set of ideas on like what the seller's going to get what the buyer's going to get and what's going to happen but like independently a group of people who'd never even spoken to me studied Rome and what they found was sellers get 5% more for their home sale when they sell their home with their low rate mortgage included buyers save $700 a month and that if this option was widespread it would remediate basically the lock in effect you see today and one of the reasons I got really excited excited about starting Rome was that I was at Open Door before this, which is how I had a chance to work with Eric and Keith.

And uh I just pulled 50,000 homeowners and asked them, "What's the interest rate on your mortgage and what's your preference share for selling to Openoro? " And like 90% of people who had a 7% mortgage were willing to do it. But if you had a 2% mortgage, you would only do it like 5% of the time. Wow.

So intuited there was like a large chasm both emotional and functional that they wouldn't be willing to cross, but somebody could give that optionality to them. That's cool. Can you take us through the news today? What are you announcing? How'd it come together? Give us the story.

Yeah, so uh today we announced that Keith and Kosla led an 11. 5 million round into Rome with Founders Fund. We actually only had two investors. Um and the whole process happened in like a week, so it was really fast. But we're thrilled to continue working with uh Founders Fund and Coastline.

You know, Founders Fund led the preede and the seed round. And it's been great to have a chance to work with Keith in all three uh investments that we've done. So preede, seed, and series A. Keith led all three rounds and then he joined the board alongside Eric who is the founder of Open Door in series A.

And in terms of the use of those funds, I imagine it's almost entirely R&D. You're not putting up any capital for these mortgages or buying things. There's no It's a very assetike business, right? Exactly. So, we're not taking any capital risk.

You know, I still hold all my open door shares RIP and uh you know, saw some of the dynamics there, but uh basically we help people without putting balance sheet risk on. We're like connecting all of the layers through the stack. So, uh, yeah, no balance sheet risk in the business. That's great. Uh, what do Oh, sorry.

Yep. Go. Do you just get frustrated that, you know, there's millions of people that are, you know, looking at Zillow all day long and you're just like like I feel like the big problem in terms of scaling Rome is just like making people aware of it now.

Like do you walk down the street and yell at people and just say like, "By the way, have you heard about Rome? like you can get a 3% mortgage. Like if I were you, I'd just be screaming it like on the street like a crazy person because it would probably be pretty effective uh marketing.

Uh but I but I'm curious like what are the next two years look like?

This almost feels like you know uh you know with the series A it would be not super practical to spend it entirely on a Super Bowl ad, but this almost feels like the kind of business that you could be doing this just sort of like mass, you know, at scale marketing and and and find results with that. Yeah, exactly.

I mean, I you know, I like walk into a bar and the first thing I ask people is like, "Do you want to own a home? " And then, "Do you feel like you can afford a home? " And like nine out of 10 people want to be able to own a home, but like one of 10 people feel like they can.

So that's immediately like the opportunity to tell everyone about is like, "We can close that gap. " And then we think about getting distribution in three ways basically.

So, we tell sellers and listing agents who like actually have that inventory with an assumable loan that instead of advertising like everyone else that you got a cozy two bed, two bath garage in Decar, Georgia, you need to lead with the fact that your home is differentiated compared to everyone else because it comes with a 2% rate.

That's why somebody's going to buy it. You know, it's because it's not a rate that they can afford. And for buyers, it's as you mentioned, more mass market, just getting the word out there through media as well as through some now we're trying a few paid channels.

uh but telling people that they can actually afford a home with a 2% rate. And then we're actually getting uh like some other partners, you know, like mortgage servicesers and agents to distribute the product for us to their clients because they see there's value in it now, too.

So, a lot of the distribution, you know, we had found signs of early on, but now we're diversifying that and bringing out really what's going to be super repeatable as we look to get to like, you know, massive scale. Sorry, I'm not distracted. I'm just shopping on Rome right now.

There's some absolutely banger mortgages available here and I'm seeing uh some potential future in Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like it's way honestly uh I think people what you need to tap into is people's addictive behavior around Zillow. Oh yeah. Totally.

