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Rently

Leading the Way in Self-Guided Touring by Carole VanSickle Ellis It’s a tough world out there for rental owners and residents, and at no point is it tougher than when the two parties are seeking each other but have not yet met. The peril does not so much lie in the difficulty in finding affordable housing or locating a unit that meets a household’s needs (although those activities can be challenging) but, instead, in actually managing to lease a real home or apartment. Thanks to skyrocketing rental fraud that targets asset owners, managers, and residents alike, the rental landscape has become more challenging than ever. According to the FBI, incidences of single-family rental fraud began rising in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a 27% jump in reported cases between 2021 and 2022, and, in 2024, the FBI Crime Complaint Center (IC3) announced the cumulative reported losses related to real estate fraud had reached a sum in excess of $145 million. The center noted actual losses were probably much higher since many real estate scams go unreported due to victim embarrassment. The results of this burgeoning, troublesome trend run the gamut from rising rental rates to increased insurance costs and permanent damage to innocent victims and corporate brands that get caught in the crossfire when scammers successfully defraud victims using the landlord’s name or real assets. Rently, a self-touring smart-home technology company that combines hardware and software solutions to optimize leasing efficiency for landlords, believes its platform represents the best solution to this emerging threat. Company co-founder Clark Li, who currently serves as CTO and works on smart-home and smart-building solutions, said his company, which was created to improve convenience for would-be renters, now holds the cure for the “pain points” both owners and would-be renters experience when it comes to securely accessing units and keeping the entire transaction clear of con artists and fraud. “Merrick Lackner, our CEO and my co-founder, and I drew from our own difficulties related to housing searches when we started the company in 2011,” Li said. “We wanted to create a system that would immediately answer a potential resident’s two main questions: ‘Is it available?’ and ‘When can I see it?’” The result of their collaboration would be one of the original self-touring platforms and make Rently what Li describes as “pioneers [and] the undisputed leader in self-guided touring.” Thanks to the company’s head start in the space, Rently is uniquely equipped to combat the rising spread of issues surrounding security and rental fraud, noted director of business operations Sahil Farooqi. Farooqi joined Rently in 2017, when the company was expanding into smart-home technology designed to protect owners and residents while providing appropriate and convenient access to units when necessary. “It was so important, especially during the pandemic and continuing today, that good people continue to have the ability to view homes and rent properties,” Farooqi said. “We create systems that enable good actors to access properties while the bad actors are detected early, at the top of the ‘funnel,’ and owners and residents remain secure and protected.” “A Whole Array of Scams” Threaten Single-Family Real Estate Although both single-and multifamily real estate are under attack from increasingly sophisticated scammers, the single-family space, in particular, has reeled under an assault of elaborate hoaxes and cons that results in millions of lost revenue, the total annihilation of life savings in some cases, and the destruction of trusted corporate brands. “There is a whole array of scams in the SFR space,” Farooqi observed. “We see social engineering, wired money, vandalism, trespassing, tactical targeting of vulnerable and gullible potential renters, fake listings, and manipulation.” He explained the biggest weak point for many asset owners lies in the ability of scammers to create relationships with would-be tenants by posing as those owners or representatives of the owners and establishing trust before springing the trap and requesting irreversible, wire-transferred “deposits” or even installing tenants in homes. In the latter case, tenants often believe they are legitimately renting the space only to learn they are squatting illegally and must be evicted. This can lead to intense resentment of the owners and property managers as well as losses in income and monies paid. Rently, Farooqi said, stops this entire vicious cycle early in its tracks through verification methods that confirm for parties on both sides of the leasing equation that the other party is legitimate. “We provide property managers with I.D. verification and selfie verification technology,” he explained. These types of real-time verifications prevent the sorts of unauthorized access that can occur with traditional lockboxes, which may be broken and removed or “decoded” for unauthorized entry. Rently recently debuted another security feature that cross references with the Department of Motor Vehicles. The company prevents scammers from taking advantage of redundancy in tours and visits to break into additional properties by requiring real-time check-ins at each property. A selfie-check, for example, must show the person and the property they are entering and match with the documented appearance of the individual who scheduled the tour. Only then will the system permit entry. Of course, Farooqi conceded, “fraudsters are always evolving their tactics.” To address this issue, the Rently team developed a machine learning model to evolve right along with the most advanced scams. “Our security team manages this risk-scoring model and conducts a review on a daily basis to enhance the model,” he said. “It takes into consideration changing tactics of scammers and guides us toward places they might try to enter the platform. We detect the attempt proactively and stop them from entering the property.” Revisiting the Multifamily Angle As Rently’s prowess at preventing SFR fraud continued to strengthen and grow, more multifamily operators expressed interest in developing their own custom systems that would operate on the same principles. To assist in this, Jared East, Rently’s vice president of product & software, and his team began working on options that would meet large operators’ needs. “There are a lot

