Laks Srini on Making Homeownership in Reach with ZeroDown

Bucks, rainy welcome to the podcast!

Thanks, thanks for having me here. So you are the CTO and the co-founder of Zero Down. What does Zero Down do?

So, we help people buy houses. We think, even in a place like the Bay Area, people with good jobs and healthy finances should be able to buy a home. It all started with my co-founder, Abhijit. He was the CEO at Zenefits. He was making a decent chunk of change, had a great job, healthy finances, but he'd moved to the Bay Area about five years ago. He had twins and he wanted to buy a house, only to find out that you need to have three hundred, four hundred thousand dollars to spare, not all of your savings but to spare, to be able to buy a house. This felt pretty shitty. Like, even if you have a great job and you're making a lot of money, and like where, what in any other place in the world would be considered rich, you can't even think about buying a house here.

Turns out, a lot more people were in the same boat. A lot of our early-tenured engineers were just getting married, looking to settle down, and man, like we can't buy a house. It's going to take us like four or five years to save. We thought there has to be some way else to be able to have a path to homeownership.

This company is super interesting; the structure is really interesting. But associated with it are massive costs. So, you know, this is not just prototyping an app and showing someone at Starbucks. How do you even start testing this idea?

Well, we spoke about this for close to 18 months. We even did a side hobby project which was like helping Abhijit buy a house. We tried to figure out like, okay, what would be the mechanics of it? What is the history of mortgages? What is the history of zero down mortgages? Why can't we do zero down mortgages to people in Facebook, Google, Apple, Airbnb? It seems to make sense. These people are good risks.

We spoke to a whole bunch of companies that had started to be mortgage providers in the last few years but died because we wanted to learn lessons from not the survival bias, but from people who actually did not succeed. We spoke to a whole bunch of real estate investors. We learned about an entire class of assets called single-family rentals that started from post-financial crisis with Blackstone and Citibank and all these other funds. People who came out of these funds started companies where they just went and bought massive amounts of single-family homes and rented them out. Their thesis was close to 11 million Millennials are going to reach household formation age over the next decade. They're going to move from these small, tiny apartments to single-family homes.

The out of luck? They're not going to be able to buy it due to so many other factors like student debt, real wage stagnation, and all these other things. So they're gonna have to rent it, and the thesis was like they're gonna rent it, so might as well rent it from us, and we'll just raise rents every year and have a really good fund doing this.

There's a company called Invitation Homes which is public and owns close to a hundred thousand homes. There are a few other big funds that just do this, and it turns out this is a real asset class that people are investing in. So it just turned out to be a confluence of things that kind of came together that made Zero Down possible.

Okay, yeah, and I think it's a really interesting point about survivorship bias. What did you learn from the companies that failed?

So, we actually learned a lot about mortgages themselves by actually talking to these companies. You can't really differentiate that much if you're selling a mortgage because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are these government agencies which define a box that are mortgages that are valid, that can be sold in a securitization secondary market. If they're not a valid mortgage, you have to hold them on your books or you have to figure out some other way of like private-label securitization and all the sort of fun stuff.

So, all the companies that started doing mortgages, like most of their thesis was hey, like if we have a better UX on top of mortgages it would be great. Turns out people didn't care that much about UX because it was a once-in-a-lifetime transaction. In fact, they wanted it to take longer. Yeah, and turns out people care more about like a 50 basis points difference rather than like, hey, like I have an app to do this stuff.

It's okay, like I'll go to my bank, like get up and out of my statement, like if I can save some money. So CAC was the problem; customer acquisition just became more and more expensive. When the rates were lower, people who were doing a lot of refinances were able to survive. But once the rates started going up, the refinances stopped, and suddenly, all of these companies were struggling to acquire customers. That was the biggest lesson that we learned.

Like, the entire trillions of dollars of the mortgage industry is controlled by this small box where you can't really differentiate that much. But it's also for the good because it's also consumer protection. People don't really understand how mortgages work. We've spoken to close to thousands of people, at least 1,000 to 3,000 people, and not everybody understands how mortgages work. These are really smart people who work in tech, and like they understand math really well, yet they have no idea how much principal they've paid down over five years.

Everybody's really surprised when I say even with a 20% down, a fixed-rate interest mortgage, you would have paid off only close to 8% of principal in five years. People are like, wow, I do not think that would be the case. So it is complicated, and not everybody understands it. People just use it because that's the status quo. So that was a lot of learning just by talking to people in the started module eight startups.

