Powering Trust at Scale for Renters with Tim Ray

Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:00.996) Welcome back to the winner circle, everybody. Today I've got a great guest with me, Tim from Verifast. They are helping renters get identified in a trustful way with AI in a trustful way to make that process go more smoothly and get you approved and identified and on to your next living arrangement. They're just a new AI excellence award winner. so Tim, welcome to the winner circle and congratulations on the award. Tim Ray (00:23.886) Thanks Russ, appreciate you. Thanks for having me. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:26.202) Hey, before we get started into this kind of new cool AI world that you're building, give us a little bit of a background on VeraFast and kind of yourself. Tim Ray (00:35.662) So very fast, we are five years into this new venture. I'm a four-time founder serial entrepreneur for the last 15 years. I've had a couple of exits, one missed dumpster fire, which I wish I could take back. But it's also my scar tissue that I'm thankful for begrudgingly. And very fast being the latest one. And we're really focused in the, although I'm in Canada, we're really focused in the US multifamily market, which means large owners and operators of apartment communities across the United States. And really this idea that, you know, very fast is powering trust at scale for enterprise apartment communities where, you know, if you're a you know, a real estate investor that has an apartment or a condo that you rent out and you might, you'd like to screen everybody yourself and shake their hand and call their employer and think you're a private investigator. You know, the largest property mentioned company in the world, know, Grey Star, for example, with over a million doors that they manage, they can't do that. And so this is a how do you do like trust at scale and really we're in renters where rents are highly correlated to people that really need that trust because they have lots of side health, income, self-employment. They're new to the country. They're new people in general that just graduated. And really that's like our mission, like our purposeless profit is how do we allow at scale people to move into apartment communities that are safe and for people that can pay their rent. So that way people can afford to make the renovations and repairs and amenities of that apartment building exists for everyone. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (02:11.888) Well, with three kind of adultish kids coming out and starting to look for apartments, I appreciate where you're going because they have no credit. They barely have jobs and they want to move out. So I'm all for it. Now, I want to take a step back because you've got a super interesting background. You've built companies across private aviation, e-commerce, food subscriptions, and then now you're here. What thread connects all of those and how did those experience shape the way that you're thinking about building very fast? Tim Ray (02:23.31) I'm sure you want some of this. Tim Ray (02:39.086) Uniquely, very fast, was not the original idea founder. I was actually the lead investor in our pre-seed round, and I came as a late-stage co-founder. But I think the unique thing that connected them all was this unique eureka moment, although they're not connected, but somebody giving you an idea or seeing a comment as drawing on some string of a problem that you've had in the past. so originally, I was a landlord in Windsor, which is across the border from Detroit. Sometimes I joke. in cheek saying that you know being a landlord and Windsor's like being a part-time social worker because it's you know if you think about Detroit Windsor's like the B version of Detroit so you know, I got burned quite a bit as a landlord. And when my co-founders were pitching me on the idea of using open banking, you know, direct source data, to get people to share their bank data, to verify their income from their bank account. was this epiphany of like, smokes. That's so obvious. It's so simple. It's genius. It's like, I need to be part of this. And, and then the rest is history. I was in the process of like failing at my third startup in private aviation. And, when that, finally went into the ground, it was a perfect opportunity to come in as our CEO and help scale us to the next phase of growth. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (03:54.118) Well, and you guys are scaling pretty rapidly. I know you're a small team, but you're against this kind of industry dominated by huge incumbents. What's kind of the structural advantage of being kind of small in this space? Tim Ray (04:07.096) So we've bootstrapped on three million Canadian of seed capital from no institutional investors to date. I'm still growing at 150 % year over year growth. And I think one of the things that's unique, know, a lot of people come in, especially their first venture and they come in guns a blazing, you know, raise a bunch of capital, awesome conference booths and lots of money to spend on marketing and so on and so forth. But when you stay tight with your capital, it allows you to sharpen your knife and really to be like operating lean and focus on what matters. And I think that like fear of death, the idea that you have like these much bigger guerrilla competitors are well funded and this like kind of chip that on your shoulder that you get from being underfunded actually makes you more scrappy, more gritty, and by virtue more innovative. And so therefore that's that you know possible you know negative has actually been one of our biggest strengths in terms of doing like batting way above our batting average in terms of growth and scale on such little you know gas in our gas tank. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (05:08.998) Now, I haven't rented an apartment in a while, luckily. I know I'm going to be a co-signer on a couple here soon, I would imagine. But most of the time, this was all credit score driven, and thankfully, I have a good credit score. But what is actually wrong with credit scores, and why has the industry been so slow to challenge them and come up with something new? Tim Ray (05:31.342) So credit scores was never the full decision criteria around renting apartment credit scores is like this historical look at your propensity to pay. And it would say, based on all of your trade lines and all of the bills that you've had in the past, how likely does Tim pay for his bills in the past? But somebody who has a $30,000 income or somebody that has $100,000 income could still have a credit score of 700 or 800. It's just how well you manage the money that you have. The second part, which what we solve for today is the ability to pay, which is very different than your historical propensity to pay your ability to pay, which is your actual income and your cashflow and your expense management in real time has always been done, but it's just been done manually. And with the sophistication of like technology and AI and really what I would call fraud printers, this idea like there's like these like legit businesses that are selling the how to kits on how to commit fraud into apartment buildings. Right. And they use tick tick tock and Reddit and telegram and other social media platforms to distribute their like how-to tips and tricks and also knowing that everybody's going to be a perpetrator of fraud. There's a lot of fraud consumers versus just like fraudsters in general and so Fairfax main thing is really focusing on this idea of like you are who you say you are, you make what you say you make and you have what you say you have as a real-time current indicator of who you are. not necessarily just who you have been in the past. The big weakness around credit scores is that there's just a lot of holes in it. really, credit score should be illegal. Sounds like a big statement, but credit score should be illegal because, for example, me as a Canadian coming to the US, I would have a zero credit score. Somebody who maybe grew up in an ethnic urban community that come from parents that are really part of the cash economy, they would have no credit score. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (07:13.307) Right. Tim Ray (07:23.276) Your great grandfather, Russ, who with like a thousand bucks of cash under the mattress, his credit score sucked too. You know what mean? And so the whole point is that credit scores is this like gamification of your worth as as a, has become a gamification as your worth as a consumer. that only captures people who have learned to play the game early, which is probably like white guys. And it does not go after the immigrants in the urban communities and the ethnicities that really have not had that financial education early enough in life. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (07:54.404) Yeah, and these people, the way you describe them is, you know, they're financially solid, but they're basically invisible to this kind of traditional screening method. But the fraud you're catching is not unsophisticated. Walk me through kind of that modern rental fraud and what it actually looks like today. Tim Ray (08:10.296) So many different. techniques and we have to stay on top of all of them, but you can have everything from, you know, an enterprising guy with a good ID and a good credit score that will go and farm out their credit score and their ID and their banking credentials to allow somebody else to then like go in and pass the system. You can have somebody that's basically you could go in using your credit score, go and rent a bunch of apartments that don't speak to each other and then be create your own like subleasing, you know, property management company where you're subleasing a bunch of people. The problem with that is that We don't know who you're listening to. They could be criminals, sexual offenders, as you can imagine. Sexual offenders, once they get out of jail, need to somewhere live too. The problem is they're a sexual offender for life and nobody will rent to them. So they have to, by necessity, do everything that they can to get into somewhere to live. We still want them to live where we live, right? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (08:48.347) Ciao. Tim Ray (09:03.618) There's a lot of ways around using what's called CPNs or credit protection numbers, which are this idea that an alias for your social security number, and obviously as you can imagine, they're being abused by fraudsters because then they will start to use these CPNs to then create like fake data associated with it to try and get past the post. Long story short, fraud is very sophisticated and because of social media and technology and the need because of the cost of living outstripping people's incomes, it's actually a perfect storm of a flywheel of it getting faster and faster of the ways that they're done and constantly trying to like stay ahead of it. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (09:46.726) So why do the legacy systems miss this stuff if you guys are picking it up? Tim Ray (09:54.222) As you, like, for example, in our space, in the multi-family space, you know, there are a half a dozen major property management software solutions, Yardy, RealPage, Intrada, so on and so forth. The core function of the PMS historically has really been, you know, to be the accounting software, the backend accounting financial function for the property management communities to operate, right? Paying the bills, receiving rent, know, ledgers, right? And everything else has been built on top. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (10:20.954) Mm-hmm. Tim Ray (10:23.822) when you look at all parts of a renter, there's maintenance, there's resident experience, there's payments, there's screening, there's touring, all these parts of things that are part of a property management that if you're not in space, you would not understand. And it's impossible to, if you're one these large property management software, to be at the bleeding edge of every single area simultaneously. And so what you have is entrepreneurs and founders like myself and hundreds of other, what we call, property techs or property technology companies that you live and breathe a specific vertical of that software stack and what we call like best of breed software. And so by virtue... It's this balance that the property management companies are trying to minimize the number of companies that they operate with from a software perspective. They can't have like a million best of breed solutions because they wouldn't all necessarily integrate together. Or using the property management software, which is like has a good software that's good for 80 % of the use case, but it's not going to get you like the last 10%. It's like saying, why am going to know, chat CPT instead of like, you know, Microsoft's co-pilot, right? Russ Fordyce 🏆 (11:36.004) Right. So you guys analyze kind of both deposits and debits kind of like you were talking about. You're not just looking at the income coming in. Why does that matter so much? Tim Ray (11:46.926) Well, as you can imagine, if I were to deposit $200 30 times in a month. through an e-transfer and I were to like cycle back out 30 times. That looks like it's, I got $6,000 in deposits, but I have a leaky boat where I actually got zero, right? And so we look at bank transaction data and how we are leveraging AI to analyze bank transaction data. It's not just looking at all the debits and all the deposits, all the debits. It's actually grouping all of the different income sources over, say a 90 day, 180 day, 365 day look back across all the different kinds of income and having different thought leadership on how do you to attribute the historical look back for a project that would go forward. For example, you have W2, which is payroll, government benefits, high fidelity gig, which is like your Uber and Lyft and whatever. If I made $6,000 last month, does not mean I'm going to make $6,000 next month, which is different than your payroll. But I trust the source. I just don't trust necessarily the historical context of what it means going forward. So you have to have thought leadership there. Then you have your low fidelity, which is all your Venmo, PayPal, e-transfers, ATM deposits. Those are legit deposits. But if I'm literally withdrawing it in a low fidelity way, the same thing, I'm cycling cash and that's the number one way that fraudsters are going to fake income, it till you make it. And then we have assets. You have to have like thought leadership around, if I'm retired, I'm a trust fund baby, I'm all these other things where have cash, but not active income, there's an asset to income replacement that you have to have thought leadership as well. And so it's like that last 10%. I can show you the happy path. Tim Ray (13:20.15) I work at IBM and I have this job and blah blah blah. But most people don't have that. They have alimony, they child support, have whatever, money coming in from their grandfather to help them out, right? You need to be able to account for all these nth degree of use cases. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (13:34.726) Well, it's funny you say that because my fiance's father went and was getting an apartment and he had to have his son cosign because he was generating income off of investments, but he had no traditional W-2 income and whatever apartment he was going after, they're like, well, we have to see income or you're going to have to have a cosigner. So he had to have a cosigner. He's got plenty of money, more than hopefully will last him. So it's really interesting. Now you guys are pulling together you know, all of this data documents, you know, and I believe you're pulling in biometric stuff and even kind of these behavioral signals. Tell us about that and why the traditional banks aren't doing that or the traditional verifiers aren't. Tim Ray (14:17.324) Yeah, so we would definitely do a biometric. verification of your face to your ID. But, you know, and most people are doing that today to some degree. So that's not very novel and so on anymore, you know, since it's game of catch up. But it's really easy to have like what we would call marrying like a pixel perfect fake ID between my face to match the fake ID, pixel perfect. And then if I were to steal through a data breach that we hear about all the time, Russ's actual like driver's license number, date of birth, address, all these kinds of things. And I were to look up the DMV, let's say, say in Philadelphia where you're based, the DMV lookup, is just like a data lookup, data record lookup, would match. So that would match Russ's data versus my ID. My face would match this. So that is a use case where you're matching to get fraud through. How we combat that is the idea that your ID and your verification has to match the phone carrier check, for example. Does this phone register this person? Is this a prepaid phone? How long has this phone been around for? Does this email address, when was this email created that you're using to apply? This is brand new email. This is bank account, have banking history. is a bank account that was just created like 30 days ago. Because the thing is like you can't fake life, right? If look at fake bank accounts, they're very shallow in transaction history. You need AI and you need to leverage machine learning to be able to understand probability of this being a real person based on the transaction details. can't spend money at KFC and Walmart and your utility company to then get that back in some sort of fraud component. Tim Ray (15:51.798) Merchant activity is like the knowing that this is a real person because once it's gone, it's gone, right? It's these low fidelity cycling of cash transferring from account to account that are the flags that you want to track for to make sure like what's real, what's not. Beyond the biometrics, going to the bank connectivity where most people are actually connecting through bank directly. But for the people that don't, you need to have the waterfall of the document processing so that if you need to upload bank statements or pay stubs or offer letters or your IRS documents, we