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Buying a home has always been complicated. You need to know how much money you have to put down and how this down payment will affect your monthly mortgage bill. Then there are closing costs and fees. Kevin Bennett has launched More to try to help make navigating the financial process easier – especially for first-time buyers.
additional It is a fintech platform that walks users through the financial aspect of home buying. The company’s first product, which will launch Friday, is a calculator that shows what people can afford and what their monthly mortgage payments and closing costs could look like, among other metrics based on real-time interest rates.
Unlike other mortgage calculators you can find on Zillow and LendingTree, it also seeks to give users more than just numbers. It tells users how easy it is to find a loan based on their financial situation, whether they should wait to buy, or whether they should pursue certain types of loans based on their financial profile, among other things.
The platform is currently free to use. The company plans to monetize once it releases more product developments but declined to share details.
“A generation ago, our parents bought a $200,000 house with a 20% mortgage, and it was pretty straightforward,” Bennett said. “There was one type of mortgage, which is what I did and it’s more complicated. There are a lot of types of mortgages. There are a lot of implications. Homes are much more expensive now, so there’s a lot more complexity, and it’s a much bigger financial decision.”
Last year, Bennett found himself looking for something new to work on after leaving Caribou, the auto loan refinancing startup he co-founded in 2016 and where he served as CEO. He knew he wanted to do something else mission oriented but wasn’t sure where.
He began looking into real estate, a category he said he had always been fascinated by. The fact that his entire family is in real estate also helped. He started talking to people who had bought their homes within the past two years and found a lot of common pain points: People didn’t understand the process and were relying on homemade spreadsheets to try to figure out what they could afford.
Bennett also had personal experience: He bought and sold a townhouse in his 20s, and was surprised to find that he had taken a $30,000 loss, despite selling the house for the original purchase price. This is because he missed out on some home improvements that could have increased the value of the home.
“You can’t hit the back button once you buy this house,” Bennett said. “I felt there was a gap in the market. It felt like it was more complicated than it was a generation ago.
He approached his friend Chris Baker, a real estate expert and former head of product at EasyKnock, about his idea last year. The couple got to work quickly. Their first conversation was on November 3, 2023. They decided to work together in January, launched the product in April, and held an unannounced pre-seed round in June. Now they are coming out of hiding.
“Our goal is to take care of the complex terms and things and really help you understand what you need to know as easily as possible, transparently, but also put you in the driver’s seat and in control,” he said. .
The company’s previously undisclosed pre-seed funding round raised $4.1 million from investors including Link Ventures, Vesta Ventures, and Fidi Ventures, among others. Bennett said fundraising wasn’t too difficult, as half of the capital the company raised was from investors who supported him while he was in Caribou. Bennett believes his track record as a founder has made a big difference. He said the company intentionally built its value table to include angel investors who have experience in the real estate market.
It sounds like this kind of financial information and guidance could be ripe for a Zillow or Redfin copy, especially considering that Zillow already offers a mortgage calculator and some tips of its own. But Bennett said he wasn’t too worried about the competition. He said he believes many companies either fall on the proptech side or the fintech side and are rarely in the middle, which he does as well, giving them more of a moat.
But moreover it is certainly not the only fintech and fintech company targeting consumers. A good example is online mortgage startup Better.com, which allows consumers to research mortgage options or refinance an existing one.
It will likely depend on what else he reveals in the planned Q1 product release that will include more features and capabilities, but Bennett hasn’t shared many details yet. Currently, users can use More to get an idea of what they can afford and what they can expect to pay when purchasing a home.
“I hope that we can empower people who have the right insights and information to make good decisions and plan this big part of their lives in a way that gives them confidence, comforts them, and allows them to focus on: I know what they really want to focus on, which is kind of “The dream of becoming homeowners.”
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