And how did it, and how did you go about testing, buying a your house, your co-founders house? Like, he helped him buy a house. What does that mean?

Now, I mean, the idea was to help him buy a house. We actually didn't succeed, like that's not a zero down because we kind of like came upon it. Essentially, what we tell our customers is we will buy the house that you want. You say I want that house, we'll buy it for you and give you the keys in seven days, like with a bottle of champagne.

No bank noise, throw a hundred-page documents, and all that stuff. You move in, and as you make monthly payments, you start getting a portion of the home every month in terms of like purchase credits. You can think of it almost as like vesting and cliff and stock options, you know what happens at work.

So you get 0.25% of the home every month, and over a five-year period you get 15% of the home. So it becomes easier to buy the home from us at any time you want after a two-year period. Think of it as a cliff, right? So anytime between two and five years you can buy the home from us zero down. Every year you get 3% of the home, so let's say you're three, you have 9% of the home, your company exited, you came into some money, you can just buy the home from us at that point and then just create similar terms, similar mortgage terms.

Then we are actually actively working on partnerships that we can easily transition people when the time comes.

Okay, and so break down the product from a founder perspective. Like, what services do you offer? How do you make money?

Yeah, so we think of it as like this vertical full-stack home buying model, which is what Zero Down is. We want to help people right from search. Mostly, it feels like a small problem with Zillow and Redfin and everybody is looking at it, but everybody searches for price, bed, bath, and maybe neighborhoods. But what we found out is that people are really looking for is "show me places 30 minutes commute from work that has a lot of natural light, that has a big backyard."

People often tend to collect all this data from different sources, sure! Like, let's take this for an example: I want a home that's about 30 minutes' driving distance from San Francisco that's close to good schools. Let's say I have a family and good schools are important to me. Now, if I talk to a lot of friends and arrive at this conclusion that I should be looking for a home in the Millbrae, South San Francisco, San Bruno area because they tend to have good schools, then I'm going to search for only those places in Redfin and Zillow.

With Zero Down, if you actually said show me all the places that's 30 minutes' driving distance from the YC HQ, where we are, you would actually see Albany and Millbrae. Albany is a little north of Berkeley. Turns out Albany's prices of homes in Albany are half of that in Millbrae, and school ratings according to Great Schools are actually better.

So there is some loss of information when you transfer this external research to these different tools, which can be avoided. If you actually use that one tool which does all of these things for you, right? Now we want to build a hyper-localized search that shows me homes in your farmers market. We just actually did a tag where we show homes that are great for dogs.

We look at like close to dog parks, big outdoor space, and stuff like that, and we try to collate all these things. So that's search. The next big thing is, okay I want to buy a home. What real estate agent do I use?

So we work with a lot of partner agents who are experts. We have this curated list of agents. We have agents who are experts in San Francisco. We know agents who are experts in Oakland. We have agents who are experts in the Peninsula, South Bay, and so on, because again, homes are hyper-local, and you need to know the neighborhood really well to be able to help.

So we help put that together and then the financing itself with zero down payment. That's like the biggest value. $200,000 in the bank today is more valuable than $200,000 in the bank five years from now, right?

So being able to do that today is a huge, huge value. Then we actually do the deal execution. We take care of inspections, appraisals, the walkthroughs because we are buying 100% of the house upfront. We want to make sure it's a really good house, and because it's your house, you want to make sure it's a really good house. That's why the search also comes in. To be able to eventually, we want to add tags like, "Hey, show me neighborhoods that performed well during the 2001 crisis, 2008 crisis."

It's almost like we are actually launching an ultimate home buying guide for engineers where we crunch like 50 different data sets and try to figure out like, okay, what are the things you should take into account as you consider where to buy a home?

So, speaking of engineers, what kind of customers do you have right now, and how do you go about evaluating customers that make it fit?

Yeah, so we have customers that are designers, product managers, engineers, directors of emerging markets, directors, investors, storage agency juniors. We have a fair variety of customers in the Bay Area. We even have a pastor as a customer.

The biggest thing that we evaluate is like, is their income healthy, right? And do they have some savings? Because we have them build the rest of the savings to be able to buy the house from us five years from now.