Regional Spotlight

Wichita, Kansas

A Window of Opportunity Could be Closing in the “Air Capital of the World” by Carole VanSickle Ellis Wichita, Kansas, has been a destination from its inception. Located near the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas Rivers, Wichita is named for the Native American tribe that inhabited the area before Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado explored the area in the mid-1550s. Ultimately, the region was acquired by the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase, and traders began to flock to the area and build small log structures to serve as hotels, a post office, and, eventually, homes for permanent residents. By 1872, the city had been nicknamed “Cowtown” thanks to the many cattle drives that ended there when the herds were taken onto newly built railways, and it also emerged as an entertainment destination thanks to a proliferation of saloons and brothels combined with a dearth of law enforcement. By the late 1800s, Wichita was firmly on the map. Today, of course, Wichita plays up other elements of the municipality than brothels and “light” legal adherence. The Wichita of 2024 proudly claims the title, “Air Capital of the World,” and the city is host to more modern business opportunities, including a vast aviation and aeronautical engineering sector, a substantial aircraft manufacturing sector, and a thriving healthcare industry. Wichita is also the birthplace of a number of iconic fast-food restaurants, including White Castle, Pizza Hut, and Freddy’s Frozen Custard. Not surprisingly, however, the biggest points of pride for local chambers of commerce are the more than 115 aerospace and aerospace-related manufacturers, including Textron Aviation (Cessna and Beechcraft), Spirit AeroSystems, Bombardier Learjet, and Airbus. The chamber also notes the presence of “a comprehensive network of over 450 precision machine shops, tool and die shops, and other aerospace subcontractors.” A “Return to Old Normal” The city’s strong economy is one factor contributing significantly to what Stan Longhofer, director for the Center for Real Estate at Wichita State University, describes as the market “coming full circle…to where we were 20 years ago [in 2004].” He argues that after the housing crisis and financial meltdown in the mid-2000s, the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on traditional models and market behaviors. This had a wildly detrimental effect on home construction, which ultimately led to the outsized demand and appreciation experienced nationwide during the global pandemic. For 2025, Longhofer and his research team predicted, “The broad theme…is something of a return to the old normal, and by that, I mean a place we haven’t been in maybe 20 years.” Longhofer explained in his October 2024 forecast at Wichita State University, “It’s been a very unusual two decades.” He continued, describing the years following the financial crisis as “an absolute cratering of new-home construction” during which levels hit their lowest point since World War II. Despite pre-housing crash overbuilding, “[new-home construction in Wichita] never