can actually extract the data See if it's real or not and match it against other pieces of information. So no piece on its own is silo It's like layering for data for data that it all checks out It's like these little breadcrumbs, right? They're getting your credit score in your credit check and then criminal as you can imagine in the United States Finding criminal data on a state-lead-alone County basis is like a nightmare and that is a superpower on its own It's something that we've really leaned into to really look at like finding this data from the county lookups. A lot of them now have the ability to look it up online through our own agentic workflows versus sending the runner old school to the courthouse. We can avoid that mostly now by doing online lookups. So yeah, I think for us it's just the idea of bleeding edge to problem solve with scarce resources that allows us to outcompete people that are 100 times our size. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (17:13.188) Yeah, and now I know that you guys kind of built in explainability into all of this to kind of make it very transparent. you almost have to, right? You've got a big trust issue here on both sides of the equation. Your apartment customers, these property owners are assuming that the data you're providing them is very trustworthy. And you're really building trust with that consumer as well. Walk us through how you're kind of building in that explainability and transparency into the platform. Tim Ray (17:42.54) I think the first thing that we realized early on was that words like trust or best or most or only are very noisy and overused and easily claimed by everybody. And it's easy to buy reviews on Amazon and Facebook and Google and all these things that can hire people overseas to give me bunch of reviews and fake some IP addresses and whatever. We were like, how do we quantitatively say that we are the most trusted financial identity technology platform in the world, the most trusted verification platform in the world with PII? And for our answer, that was Trustpilot, because Trustpilot is known and purported for their ability to spot and scrub fake reviews. And it's true. We've tested. They catch them all the time. Early on, when you have no reviews, you're like, man, if I could only just see this review with a few reviews. And they're like, no. cut those things buddy right and so that you that now we have like 14,000 plus reviews from renters you know the idea of going through very fast and this idea of like sharing your data for a rent experience is like a financial colonoscopy. I kind of joke and tongue in cheeks like a financial colonoscopy like and then we're asking to rate it at the end, right? And so as you can imagine, you know, there's a lot of restaurants that would love a 4.4 rating on Trustpilot, which we have in over 14,000 rental reviews. And if you're to look at something like a plaid or something like that, they like, you know, something, hundred something reviews that they're hoping nobody finds that it was like a one, you one star is like, you know, the graveyard of all their just, you know, the most angriest other fractional customers. So I think for us, leaning with binary quantitative trust score by asking the actual people that are sharing their financial data with us is important. It's also the way that we get our first... Tim Ray (19:29.474) ground truth data if there's an issue with a customer getting lost in the dark, a bug, something that happens where lots of people say if you don't fix what's not broken or if you don't hear anything, it's all good, right? For us, if we hear it from the client, that's our quickest way to fix things that nobody else, maybe our clients didn't even know were wrong, right? So it's important for us. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (19:32.368) Mmm. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (19:50.744) Yeah, I managed reviews for a long time in telecom, which was a feat of its own. And it is a process you have to go after. And it is a very good indicator of what's going right and wrong in your business. You described this kind of human in the loop model as a core feature that you guys have. What made you to decide that kind of a human needs to step in and kind of take over in the practice? And where does that actually fit into your project? Tim Ray (20:18.126) This is great question. in general, this idea that for a renter who's paying an application fee, so your kids are going to be applying for rentals, they're going be paying $50 to $150 bucks per rental to apply for. And if they get rejected, they lose the $100 and have to apply again. So you could imagine somebody who's like a roofer, a mechanic, a grass cutter. You know, that 50 bucks really matters. And sometimes they have to pie six, seven, eight times before they get approved. And that's a roof over their head, right? And so a lot of software, they're like, as long as we get 80 % of right, they're okay with the 20 % fall off. In our methodology, we actually have to get right for every single person, right? because it matters, it's the roof over their head. like, Mausoleum's hierarchy of needs, it's the shelter security and safety for them and their family. And so when you humanize it that way, not being good for 5 % of the people, that's a lot of people, right? And so where the AI does really well at the smart decisioning and raising flags, and we have a agentic AI to look at the first AI motion. We also always need that human loop to escalate for exception clauses, right? And to make sure that we're double checking that the AI is doing what it's supposed to be doing. And right. And so like right now we're always like AI data first and how we want to solve for like the 89 % of the problems with always having that kick up the human loop to a QA check the AI and then two to escalate where there's like exceptions to that. The AI have a tough time handling. And we're very excited about this idea that we're like really, you know, super, you know, using AI to, you know, superpower people. not to AI to eliminate people. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (21:58.222) Yeah, now what's interesting to me is you guys have been at this for a while, even before you brought the AI into it. You've got six years of doing this. And now I imagine that you're using all of that real world data to kind of refine your models. It must give you a very kind of deep model that newer systems just simply can't compete with. Tim Ray (22:21.976) Yeah, we have a huge data mode and to your point, I think, you we always leveraged. We always leverage the AI, but AI is changing what we talk about. Machine learning is the lowest level of AI. Then you have more advanced AI. the large language models in the last 18 months has really come in. And how we view we're using AI to match your face versus ID, we were doing that back in 2021. But now how we're using AI to smart decision with actual conditional logic and to create like a. replace more more of our human the loop component that is allowing us to like high velocity to move faster to now use AI to code our product, which wasn't available two years ago. So we actually release and ship products faster, right? Using AI as my co CEO to teach me what I don't know about our books, what I need to be looking at, right? To make sure I'm not crazy about this idea, right? So I think that we're at this incredibly exciting time where we've always been using some AI in the product that we delivered to our clients to varying degrees. And whether it's like machine learning or other various of a higher level AI to now LLMs. But now embedding into our operating DNA so that our company and how we look at things and our visibility is actually faster as well. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (23:34.842) So I'm a property manager now. I'm just telling my prompt. Act like a property manager. I'm a property manager, and I've just signed up for Verifast. I'm used to doing this kind of manually or with a different system. And I imagine that you probably turn down more people than you actually approve. What does it look like once we get Verifast in there, and how does it kind of change my process flow? Tim Ray (23:59.054) If you're a property manager today and you're not using any sort of like fraud or income verification, you probably have a lot of people that you're affecting from your apartment building every month. You're looking at bank statements manually. Typically we see, you know, one out of every three renters get rejected. If you're property manager, you're probably approving more people than you should be because you can't tell the difference with your naked eye. If this bank statement is pasted up in this like very corroborated, like rental package, is that should be real or not. You're relying on your property manager who was not developed at high school to be, you know, making $20 an hour to be this like bulletproof private investigator, you know, judge of your apartment building. Your $50 million apartment building is being held in the hands Russ Fordyce 🏆 (24:40.4) Judge. Tim Ray (24:46.768) of a $20 employee, which is your lowest paid employee in your company. It doesn't make sense. And so you need sophisticated technology and AI purpose built for this task because your leasing agent is meant to sell. She's meant to be your happy person for your resident experience. You don't want to turn your good cop into a bad cop. And that's what's happening today. It's like the car salesperson also underwriting the loan that they're selling. That is literally the reality of the onsite teams. in this huge 20, 30, $50 million asset that you're putting in her hands. And so it's just like not good common sense that if you own a very high value asset, to put it in the hands of people where now with sophisticated fraud, that they are not being set up for success to fill it up. And now with renter protection rights, which are very valid, it can take you up to a year to get a very sophisticated fraudster out of your apartment building. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (25:41.793) Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's the last thing I want to deal with is trying to evict a guy or a person You mentioned something earlier that kind of struck me because I told you I had three kids and you know They're hustlers right and and most of the people I think we're talking about our hustling they're looking for that American dream and these gig jobs are now popping up You can make money anything right you can task grab it uber, you know lift what whatever These Git workers and contractors seem to be a significant part of your use case. Walk me through what that actually looks like when Verifast assesses one of those applicants versus a traditional screener. Tim Ray (26:16.27) So 60 % of Americans. actually have some sort of secondary income, right? Whether it's a Task Grab, Uber, a more informal freelance role or self-employment. And so what we really do is we actually, when we're verifying the income and the character bank data and all supporting documents, we're actually showing, you know, lot of other people that are doing some sort of income verification, put all the transactions together and gobble together and I call it like an income soup, right? It's like, here's your monthly recurring number of income, but they don't show you the math. Like it's like, you know, in school, you common core math, they don't show you the solution for how they got to that number. And so I think one of the superpowers for Bearfast is actually like this idea that we we show our math, right? And when you look at bank data, for example, all property companies look at like gross income to rent ratio, but your bank data is net income. And so what we do is we also look gross up the income from the bank account to from the net amount to the gross amount. and looking at all those low-fidel or all the other gig workers. So we'll say typically you have two and a to three income sources per person. And we'll say, here's all your transactions for the last 90 days for TaskRabbit or Uber or Lyft or this PayPal or Zen transfer that we're seeing coming in recurring from this person. What is that? And we group together and then we allocate it up to your monthly total. That saves so much friction in conversations where you can imagine a manual bank statement from a proper manager to look at your son's six months of bank stamps to be like, line by line, what are all these things? Circle it and add it up and be like, I don't trust it because maybe you're a drug dealer versus you just have a really good long care side hustle. The amount of people that we're allowed to move in instantly and not have that conversation around what is this. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (27:52.901) Yeah. Tim Ray (28:04.27) just increases the velocity that allow people to move in or to not move to the that they're fraudulent. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (28:08.25) Well, and you've got FAST in the name, which is good. Your marketing team did well on that. So VeraFAST makes this pull process, in theory, more trustworthy, more full, a bigger picture. What does that do in terms of the timeline versus a traditional verification method? Tim Ray (28:31.658) accelerates it. We would say probably, you know, In today's world, we probably save about two to three hours of active review time between, you can imagine if you don't use something very fast and you want to do an employee reference, actually calling the employer. That doesn't answer. Multiple times to call them. Calling the past landlord and making sure it's not their cousin Vinny, right? There's a lot of these manual workflows looking at the documents themselves. When you're sharing a document, the first thing you do when you look at a document, when you get it, you don't look at the data on it. You actually scan it to see I couldn't even trust the source of the data. With Verifast, because we're bank connect first or direct source data first, whether it's your payroll or your bank connect or your DMZ or whatever, we synthesize that data instantly because we trust the source. When you look at a bank statement, the first thing you're like, is this even a real bank statement or not? It's a wasted resource that you're doing and energy spent just to validate the authenticity before you even start to look at the numbers themselves. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (29:34.31) That's super interesting. Now you guys are actually expanding into kind of different areas. What made you kind of look at those different verification options and kind of how are those workflows different than this kind of rental model? Tim Ray (29:49.844) Sorry to just break. We're really double clicking on multifamily. We're not expanding beyond multifamily as the base, but what we're seeing is that today when you're, let's say your son goes and applies for a rental. When they get to the end of application, it's a complete screen. That data's at a date next month, and it's not up to date. And if he has to apply again, he has to start from scratch all over again. What we're leaning towards is this idea that at the end of application, your son can opt in to own their own data. Think of a credit karma, but on steroids, where it's like they say pre-check, it's their budgeting app, it's their credit score, their trade lines, their criminal, all these things that are now being connected, but they say persistence. That way your son doesn't have to prove himself again and again. If he gets rejected, well, very fast clients have two common currencies, US dollars and very fast trust. And if he gets rejected from this apartment building, your son's data is his data. He didn't get rejected from living and having a roof over his head. He just didn't meet the qualifications for that apartment. And I guarantee you, we probably have an apartment two miles away that he does qualify for. And that apartment building uses very fast to qualify credentials as well. And so we could actually guarantee and pre-approve him for another apartment before he goes and sends another 50 bucks on another app fee. So this whole idea of around trust and creating a baseline for the good guys is really where we're leaning into. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (31:07.526) Yeah, it makes all the sense in the world. It's almost like a checklist of the things I need to do before I go below another $50, right, or $100 on another application. You guys have built this in a very kind of tightly regulated environment. It's kind of high stakes of trust. If there's another entrepreneur out there listening, what's the one thing you would tell them about earning trust from humans? Tim Ray (31:29.902) That's a really good one. I say this all the time is that, you know, we only ever have one reputation. Everyone has one reputation. And we all either lean into it or we run away from it. There's no in between. So if you're one of the people that thinks about that, the one reputation that you have, and when things are tough and, you know, the data is not 100%. If you're somebody that leans into your reputation, they know they can trust you because they trust you, then that is gold. And so you want to make sure that they can trust you. Because when the things get tough, you want to make sure that you can go on your reputation, that you're somebody that people can count on that does what they say. And they say what they do, and they do what they say. The other people, they're dumpster fire, trying to run away from the reputation. A million reasons why they got too busy or someone did something or external factors why they're not to blame around something that happened that they were in charge of. Like this lack of accountability. So that's my number one thing is making sure that you always think about your reputation as this like once in a report point of truth that you can always go back to. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (32:42.202) Tim, super interesting. I wish very fast all the success in the world and congratulations again on the award. Tim Ray (32:48.728) Thanks, buddy. Thanks, Ross.