So, we are basically making a bet on the five years from now customer, right? Like, we are saying the future you is going to be way more successful, the future you is gonna have way more money, and the future you is gonna be way more all-around awesome. And that's kind of like what we evaluate for.

It's a pretty fast, like three to five minute qualification flow. You just connect your bank account using Plaid. Let me look at an asset report. We look at your income and we say, "Craig, you can go and buy a 1.4 million dollar house, and here's a great real estate agent." Once you say, "I want that house," the next thing you know is you get the keys in seven days and a bottle of champagne. It's worth it.

Now, how does this work in a market? I don't know what the temperature of the market is right now in the Bay, but you hear about like all these all-cash offers that happen immediately. How does Zero Down work?

We actually give our customers deposits for an all-cash offer.

Okay, so we basically arm our customers with all cash offers so that they have way more probability that they close on the home of their dreams. Yeah, fast! Well, when we started the company, I thought like one of the things that were going to take the longest is like people finding homes.

I actually like closing on it. Probably 75% of our customers so far have bought homes in two or three weeks. I mean in the home, like in a month, month and a half from the time they wrote about Zero Down, and I have their know-how, which is crazy. I mean I can't even believe that, but it’s amazing!

Okay, now how? I understand this in the context of high-paid engineers or, you know, Bay Area folks. How does this go about expanding to other markets?

So, there are lots more cities. I think one of the things that has become a characteristic of the unaffordability crisis in the country is that the most desirable places where people want to live—the places where the most desirable jobs are—are the places where people have been priced out of the market.

Seattle, Denver, Austin, Salt Lake, DC, New York, Boston—these cities are viable markets for us, and we are planning to be in Austin and Seattle in the next couple of months.

Hmm, so how do you go about crying? Oh my God, cities is one! And largely, it's about education and how do we explain this to people? How do people understand this? Because it's a new way of doing things, right?

And if you actually look at the math at Zero Down against rent, even though the monthly payment is higher than rent, at the end, you get purchase credits that's worth like fifteen percent of the home. If you take that into account, it actually ends up being cheaper than renting.

Hmm, so being able to explain that really well... Okay, this is the thing, right? I heard about Zero Down when you guys were in the batch. It seemed great. I imagine a lot of people who are not in the tech industry and especially those not exposed to early startups all the time hear this stuff and they're like, "Mmm, I don't know about this." Maybe they even remember 2008. How do you communicate that to someone?

I think part of it is just enough people having done it, okay? So, yeah! If you have a friend who has done it, yeah! We are doing about a dozen homes a month right now. I was actually on Saturday with customers, doing video shoots of like how do they think about Zero Down? How would they explain Zero Down to a friend? All of that stuff helps.

Okay, now in terms of where the market's going, if there were to be a downturn in the housing market, how would you guys fare?

Zero Down is actually a long-term holder of homes. The fund that we run is a five to seven year fund.

Can you talk about the fund really quick?

Yeah, so Zero Down is actually two businesses. We have a tech company and what's called a propco property company. The property company is actually a fund that goes and buys houses and holds them. The fund has a lot of infrastructures; it has like legal, audit, external fund administrator.

It has backup servicers, so that's also part of the safety net because these are people's houses, and we don't want to be blasé about it. Like, we want to have protections even in case anything happens to us—that the contract can be honored.

So the fund actually has a lot of infrastructure around it. Now, the fund is a long-term horizon and we actually believe we are bullish on real estate like in Bay Area, Seattle, and all these different places over the long term. The reason we are is also this is where the jobs are. If you look at the job growth in these markets, the wage growth in this market, we believe that like these jobs are probably going to be the most evergreen jobs in the next few decades.

How many people?

We are about 17.

17! Okay, so, man!

Okay, now as big as I thought, given how things are going, like to be 25?

I was gonna say, how do you go about hiring for all these diverse roles when essentially you have these two structures in your company?

Yeah, so we have a director of capital markets who used to work at Photos' Investment Group. Our GC is from YC Continuity. Our marketing person used to be from YC as well.

So we are also looking at like people who can straddle and play multiple roles, like from being an IC to like being a manager and building out an entire team. Not everybody can do that, so we are trying to be selective about hiring those kinds of people who can straddle that entire range.

We have our engineering team in Vancouver. We are gonna be building our data science team in India because we are doing hyper-local search for every city.

So how do Google bus routes affect home prices? How do Facebook busloads affect home prices? We are doing a blog post soon about how does greenery and tree cover affect home prices. These things kind of help and matter.