recovered,” Longhofer said. However, with the pandemic largely in the rearview mirror and, thus, no longer threatening the manufacturing bases in Wichita, a slightly softening housing inventory, and relatively affordable housing costs, the city is poised to be both attractive and affordable in 2025. Unlike some markets where inventory volumes are rising so fast the appreciation from the past few years is at risk, in Wichita, it appears demand and a slow increase in listing volume are balancing each other out to keep home values strong. According to one local agent, this trend has been in the making for about 18 months already. “The number of homes that are for sale has increased, but slowly,” he told local news outlet 12News. “Home values are still increasing.” Although home price gains were more modest in 2024 (8%) compared to previous years, which posted double-digit appreciation (11% in 2023 and 2022, nearly 15% in 2021), they remain solid and are expected to come close to these gains again in 2025. With Low Home-Flipping Rates, Wichita Investors Focus on Buy-and-Hold All this appreciation has not led to as much fix-and-flip activity in Wichita as one might expect. In fact, according to ATTOM Data’s report on flipping activity released in 2023, just 5% of transactions in Wichita were home flips. This is one of the lowest rates in the country. Real estate investors in the area today report profit margins “are lower now than five years ago,” as local landlord Mike Heldstab told NPR this past August. Heldstab made headlines at the time for the longevity of his tenant relationships. Some have maintained leases with him for more than a decade. Heldstab’s model of rehabbing and then renting out properties often below market rate (a model he developed after finding the fix-and-flip model was not as effective as he had hoped) has worked for him, but he acknowledged he is also not currently raising rents as much as he said he “probably should,” explaining, “It’s tough for anyone to afford [rental rate increases] when their incomes maybe haven’t gone up.” Rental availability, like housing availability in general, is somewhat precarious in the Wichita area. According to HUD’s October 2024 “Comprehensive Housing Market Analysis Wichita, KS,” the rental vacancy rate in the area is “balanced” at just over 10%, but rental rates are increasing along with demand. HUD estimated there would be a demand for more than 3,100 new rental units in the coming year, but only 2,100 are currently under construction. For-sale housing inventory is likely to undergo starker shortages, with HUD estimating a pending demand for roughly 5,100 units and only 1,400 under construction. Despite this, HUD analysts noted, “[Wichita] remains among the most affordable areas to buy a home in the nation.” The area remains the 59th most-affordable market in the country out of 241 areas ranked. Local government is currently working with investors to incentivize the creation of new housing as well via the Wichita HOME Investments Partnerships Program and the Housing Development Loan Program (HDLP). These grants are intended to support development in areas classified as

