It's funny, this is what we were doing which led to the idea for the service. We were renting and investing in REITs and thought "what would a better version of this look like?"

One big difference is that we wanted to feel like an owner of the home we were living in. It carries some emotional appeal and as we got further into planning out the business found there are some tax and return benefits as well.

A few problems we ran into with REITs available to us: - You pay a premium (lower yield) for access to public market liquidity - Public REITs are quite large and not really a great hedge against single family home values (they're invested in multiple property types and residential REITs are often focused on multi-family) - Market sentiment can change the value in an instant, and as a result, share price is not always based on the value of the properties. Not as big of an issue with long-term investing, but can be a problem during periods of time you may want to access the funds (like the end of a lease).