To be able to do some of these things fast and for many cities, we want to build the right team to be able to do that in your distributors. We are distributed; we're not fully remotely distributed, but we have a few offices. We have an office in Vancouver. We have one person in India right now, and we'll maybe have an office in...

What led you to make those choices?

I think at Zenefits, I had built an engineering team that was like Vancouver, Bangalore, SF. Vancouver is in the same timezone, two hours away, and you find some amazing talent there. We were also heavily influenced by the PG article about like 95 percent of talent is outside the US.

One of the ways we grew really quickly at Zenefits in terms of hiring was we were able to tap talent all over the world. It was just easier to bring them to Vancouver in terms of immigration than the US.

But now we know great people there and so it's kind of a no-brainer at this point. It was all in network; we're not like trying out completely new people, you know, like optimizing for like the lowest costs. Yeah, I know, and we trust the people. We want to build, like I said, the right team, the right person, who can straddle all the way from being an IC, like actually do the work, to be able to be like, okay, switch gears without a team.

Yeah, to be able to do that.

Okay, and so all the remote folks are not, well, sort of kind of remote, are on the tech side now, the Shannon's in Seattle, of course. From now, I think like our design is mostly on the tech side.

Okay, and on the tech side, what do you foresee being the hardest technical challenge?

It's the entirety of the experience, right? I mean, like I use tech. I think about tech has a great haha. So, when you're looking at homes, how do we deliver the right forms to the right person at the right time, right?

Like, what are you looking for? Just like being able to do that itself is not super easy. Then you want to do it at scale. There are aspects of like the asset management, deal execution, and like a whole bunch of stuff. That's where like a lot of our like Zenefits, like automation and those kinds of capabilities come into play.

On the asset management side, like a bunch of us from the team have experience. Like I worked at the Shaw, which was my first job out of college, and a couple of our folks on the engineering team were all people I hired out of college at the Shaw. They followed me to Zenefits; they followed me to Zero Down.

So there's a little bit of that there. So we're looking at it as like all these pieces, but like all of them need to connect and have like a coherent single experience, like a cross search, agent T, financing, deal execution, and actually living in the home.

Because these first-time homeowners often have no idea of the things that could go wrong, we actually provide this concierge app where like people can text us like if like, "Hey, my sink is broken," and we'll connect them with like high-quality service providers in their neighborhood.

We actually give them a concierge service which will come like every six months, like make sure they do preventative maintenance, change the light bulbs, switch out the batteries, like the bathrooms, kind of stuff. So just making the entire process of homeownership easier.

Yeah, we also have a watch program where if they buy furniture like in Borrow or like they use Feather, they get some discounts.

The breadth is really wild for such an early company. Why did you choose to go that way?

I think it was part of our DNA from being at Zenefits. So one of the biggest lessons there was this thing called the hub-and-spoke model.

Okay, so Zenefits, like the software itself was the HR, payroll, benefits, but there were so many other spokes like time and attendance systems, 401k, commuter benefits, health insurance. All of that stuff was set up in a way that you can make so much money off all the spokes that you can give the hub away for free. That was the original Zenefits business model.

But Zero Down, we want to keep, we don't want to really make money off the financing and we want to keep that cost low, as low as possible, or at cost. We want to pass that on to the customers.

Now, there are so many ancillary things around the home in a home buying transaction, right? Like there's search, brokerage, escrow, insurance, and while living in the home—all these different services. There's so many players that take a small transaction piece of the pie.

If we can pull it all into one great experience, one is, we can make money off other places. In fact, like we charge the customers a $10,000 upfront fee.

Okay, that's how we make money. We split commissions with the buy-side broker and that's how, like those are the two big things we make money.

And then we make money on the concierge. If people choose to buy furniture using rewards and get a discount, like we make a small percentage of that.

Okay, now having all these together not only means that we can give the home at cost, but it also means that like we can build a single coherent experience for the customer, right?

It'd be like we want people to have a jaw-dropping experience like when they buy a house—which is not something you associate with buying a house, you know? It's like one of the most painful processes like that you go through in life.

But so far, like we have a hundred and PS, and people, it's almost incredulous when you talk to people. So, what? Like, I can't believe how fast this happened! Yeah, like we wanted that house ever in like fifteen days, like we were in the house!