And you just need to convert that to because the dopamine of seeing like I see a house that's uh seeing a number that's like oh two grand a month or three grand a month like it's like oh that's like completely like the shot goes away.

I'm seeing a house that is almost three times as expensive as my house within a half mile but the mortgage is only like 60% more. Yeah.

And it's like that is like the dopamine rush for a user to be that sort of like basically take the magic of like look home shopping and then you just make everything like you know whatever whatever the average is 30% cheaper from a carrying cost standpoint because that's what ultimately drives affordability for most people.

That's why we have this right through visualization everything on Rome because you know we didn't even need to make a map if Zillow would have done this.

If you go to Zillow and you search for like, I don't know, like a city like Houston, and you go in keyword search because that's how you'd have to find it, and you just look for sellers who are advertising assumable loan, you'll find like literally two results.

And then if you come to Rome and search in Houston, you'll find 2,000 results. And it's because sellers don't know they have it. And Zillow is basically just feeding what the MLS gives them, which is like, you know, an uninformed perspective into it. And uh, you know, we raised the capital, too.

We had some investors ask like, "Oh, what happens if Zillow does it? " And I'd be like, "Great. " You know, like now everyone knows. put a button on there that says buy this home with Rome and cut your monthly payment in half.

So it becomes like a firm for home buying where it's button on every listing card in the US to help you cut your monthly payments in half. Yeah, that's very cool. Uh I mean speaking of customer acquisition, like what is working and what do you think the next year of customer acquisition will look like? Yeah.

So right now what's really worked super well, you know, preede seed series A, like when we did the preede, you know, and we're like, okay, like is this a real problem? Like let's announce it. Uh it was like the front page of the Wall Street Journal, you know, which like blew me away.

And uh that's not because of me or anything that I've done. Like nobody even knows who I am. It's mostly about like the fact that it resonates with so many people that they feel like they can't afford to buy a home.

And so we saw that continue for like the last 18 months basically that there's just, you know, quarter million buyers that come to the site and we didn't pay for any of them and they're just like looking to be able to buy a home.

Now it's like, okay, how do you really deepen that penetration and get to work within each of the local markets? And so now we're finding ways to work with agents, which like for listing agents, hey, let's help you win more sellers because you can actually show them why you can get them to move.

Kind of relating to that study I done at Open Door. And for buyers agents, it's like, hey, you got like 10,000 contacts in your CRM that basically said, "No, I'm not interested because insurance is high, taxes are high, prices are high, rates are high. Go and re-engage all of them.

be like, "Hey, if I got you in a home with a 2% rate, you might find that you don't get qualified for 325K, but now you get qualified for 475K. " So maybe that makes you interested in buying a home now.

So, have you seen have you seen investors using Rome to buy homes with the intention of just leasing them out because like I imagine, you know, I'm just like scanning the marketplace around LA. There's rental units that I'm, you know, or I'm seeing like three bedrooms that are whatever for like four grand.

I'm like, I know where that is. It's probably like a 7 8K a month rental. And if you're an investor looking at this, I don't do anything in real estate.

I prefer highly liquid private shares of my friends companies, but uh there a lot of opportunity I imagine just like in in kind of like, you know, potentially alpha on on Rome. Yeah, totally. So, we actually launched a page just for that. I think if you go to the homepage, there's a tab called investors.

So, it shows you all of the homes that have an underlying VA loan. Those don't require primary residency and so any investor can purchase that. You can put in the cash and you can take over that loan and, you know, go on to lease it out. So, we facilitate those all the time.

And most people don't even know that's possible. You know, there's so much misinformation about this stuff because if you think about it, nobody's really incentivized for it to succeed. Um, most people are incentivized to originate new mortgages at 7%.

Not like to recycle the cash to purchase your friend's mortgage at 2%. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That makes ton of sense. Very exciting. Uh, well, now we know you. We know how your name and uh, yeah, we really appreciate you stopping by. This was fantastic. And congratulations on the series A.