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On the Cutting Edge of Efficiency

Fordham Enterprises is Taking 3D Printing Technology Mainstream by Carole VanSickle Ellis When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, Justin Fordham, founder and CEO of Fordham Enterprises, had to take a step back from his latest project of 20 three-unit residential homes, and reevaluate the situation. In New Jersey, where the project was located, most development contracts were pulled or frozen early in the pandemic, leaving investors and developers struggling to determine how they would complete projects or reenter the market. Fordham, however, did anything but flounder. He assessed the situation and ultimately decided cutting-edge technology and innovation would be the key to his market reentry. He founded Fordham Enterprises, a company that would take investors “from tech to title, helping to make homeownership a reality.” Fordham Enterprises describes itself as “a cutting-edge investment firm that combines 3D concrete printing technology and real estate development that is leading the way when it comes to bringing new methods of construction into the mainstream.” In addition to development and lending, the firm is the only private lender in the country dedicated solely to the 3DCP [3D concrete printing] industry. Fordham said, “Our commitment to innovation and social responsibility [3DCP residences are more affordable, faster to erect, and typically more energy efficient] fuels our relentless pursuit of creating sustainable communities.” Because 3DCP technology enables developers to “print” assets in layers, stopping only for the insertion of plumbing, electric, or other mechanical services, the timeframe for these projects is typically far more expedited than in traditional construction. “One of the problems we were having on the development side even before the pandemic was time,” Fordham said. He added, “The money was an issue as well because the cost of capital was already rising.” In early 2020, Fordham leveraged his time to research strategies for building and cutting margins without cutting the quality of the end product. He encountered all the “usual” solutions, but then, he encountered something even better: 3D printing. A developer himself, Fordham talked to the leading 3DCP manufacturers, lenders, and developers in this emerging space and developed partnerships with them. “They taught me about the process and how to implement it on a mainstream basis, and I, in turn, showed lenders how they can in most cases triple their ground-up funding by working with 3DCP developers,” Fordham said. Just four years later, Fordham Enterprises proudly states it is “the pioneering private lender dedicated to the 3DCP industry offering an unprecedented advantage with expedited ground-up funding for 3DCP projects.” Fordham noted, “Little did I know there were companies doing this type of development since the 1940s, but it is only just starting to be commercialized, disrupting the $10 trillion concrete industry in the process. Fordham Enterprises exists to help bring this technology and the affordable, high-quality housing it facilitates into today’s market.” A Long & Quiet History Concrete printing made a quiet debut nearly a century ago when inventor William Urschel used his “wall-building machine” to construct the first 3D concrete-printed building in history. That building, a basic structure composed of simple, concrete walls, was located behind a warehouse in Indiana. Since that time both concrete and 3D printing have come a long way; in 1998, high-strength concrete was used in the construction of high-rise buildings like Two Union Square in Seattle, and in 2006, “self-healing” concrete began to appear in construction. Self-healing concrete includes a “bacterial stimulant” that secretes limestone, enabling it to reseal cracks and minor damage. Today, 3DCP builds are weatherproof, fireproof, pest retardant and energy efficient. In 2020, the real estate space was ripe for the introduction of larger-scale developments and projects like Fordham’s due to housing scarcity and a national need for affordable residential options. “What we are really doing is pretty simple,” Fordham said. “We are utilizing A.I. and new machinery to help expedite the build process.” Fordham Enterprises is currently working not only on traditional single-family structures, but also larger buildings, including a four-story 3D-printed structure in New Jersey that will be the first of its kind when completed. “This building will have 21,000 square feet and 17 units,” Fordham said proudly. The mixed-use building is the largest 3DCP project in the country at this time and represents huge potential for expanding 3D printing opportunities in the multifamily, commercial, and industrial spaces. “U.S. inventory is behind by about 4 million homes,” Fordham said. “The only way we are going to make that up is if we transition how we build. We need to offload the work for humans and put the heavy work on machines so we can think better and work a little less.” He continued, “I love telling people to take a look at their six-to-eight-month process; I can do that same job in six to eight weeks.” 3DCP is largely impervious to weather conditions, making it ideal for areas with long rainy seasons. “We are able to tent the entire property and the machine itself, so rain and snow do not impede our development,” Fordham said. As 3DCP becomes more mainstream, Fordham said a misconception about the process has emerged around the idea that automating construction jobs will hurt employment in the industry. According to a 2019 study conducted by Oxford Economics, it is likely that systems like 3DCP and other manufacturing platforms could replace roughly twenty million jobs by 2030. However, according to the same study, automation and robotics also tend to increase demand for workers because these systems make more product available. In the case of 3DCP residential properties, that hypothesis holds true, Fordham said. He explained that historically, many people have expressed concerns about 3D printing putting developers and contractors out of business. In reality, he said, “It is actually the inverse. New technology coming to market opens up more jobs and opportunities because we can build more, build faster and build with better efficiency. We need to train more people, improve the relationship between lenders and developers, and educate investors to make the entire process easier.