Yeah, which is extremely gratifying, and that's why we do all these hard things.

Yeah, it makes it exam. But we, the biggest thing we want is like for consumers to have this amazing experience like across from the time they start to search for homes.

Yeah, till the time that they're living in the home. I just find the product development method really interesting to just like go so broad from the beginning rather than like pick like one.

Like, you know, obviously, maybe search was like figure it out. I just think it's cool. And then did you—who's peeing all these things?

So it's almost all of us because we have folks who talk to customers all day long. So that needs to come back as constant feedback in terms of what do people really want.

And we have, again, like almost all of us try and talk to customers of like, "Hey, why did you do this thing? Why did you not end up going with zero down? What was your reasoning?"

Okay, and we try to just understand like why people what objections people have and how do people think about the process. That's how we even came up with searches.

Because then, when people are talking about a home, like one of the first questions we ask is like, "Okay, tell us more about like the kind of home you want. What are you looking for?"

When you hear people talk, that's what you hear. You hear things like, "Hey, I want my commute to be efficient," right? If two people commute, it's a machine problem to optimize that commute. Right?

Machines can do a way better job at optimizing your commute location based on where homes are available than like humans trying to optimize commute after life, right?

Machines can take your choice from 10,000 homes to 20 homes—like 20 to one is a human problem, 10,000 to 20 is a machine problem. So that's the whole point of building search.

We'll just, by listening to people and hearing what they want, and there's a lot of anxiety around homeownership. Right? It's like, "Oh, like so far I was living in a rental, if there was any problem, I'll just call my landlord. No, now what happens?"

Like, if something happens, yeah, that's where the concierge comes in. You always have help! It's like a support line for your home, and it's 24/7. You just text us and like, we'll take care of you.

Hmm, so that's the way that we think about the different stages.

Okay, so let's break down the customer conversations a little bit more then. So are you sending out every employee into the field to literally knock on doors of Zero Down customers? How does that process actually work?

Yeah, so, we do a lot of customer interviews, and we record them. And we disseminate them. Everybody listens to it, yeah, to continuously learn. We have people talking to customers all day long, like trying to explain how Zero Down works.

We listen to the questions that people ask, and we try to understand what are their concerns, what is good, what is bad about this, what are the barriers to them just saying, "No-brainer, I'm just going to do this."

So, we constantly try to iterate and learn from that.

Okay, and I think that's the thing that I love about YC the most as well because the effect of compounding on these learning is huge. Yeah!

The things that you learn week over week over week just compounding to have massive advantages, right?

I think because I just keep hearing it from you, and so many times people are like, "Oh yeah, I talk to customers." And right when was the last time you actually talked to a customer?

And it's like usually a month ago, two months ago. And it doesn't sound like that's the case for you.

Yes! Saturday, so we drove over to customers' houses like to do a bunch of customer videos and testimonials, right?

Yeah!

So where do you go from here?

I think we want to make it possible for everybody to be able to own a house, no matter where they live, and it's a path. It's a long process, but we want to help as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, which is why we're going to be in Seattle and Austin soon.

Yeah, and we probably will be in like five or six more cities next year.

Okay! Because, what’s your philosophy then? Is everyone should own a house?

Yeah! Okay, well, but why? You know, like Millennials move around like...

Yeah, so wouldn't it be cool if you are living in a house for five years, like you own some ownership in that house, you should be able to take it with you?

Why should everybody 100 percent of every home? Wouldn't it be cool if you can take your homeownership with you where you go, like a 401k, right?

Like you can take your 401k around like it's not tied to a company.

Right? Like it should be like that! At any point, you should be able to sell some part of the home like for money.

It should be liquid. Now a home is a financial hub, right? I mean, it's where most of your wealth for most people is trapped in this brick and mortar.

How would that work? So those are the things we often think about as the future—like how do, how does homeownership look at least like for the generation of people that are growing up like here, five, ten, fifteen years from now?

Yeah, and what would make it really easy? What would make it accessible? What would make sense?

Honestly, this is what I'm wondering! Like, do you sweat the details of what a house looks like?

If you said, you know, in a crazy world where everyone basically lives in like the pod hotel version of a house, or a world where...

I don't think that would be the case, but everybody is gonna live in a pod hotel.