Congratulations on stacked uh, stacked lineup too on the whole size going for you. So, enjoy it. I appreciate that, guys. And then if there's anyone listening who is interested, I think of it as like the Manhattan project for housing affordability and we're actively hiring.

This is going to be the most important and I think only solution to affordability in the next 5 years. Politicians talk about like, oh, we'll increase permits or something like that. That's just not going to take impact to like 2035. Sure. You want to contribute to making it more affordable today, email me.

I respond to every single email. I'm ronic with rom. com. Raqqrome. com. So well, thanks for coming on. Fantastic domain, too. hit the Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it's with with Rome. Sorry. Uh hopefully you're getting Rome. com soon. Soon. Soon. That's series B money.

But we will have you back as soon as the series B drops and anytime there's housing news, we'd love to chat with you about it. Um but have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much for stopping by. Great to meet. We'll talk to you soon. See you. Bye.

Uh well, you know, if you're looking for a new house and you're roaming around, you're trying to see if you want to live in a community, go on Wander, find your happy place, test it out, rent a luxury home, and then get on Rome and buy a house next door.

Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 247. What do we say about wander? We say find your happy place. Find your happy place. And we also We're getting better every day at that. Yeah, we are. We're getting good.

Uh well, let's go through some news and some uh some timeline. Uh this is an exciting story. So the co-founder of Robin Hood has started a company called Aetherflux. Etherflux uh and Chad Buyers was posting about it. Uh Baiju co-founded Robin Hood and helped scale it to a $40 billion company is today.

He's back with a new company to help deliver energy from space. Excited to be a small angel to work on space lasers. So they're putting solar panels in space as I understand it. I I had uh I got like a pizza with him like a long time ago. I think he'll be able to come on the show in a few days.

Um, and uh, and and I think they're putting solar panels in space and then beaming the energy down with lasers to a receptacle that that takes the energy and uh, it's all very sci-fi and futuristic, but I'm I'm excited to hear how he built out that model because that feels like something that lives and dies by the Excel spreadsheet of like what are launch costs, what do the cost of the solar panels cost?

And if you play it out, there's a bunch of controversial things about like are we going to black out the sun? Like will we be able to see the sky? There's there's uh, space trash based junk questions. Uh there's also a ton of hard tech engineering stuff.

We've talked to Delhi a bunch about how hard it is to actually manufacture something, get in get it into orbit quickly. And so lots of challenges, but I love that he made a bunch of money in finance and then is taking it into hard tech. This is what we saw with Elon.

This is what we saw with a lot of folks who had this is what everybody says. They say I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to get the bag and then I'm going to change the world. Few actually and he's doing it. So get there.

So yeah, happy to support and I'm sure we're going to see a lot more from his company in the near future. Um, I wanted to cover the Circle IPO filing. They filed their S1 yesterday. Uh, we have a post from Omar, who I believe's over at Dragonfly.

He says, "Nothing to love in the Circle IPO filing and no idea how it prices at 5 billion. Gross margins getting crushed with distribution costs. " Um, for those that don't know, Circle pays Coinbase, as an example, a lot to effectively distribute the stable coin.

Um uh Omar says core US market being deregulated and banks and financial institutions about to crash the private party spending over 250 year in compensation another another 140 million in GNA core income driver which is rates already topped and heading lower 90% chance of two cuts this year um and it we're they're pricing it at 32 times 24 earnings for a business that just lost its mini monopoly and facing several headwinds.

Uh, and it's expensive when growth is structurally challenged. TLDDR feels like a hailmary for some liquidity before the squad rolls in. So, who is the squad in this case? Oh, it's just all the banks and other financial institutions that will launch their own equally stable coin. Sure. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense.

Um, I heard a take from a crypto investor I was texting with.

uh she said uh you know there's no real crazy take here but it's the first uh stable coin IPO which is just a cool way for public markets to have a clearer way to be long stable coins generally and so that's a product that really hasn't existed prior you had to go into the private markets and invest in something like bridge which Sequoia did or you had to go onchain and do all this more manual stuff and get some like leverage and do all these crazy DeFi things and now you'll just be able to buy it on public.

com so if you are invested in Circle and waiting for the IPO and you're stressed out. What kind of bed should you sleep? An eight sleep for sure. Absolutely doubts of feel your best days. Uh, how'd you do last night? I think I did poorly because I woke up so early because of the Ripling Deal Spy news.