Profile

Property Shield

Data Security Firm is Changing the Face of Fraud Protection by Carole VanSickle Ellis Property Shield is, by any definition, “new to the scene” of data security. In fact, the company launched in February of last year. However, said the company’s co-founder and CEO Alex Fahsel, the data security firm hit the ground running by tackling emerging issues around fraud, data security, cyber security, and even artificial intelligence. “As much as we love all this technology, it can be used for all sorts of nefarious things,” Fahsel said. “Property Shield specializes in using this technology for good and to stay ahead of scammers and fraud. Cybersecurity has historically been a ‘cat-and-mouse’ game where the good actors have always been a few steps behind. We started Property Shield to give those good actors the opportunity to stay ahead.” “We are basically the data police,” explained Luke Lind, co-founder and CTO of the company. “Our system is constantly monitoring the web for potential fraudulent listings, and whenever it finds one, we immediately notify whichever client owns the data.” At the same time as the notification is going out, Property Shield tackles the process of having the fraudulent listing removed from consumer access as soon as possible. “The combination of these two workflows helps reduce illegal activity at the physical property level,” Lind continued. “Because our system is able to identify and remove fraud listings within hours, we can effectively cut down on the threat they pose to the property.” That threat is growing exponentially larger every day as cyber criminals, already frighteningly internet savvy, add psychological manipulation to their roster of skills. According to the Boston Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), rental scams increased 64% between 2020 and 2021. Cumulative losses exceeded $350 million in 2021 alone. “The actual losses are most likely much higher,” the bureau added, “because many people are hesitant to report they were scammed.” “These are very sophisticated crime syndicates that push these scams and frauds,” Fahsel said. He explained that large syndicates of cyber criminals based in countries with low or no regulation on this behavior may run hundreds of variations on dozens of distinctly “stamped” scams, from romance scams to employment scams to rental fraud. When one strategy begins to work particularly well, the lessons from that strategy may then be applied across the board. There is a great deal of intense analytics involved. “Cyber criminals look closely for certain criteria to indicate if a certain geographical region or market is ripe for real estate scams,” Fahsel said. “When they home in on a market, they will check net domestic migration patterns, for example, to determine where a large volume of people is moving. Then, they tailor the scam to fit the mindset of the people moving into or out of those areas.” Because an individual moving into a new area may not have a clear idea about the nature of the rental landscape, they are particularly prone to falling for what Fahsel calls “too-good-to-be-true” offers. “Scammers compile data about properties, rental prices, images, and listings, then hire virtual assistants or even college students looking for part-time jobs to put together these offers and facilitate the exchange of security deposits, rent, or other funds,” he explained. This makes the entire process even muddier for law enforcement because there are often innocent parties involved in the middle of the process between the victim and the cybercriminal. “The ‘employees’ get scammed too, because they frequently never get paid,” Fahsel noted. The “salaries” for these positions are also often too good to be true; the Federal Trade Commission estimates in 2022, job seekers lost $68 million in labor, lost income, and fraudulent fees associated with fake jobs. Cutting Off Fraud at the Source Because most real estate scams are carried out by large syndicates running multiple scams and multiple variations on these scams in multiple locations around the country, identifying trends early and acting preemptively to identify and eliminate fraud related to an investment portfolio is one of the few ways to make a significant dent in the potential money, time, and opportunity lost when a real estate scam succeeds. There are multiple victims at every point in the scam, from the property owner to the “employees” and “interns” working unwittingly for the scammer to the renter hoping to establish a household in the property shown by the fraudulent listing. According to Georgia Legal Aid, an organization based in Atlanta, Georgia, which is currently a hotbed of rental fraud, the two primary types of rental listing scams actively deployed at present included renting properties that the scammer is not authorized to rent and creating property listings for properties that do not exist and soliciting deposits or application fees using those listings. However, this simple explanation barely scratches the surface when it comes to the ingenuity and brainpower cybercrime syndicates dedicate to this type of fraud, Fahsel said. “These are teams of people who wake up every day and think, ‘How do we scam these people? How can we hack the system and take advantage of it?’ If they put half the effort they do into pushing these scams into a legitimate business that would help people, they could do really well,” Fahsel explained. “Sadly, that is not the route they take, so Property Shield spends every waking moment thinking about how to stop them.” Lind added, “Our system stands out from other fraud-prevention platforms because we are using the same tools that the scammers are using to fight them. Machine learning is a critical component of our system, and we have been ‘training’ our models for a long time.” To “train” a machine learning model, the algorithm is “fed” data from which it can learn. The more training the model receives, the better it becomes at identifying threats and classifying them as such. Lind noted, “Our model is also multi-modal, meaning it can process multiple mediums of data, including text and images.” This enables Property