Because even today, I think space is important to people! So people make all sorts of choices for space. I mean, people commute crazy amounts in the Bay Area! Like, people commute from Antioch, Tracy, and like three hours one way to get to a job, like because they get a larger space that's close to schools and these things are important.

And I think these are like fundamental human things. I don't know if that will ever get replaced.

There will be a class of people at different stages in life. Maybe there's a stage of life where you live in a pod hotel or community building, and then there's a different stage where you don't.

So that's kind of how I think about the world.

Okay, and do you think autonomous cars affect that, affect your business in any way?

I don't think so! I think autonomous cars are cool! Like it might enable people to live farther away, but I don't know! Like just because the commute is easier, it still takes that much time!

So, I mean, there are places on the East Coast where there's like great public transit and people travel three hours on a train.

Yeah, maybe like those kinds of things will become easier, but I don't know. I guess we would have to step into that world.

I can't make the transition in my head to see myself living more than ten minutes away from work!

So, I'm in the same boat! Like I would never do that!

And I guess the core of the question is like, it doesn't really matter for your business right now, does it?

It doesn’t! I think people have to live somewhere! Yeah! It’s inherently human, like that you want to make the space your own!

Yeah! If you really think about homeownership, the fundamental rights are the ability to profit from sale.

Right? When you own something, you can profit from sale. Ability to customize it, reshape it, remodel it, make it your own.

If I gave you an iPhone and said like you can't install any software, and they say you can't like put a cover on it, like then, it's not your phone, right?

Like, so that's what happens to a rental most of the time! So ability to reshape, remodel and make it your own, and finally I think ability to have like a stable cost basis over a period of time.

That's what mortgage really does! Like it locks in your payment for 30 years. Yeah!

With Zero Down, you have five years of like stable payments. Nobody will raise the rents on you or kick you out, right?

You can remodel, reshape the home, like to make it your own, and you build these ownership—like you build these credits in the home, and you get the profit from like these credits because they're a percentage of home value, they increase with the value of the home.

So that's, that's how we think about Zero Down.

I think it's great! So just kind of wrapping up for founders who are listening who still haven't figured out what they want to build.

You have spent a lot of time researching Zero Down, and then you just execute it. Did you go through other ideas?

Oh, well, a lot!

Okay, but I think, I think at the end of the day, if you are not doing something that you truly believe should exist in the world or like be there, it's gonna be very hard.

Like there are gonna be like deep dark days, and there are gonna be really bad days. There will be great days, but there will be really, really bad days!

And if it's not something that you're super committed to, you want to really see in the world, it's hard to stick with it! It's hard to just do a startup for startup's sake!

Yeah, so I think this is the thing that spoke to us!

So, okay, what do that? So you basically hit a point where you're like trying one thing or thinking about one thing, thinking about the other thing, then you just felt the energy?

We just kept coming back to this, right? Like, the biggest reason that we might not have done this is because it's really hard! There are like all these different aspects.

There’s capital markets, there’s educating consumers, and basically making sure all of these things work together. And again, like it's a broad play, so that was the biggest reason we were like, "Is this like—can we do some enterprise hit Jeff's ass? That's easy money, just comes in every month, it's beautiful!"

Yeah! But it didn't quite excite all the three founders as much as like, "Hey, this is a real problem! There are people in the Bay Area today making more than $200,000 household income, but they can't even think about buying a house!"

So like, how do we go about solving that? Like, homeownership is part of the American dream, man!

Yeah, and we want to kind of revive it and bring it back!

Did you feel that same kind of enthusiasm about your co-founders?

Like, was it where you should be shopping around for the company or the idea itself?

I think I had made up my mind that if I were to do another company, it was going to be with the business and hobby, and that was the most important thing for me!

Like, so—because again, like, yeah, like it is, like startups are hard! You've gotta be like spending a lot of time together! Might as well like have fun while doing it and do it with people who you like as people!

So that was the most important consideration, and then this idea just spoke to us! Like, because it was a problem that was facing myself! And it turns out like a lot more people were facing the same problem!

Yeah! At one point, I thought like our marketing strategy would be standing in front of University Avenue, holding a board saying like, "Buy a home with no down payment! Let me explain how!"

But it definitely feels like that, that so many people with really good jobs and healthy finances are just caught in this loop of trying to save enough for a down payment!

Like, the cost of living is high! That's why people leave the Bay Area, yeah.

Right! Man, thanks so much for coming in!

No, thank you! Thank you for having us!