If you have value in your home, you don’t want to miss out on the opportunities that equity can bring you. That’s why Splitero was born: to use technology to give homeowners financial flexibility without taking on additional debt.
In this episode, we explore virtual home equity access and how it’s revolutionizing the real estate industry. CEO Michael Gifford shares the story of Splitero’s inception, just over two years ago, and their unwavering mission to provide homeowners with the best options to access their home equity.
Salesforce, the backbone of their operations, streamlines the entire process, from lead management to underwriting and funding. Michael shares valuable insights on how he and his team have navigated implementing Salesforce while rapidly growing their business.
This is a conversation you don’t want to miss, as we explore the heart of real estate innovation, fintech growth, and their relentless pursuit of empowering homeowners.
Revolutionizing Home Equity Access
Don’t have time for the full episode? Here’s what you need to know:
The Highlights
How did your company get started?
0:56 - I've been in real estate the last 14 years of my career and over the last few years, the market has evolved to where homeowners don't really want to sell because there's not a lot of homes to buy. The interest rates have gone crazy. And so they probably have a low interest rate, but they have all this equity in their house. People have amassed a crazy amount of equity that they want to access to pay off debt, repair, renovate their house, . . . or just cost of living. They need help supplementing the cost of living. And so they want to access the equity and Splitero is here to help that.
How long have you guys been in business?
1:36 - We're relatively new, just over two years. We started making a lot of home equity investments in California. We've expanded outside of California to Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and Washington.
So you are a startup company. Did you guys raise venture capital or were you bootstrapped?
1:59 - A little bit of both. We have some great investors that are venture capitalists as well as some strategic . . . real estate and . . . FinTech-focused investors.
Can you tell us your mission statement?
2:29 -Our mission is to provide homeowners the best options to access their home equity. And really what happens is a lot of people own houses, but they might not have, say, the best credit or really high income. And so it can be difficult for them to use the traditional methods to access their equity. We're here to fix that. We want to change and help the homeowners that the financial systems left behind.
Can you tell me what made you decide to go with Salesforce?
3:00 -We use Salesforce for everything. We use it as the foundation for all of our business. It starts with the most basic Salesforce use as a CRM. A homeowner comes to us, they need help. How we keep track of them, make sure that we're working with them, keeping up to date, and really anything after getting the lead, it goes through our system.
3:23 - All of our team uses it to process the home equity investments we produce. We underwrite in there, we put a valuation, we have APIs that bring in a bunch of data for us for the market and then all the way to closing and funding. So it produces our documents that a homeowner signs. Those go out to a notary and escrow and title, as you can imagine. When you're giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to people, there's a lot of legal stuff that has to happen. And so it produces all those documents. And then we fund and close out of Salesforce as well.
Prior to this role, have you worked in Salesforce before?
4:01 - Yeah, I have worked in Salesforce before, but I've also gone the other path, . . . where you're developing your own operating system, how long that takes, and how expensive it can be. Obviously, Salesforce needs a lot of manipulation as well to your unique case. But it can keep up with the pace that the organization is moving. We change and iterate and grow quickly. And that is easier for us to do in Salesforce than if we were building our own operating system from scratch. And so I've seen both paths before the Salesforce path. It was very clear after seeing how poorly building our own software and operating system could go.
What was that implementation process like, bringing on a big CRM like Salesforce and merging that with the growth of your company?
4:59 - It's certainly challenging. I think that the process itself is being hyper-focused on the steps and iteration, like the building blocks, building the foundation in there so that we can do bigger things in the future, even though you have to start with only certain aspects. There are even teams in Splitero right now that have very rudimentary Salesforce experience or even not in Salesforce cause we haven't gotten there.
5:27 - When you are a startup, you have limited cash. You're trying to figure out, where do we best invest? How do we put this into the part of Salesforce that gives us the biggest lift. And so you start from there, but it is hectic from the start. There's a lot of building that's going on. Everybody needs help. We have homeowners that we need to help. And it's hard trying to sit down and prioritize what projects you're going to work on. And that makes it difficult, but also a lot of fun.
6:08 - It also is challenging, right? You sit down, you write out a workflow, you try to figure out okay, this is how it should work. Then you start putting water through those pipes. And it's ‘Oh we didn't think about this’ and ‘We didn't think about that.’ And then you're constantly iterating, changing. Especially in our business, finance and real estate, there's so many unique situations. It's not just a black and white business. And so it's not, like producing a widget that looks like this every time. Every homeowner has different needs, a different situation. And it's hard when you're sitting down to build Salesforce, to think of all of those before you start building.
What growth are you looking forward to seeing at Splitero in the next 12 months or even five years?
6:58 - Right now, we're in 5 states. We have a lot of homeowners to help in those states, but we know there are a lot of other states where homeowners have amassed a multitude of equity. We'll be growing for sure to move out to other states, help those homeowners. And then I think five years, our industry in general is in its adolescence, so it has a big opportunity to grow. If you look at our space right now compared to say a home equity line of credit or other traditional financial products, there's 50-100x growth in there, so there's a lot of opportunity for us to grow in the next five years.
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