Regional Spotlight

Orlando, Florida

Florida’s “City Beautiful” Endures a Statewide Market Shift by Carole VanSickle Ellis The third-most-visited city in the United States could see a shift in the next few years as formerly happy pandemic-era homebuyers put their properties back on the market and flee inland once more…or the market could “correct” in one of the gentlest “softening” events in the country. Analysts can make compelling arguments in both directions. “Florida’s real estate market has a split personality,” wrote Realtor.com data journalist Evan Wyloge in August 2024. The same is arguably true on an individual level for at least some of the state’s markets, including Orlando. After weathering multiple named storms in 2024 alone, including Hurricanes Helene and Milton, many Orlando residents say they are considering listing their properties and relocating closer to their pre-pandemic stomping grounds. Given how prices have risen over the past four years, many expect to liquidate to great effect and, furthermore, they have high hopes of an expedited experience thanks to rising demand for housing around the country. The sales process, however, may not go as smoothly as many expect. “We could see some price deterioration in some areas,” warned Florida Realtors chief economist Brad O’Connor in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in early October of this year. He added, “[There has] definitely been a sizable increase over the last couple of years in inventory.” The combination could spell bad news for Florida homeowners who purchased at peak pandemic pricing and are now hoping to sell quickly for top dollar and make an exit. While Orlando has not been hit as hard as much of the Gulf Coast of Florida this year, the city did experience tangential economic impact from the rough weather associated with Hurricane Helene. The storm made landfall in northwest Florida but created a preemptive economic impact as Orlando’s theme parks and other tourist attractions and services shut down or cancelled certain seasonal events. Orlando experienced more direct damage from Hurricane Milton’s flooding and extremely high winds, which caused damage in the Orlando area as well as throughout much of the state. Investors should note Orlando may be classified as an “inland market,” but this does not exempt it from looming threats associated with the departure of property insurers and rising rates associated with inland flooding and other natural disasters. Unfortunately, the classification often causes property owners to forego flood insurance if they are not located in an officially designated flood plain. Some insurance companies in the Orlando area will not insure properties once they reach a certain value unless the owner also takes out flood insurance even if the property is not in a flood plain. These storms and others are causing property insurance premiums to skyrocket across the state, including in Orlando. Katherine Frattarola, an insurance agent at a firm catering to high-net-worth clients, noted earlier this fall that many of her clients are reconsidering waterfront Florida property acquisitions in response to these premiums. “People are making different choices as a result of the rise in insurance costs,” Frattarola told WSJ. According to a report from the Florida Policy Project, Florida homeowners saw rates rise 45% between 2017 and 2022. Since 2022, areas hit by hurricanes have posted insurance premium spikes as high as 400%, according to Moody’s Analytics. Moody’s also predicted rates would rise still higher in areas affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Although state legislators have attempted to insulate property owners from instability in the insurance market by creating a $1 billion “reinsurance fund,” disincentivizing “frivolous lawsuits,” and establishing stringent deadlines for the claims process, it appears unlikely that such measures will hold in the face of homeowner discontent and increasingly strong hurricanes and rainstorms. Florida governor Ron DeSantis noted more than one in 10 Florida homeowners do not have property insurance (vs. about one in 20 nationally) and expressed hope that the bill would keep the state’s residents insured at affordable (or at least only gradually rising) rates. Critics of the bill said it would not stop rate increases or cancellations; investors should note ten insurance companies had left the state due to “choice or insolvency,” as the Insurance Information Institute described it, as of August 2024. Florida’s “Split Personality” Could Make Orlando Investing Complicated As the state of Florida experiences volatility in the housing market, markets like Orlando are divided not only by the extent to which they are affected by extreme weather but also by housing sectors. For example, insurance premiums and fees play an outsized role throughout the state, but particularly in prime landfall locations on the coast. On the other hand, state regulations on condominium assessments and related regulations have softened up the condo market substantially in the past few years, including in the condo-flush Orlando market. At present, about one-third of all listings in Orlando are for condo properties. “Nobody can afford the association fees anymore,” realtor Jennifer Levin told Realtor.com in mid-August of this year. She cited legislation enacted in the wake of the tragic collapse of the Miami Surfside condominium building in 2021 as a significant component of the softening condo market. “The big pullback in the market is in the condo market because of rising insurance costs and new laws that require buildings to have full reserves by next year,” Levin said. Realtor.com reported condo prices have fallen about 12% since 2022, while single-family homes have held steady or risen in value in most markets. In Orlando, single-family home median values were up slightly year-over-year in August 2024, reported Bankrate, posting gains of 9.3% year-over-year but falling slightly from a July 2024 peak of $412,000 to $399,000 in August. Readers should note the state of Florida remains one of the most attractive states in the country for new residents and gained a net of nearly 250,000 new residents in 2022 alone according to the most recent available data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford metro area holds steady in the top three most-popular Florida metro areas and