We had to get up early to talk about that story. Dig in. Let me see how I did. I imagine I'm a little low on total time. I was right. I got a 79. I was asleep for 6 hours and 31 minutes. What' you do? We were We were scooping. Yeah. In our defense. What' you do? I I did a 97. 97.

That pales in comparison to uh friend of mine and listener of the show, Bailey. Uh Bailey Barrow put up a hundred last night. Congratulations to Bailey. Congratulations to Bailey. Give him give him a little gong for that. Little gong moment. Uh but go to eatleleep. com/tbpn and get yourself a pod.

uh you will not regret it and your uh body will thank you. Uh who else should we talk about? Oh uh big news from Patrick Oanosy. Uh he's uh launching issue number two of Colossus Review. We we did a whole deep dive on the first edition of Colossus Review.

It was a fantastic uh interview and and really a lot of content in that magazine. Not not light on content at all. Uh great layout. Um it will be free for everyone online that the print is magic. You got to get the print edition. That's a good strategy, by the way.

And I feel like one of my friends had um his parents had a subscription to National National Geographic since like the 80s or something. And so he has a collection of every single magazine of National Geographic. And so when you go over to his house, he'll kind of say, "Oh, like what month and year were you born in?

" You'll pull out the National Geographic from that year and you can kind of see what's going on in the world at that time. It's kind of a fun like party trick. And it's not every day that you get a chance to actually say, "Okay, I think this will be I think Colossus Review will be around for a long time.

If I order the first one and then stay subscribed forever, I could wind up with a library full of these things and actually have a complete collection. " Uh, and I'm not saying that that's going to be like wildly valuable.

It'll just be a cool artifact to put in your library one day and a way to understand history from the lens of Patrick himself. Uh, I'm I'm just excited this becau about this uh because the topic. Yeah.

because the topic Green Oaks is is one of those firms that is intentionally goated under the you know they they're in many ways under the radar. You don't see them on the timeline a lot but then every time there's a you know10 billion plus exit and they're they're way in there. So snuck in um very excited. Yeah.

So they're covering Neil Meta and Green Oaks. It's written by Jeremy Stern and you really won't want to miss it. So check back tomorrow uh to get a copy of Colossus Review. Can't wait. I mean, I think Colossus Review, I'm I'm I'm super bullish, super long.

I wish uh you know, Patrick obviously posts about it and he talks about it on his show, but I think he should buy some billboards and I think he should go to adquick. com and I think he should make you know focus on put Neil on the 101. Yes, 100%. I'm sure he would love that. I'm sure.

Yeah, I'm sure Green would love that. Uh I mean, Adqu would allow Patrick to tackle out ofome advertising in an easy and measurable way.

Yeah, you know, Patrick and Colossus, they'd be able to say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising because only Adquertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And so, it's it's kind of a no-brainer for Patrick. Text him, let him know.

Um, should we go over to this this fun story that people were generating uh AI generated receipts trying to fool the expense management softwares? Ramps on the case. They solved it within within 24 hours. within 24 hours.

Eric Lyman posts speced, designed, and widely shipped to production in under 24 hours by Will Ye and the applied AI team at RAMP. They uh and he shares the Michael Jordan meme of I took that personally. Chat GPT's new image generator is really good at faking receipts.

Well, you're going to have to try harder, good luck, to sneak it by your ramp expense policy because ramps on the case. What What's the scenario where somebody's generating a fake receipt? they uh didn't catch a picture of the receipt. No, no, no.

I I I think it would be you you your you you know your boss says, "Hey, yes, you can go and take people out, but you can't get a bunch of drinks. " And so you go and you say, "Yeah, we were at the we we we went to this restaurant and we bought salads and we weren't buying liquor. " Basically, something like that.

