Rapidly growing real estate investment startup Roofstock has tapped a former executive from Tesla Motors, Elon Musk’s electric car company, to help run and scale up operations.
Fiona Taylor
Fiona Taylor, who previously worked as a senior director of business operations and customer service at the electric car maker, will now serve as Roofstock’s new vice president of operations, the Oakland-based company announced Wednesday.
Roofstock CEO Gary Beasley told Inman Taylor will oversee tasks such as inspections and valuations on properties, and added that she is a good fit because she has “been through the drill” and experience with growing companies.
“Since there’s no play book for a marketplace like ours we really wanted to bring in someone whose seen a lot of situations,” Beasley said.
Taylor told Inman that she will be “responsible for basically making sure that all the operations in the company are positioned to be as efficient as possible and can scale.” She also said that her role at Tesla — which involved overseeing things like roof inspections for the car maker’s solar panel subsidiary SolarCity — has a surprising amount of overlap with her new job.
“I’m of course learning the real estate industry but I think there’s a lot of process application that directly applies,” she said of her former position.
Roofstock provides would-be real estate investors with a catalogue of single family homes spread out across 22 states. The homes tend to be relatively affordable, and Roofstock’s listing information includes expected rents and returns.
The company also connects buyers to property managers who operate the rentals.
Credit: Roofstock
Roofstock launched in 2016. Beasley said the company logged approximately $40 million in transactions that year. The company raised $35 million in funding in 2017, and in early 2018 announced it had done $1 billion in transactions. The company also spent 2018 expanding into new markets.
Beasley said that during the final months of 2018 the company “had a record number of transactions and revenue.” He speculated that the increased interest in Roofstock’s model has to do with the company cultivating more relationships and building out its technology, as well as the recent chaos in the stock market.
“With single family rental properties,” he explained, “the returns are quite good with a lot less volatility.”