Profile

Madison Trust Company

Making Control, Versatility Easy for Self-Directed Investors by Carole VanSickle Ellis In 2009, the real estate market was hovering near the bottom of the post-housing-crash slump of the mid-2000s, and Madison Trust Company CEO, president, and co-founder Daniel Gleich was focused on helping his father diversify his retirement investments. In the short-term, this was something of a challenging experience, as one investment manager after another informed Gleich retirement assets were “limited” to stocks and bonds. Gleich, a real estate developer who was well aware of the massive, positive potential in the coming decades’ property markets, was undeterred. The long-term result of his mission to challenge what was, at the time, standard operating procedure for retirement investments, has been life-changing for more than 20,000 of Madison Trust Company’s clients today. “When I heard these financial advisors say, ‘Retirement money is limited to stocks and bonds,’ I just thought to myself, ‘That doesn’t make any sense!’” Gleich recalled. “I understood that we would have to pay taxes on the money if we wanted to move it and diversify, but why couldn’t I invest it where I wanted to?” Soon, he had discovered a relatively unknown vehicle for the time, the self-directed individual retirement account (IRA), and one of its most valuable features, checkbook control. From that point forward, Gleich never looked back. He had found something that would change his father’s retirement investing and that of many, many others over the next 15 years. “It worked beautifully,” Gleich said, “and I was telling friends and neighbors all about self-directed IRAs with checkbook control. After I had set the checkbook control structure up for a few other people, I spoke to one of my partners, Mervyn Klein, future co-founder and shareholder at Madison Trust Company, and we agreed there was a huge opportunity.” They, alongside E. Brian Finkelstein, shareholder and chairman, first opened Broad Financial, an IRA LLC facilitation firm, which worked with a third-party IRA custodian to help investors open checkbook IRAs. By 2012, the founders had realized, as Gleich put it, “the level of customer service that the custodian was offering was not nearly on par with what we were offering.” With an eye toward offering clients a “seamless transaction, all in-house,” the group began the two-year process of meeting with regulators and becoming a trust company. In 2014, the doors of Madison Trust Company opened for the first time. “We wanted to make sure people could invest their retirement money and have more control over those investments,” Gleich said. “There are millions of people out there who could use this investment vehicle and should know about it. At Madison Trust Company, our goal is to help them make that happen.” It was a daunting task, particularly given that around the same time Madison Trust opened for business, the U.S. government actually started work on a report focusing on the dearth of information available on self-directed IRAs and calling for the retirement industry and the IRS to provide more guidance on the topic. That report would be published three years later in 2017. Prioritizing Investor Education & Cutting-Edge Strategy While the federal government began its own research on educational materials available to self-directed investors in the 2010s, Madison Trust Company began a carefully researched educational outreach of its own that would, ultimately, enable the company to grow to the size it remains today. “We spend a lot of time working with our compliance team, consulting the IRS website, and making sure the content team is familiar with all of Madison Trust’s initiatives to ensure that all of our educational material is informative, accurate, and digestible,” observed Brianna Avillo, Madison Trust’s marketing manager. Avillo’s team spearheads content creation for all educational resources on the Madison Trust website, including animated “explainer” videos, infographics, educational webinars, written material, and beyond. “We have an investor-first approach, so our goal is to always make things as easy as possible for our clients,” Avillo said. She explained that for Madison Trust, making things easy for investors means making operations within the organization smooth and pleasant as well. “One of our mottos is that happy employees lead to happy clients,” she said. Gleich elaborated, “If we, as owners, take good care of our employees, and our employees are happy, they will take care of our clients, and our clients will be happy. If our clients have a smooth experience, our shareholders are happy, and the loop continues to go around.” He cited the company’s 900-plus Google reviews with an average star rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars as evidence of the success of this policy and the company’s clients in their self-directed investing endeavors. “If people can successfully self-direct their retirement account, they will have a richer retirement, and Madison Trust aims to provide clients with a pleasant journey getting there,” Gleich said. “The key is providing investors with the opportunity to invest in what they know and believe in.” Dana Udumulla, who serves as investments manager for Madison Trust, said her team relies heavily on the education element provided by the company when she travels on its behalf. “We not only have an education-first approach with our current clients and investors; we are always trying to educate wherever we go,” Udumulla said. “There is a huge retirement crisis looming right now in America, and a lot of people are experiencing anxiety and insecurity when it comes to their finances. By providing education and insight that is simple and straight to the point, we make it possible for anyone to become educated on self-directed IRAs and begin gaining control of their situation.” Walking with Investors Creatively & Constructively Customer care and guidance are crucial elements at Madison Trust Company, Udumulla said, explaining that unlike many other SDIRA custodians in the industry, the Madison Trust investments team has the educational background and training to provide guidance with regard to client inquiries within the self-directed investing space. This means members of the investments team are available to clients

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