That is wrong. You know, you could change that. No power because you're not going to be able to change the name of the swipe on the credit card, but you could fake the items that you purchase. So you could say, "Yeah, I went to Best Buy, boss.

I got a new office chair, but really you got an iPad and you like sold it or something like that. " So like that type of fraud, I think is what not not to give you any ideas, but that that's the type of fraud you want to avoid.

And that's the reason why why why RAMP like is whole built around like take a picture of your of your receipt so you know actually what people are are are buying on the corporate cards. Yep. Anyway, um speaking of ramp, go to ramp. com. Say both. A lot of people say, "Oh, Wander is where you find your happy place.

" But when it comes to corporate cards, expense management, and bill pay, RAMP is where I find my happy place every day. Use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Um, what else would be good to go to before we wrap it up?

Um, we got, uh, I liked I liked, uh, to round it out Chris Baky's post on summary quote.

He said, "Uh, the plan, you're James Bond, but it's at a global payroll company, and you only get 5,000 euros a month, and when you get caught, you'll lock yourself in the bathrooms and delete your LinkedIn account, break your phone with an axe, and immediately confess and join the It's a great summer.

Join the uh, you know, the enemy. It's such a bizarre story. It's really entertaining. It's the truth is stranger than fiction. You can't really can't write this. " Um it is the new the new season of Silicon Valley. Everyone, what a wild what a wild day. But yeah. Um and yeah, thank you to all the sponsors.

Uh show's been really fun. Go to public. com investing for those who take it seriously and check out Poly Market, Adqu Wander, Bezel, Numeral, all of our sponsors. We're really grateful to them. Do it all in We got to get a new We got to get a new So I was looking on Poly Market.

There's a lot of stuff on who will acquire Tik Tok. Apparently, Apploven and Amazon emerge as Tik Tok biders ahead of the deadline. So, right now, uh, Perplexity, Larry Ellison, Oracle, etc. I don't know if App Appven I don't think is even listed or or people. Yeah, we're not seeing it up there.

So, we're going to get this update or we're going to get this market updated uh because app is in the race and last I checked I'm going to look on public uh app actually had the market cap to potentially absorb something like this and they have you know the uh I mean just the last thing we should cover today because it is news today uh the tariff announcement did happen.

Uh Trump gave the speech at the Rose Garden for Liberation Day and the result is that uh the US will impose 10% tariffs on all imports and even higher rates for some nations. The president opened his remarks Wednesday by saying new tariff policies would make America wealthy again.

He said he would be announcing reciprocal tariffs on countries across the world. It can't get any simpler than that. You tariff us, we tariff you. Later, Trump held up a chart with a list of countries saying it was too windy to put on an easel, which is kind of funny. There's a funny image going around.

uh he began to read off the list with tariffs of the countries imposed on the United States and then the tariff he said the US would levy in response he said that the US was going to be charging a discounted reciprocal tariff because the US is kind for China the US is levying a 34% tariff then for Europe we're going to charge them 20% Japan Japan 24% is going down 31% tariff on Switzerland meaning that the price if of your existing watches just went up and uh in general the market seems to like it.

Uh the Dow Jones is up half a percent, the S&P 500 is up point6 and the NASDAQ is up8% today. And so not a not a bloodbath in the markets. Um people were expecting some stuff, they got some stuff, they got some they met their expectations and so things move forward. The march of capitalism marches on.

We should have Joe on tomorrow. Sure. It' be fun. I don't know if we have time. stack lineup tomorrow. Joe Weisenthal would be great. One of the top posters in the world. But uh wait, we got to give away We gota So let's give away the dom tomorrow.

I realize we didn't prep and and pull all the reviews and everything give away. Little bit of an update. We are we are giving instead of instead of drinking a bottle of Doming, we are regifting a bottle of Dom Pering. And so leave us a review on Apple Podcast or Spotify.

Send us a screenshot of your review and you will be entered to win this wonderful bottle of Don Peron. It is a 2015 vintage if you care, but we think it all tastes pretty good. Everybody cares. Thank you folks. Thanks for watching. Cited for