Published on 17, Feb 2023

Fresh off $37MM, Techvestor Eyes a $100M STR Portfolio

As the COVID-19 pandemic has mostly wound down, people are getting out into the world and traveling again, massively boosting the travel and hospitality industries. This is key when it comes to real estate investors, who are seeking alternate sources of revenue as the current real estate boom slows down.

Short-term rentals have been exploding in popularity on websites like Airbnb. The exciting 
18-month-or-so old company Techvestor, co-founded by COO Sabrina Guler and CEO Sief Khafagi, offers an institutional grade, proprietary rental platform, allowing investors to earn passive income in this exciting asset class. Techvestor has the capability of analyzing over 18MM data points monthly and is able to identify the best investments, with more than 100,000 properties underwritten every month and over 75+ properties in its growing portfolio.

Identifying an Industry Gap

Co-founders and ex-techies Guler and Khafagi were separately building their own real estate and short-term investment expertise as they worked at Apple and Facebook, respectively. As the Engineering Project Manager at Apple, Guler worked in both business and tech, growing the AirPods line into a multi-billion dollar revenue stream. Over at Facebook, Khafagi was scaling the company’s second-largest engineering organization and identifying top talent. 

Guler shares that while she enjoyed her job at Apple, she had other aspirations as well. “I had started investing in single-family homes and transforming them into short-term rental properties for Airbnb,” she says. “It became such a lucrative hobby that I began looking into the implications to pursuing this full-time.”

She says that as she invested and began to see significant returns, she had friends and colleagues who were interested in investing but held back due to the many complexities of the process. “There is a lot involved,” she admits. “You need to find potentially successful properties in high-demand locations, and go through renovation, design and actually operate profitably. It’s not easy. There are many steps to overcome prior to enjoying a truly passive income.”

Guler and Khafagi came up with the concept of a company that would simplify the process and help people jump over those hurdles. 

Applying Technology to Streamline the Real Estate Investment Process

Guler says that the key to Techvestor’s success lies in two factors: its team and its software platform. “We got really specific and designed a 16-point strategy for analyzing the potential of both a property and its location,” Khafagi states. “We included uniqueness, low seasonality, cost segregation, diversification, and STR-friendly states as well as other crucial factors.”

Guler and Khafagi also gave Techvestor another advantage: it's 100% vertically integrated, handling everything from acquisition to design to management. 

Techvestor’s software was designed to pinpoint the right properties to be added to the company’s portfolio. Khafagi explains that its technology means they know what to buy, where to buy it, how to best finance it, how to operate it, if the property is in a sustainable market, and what realistic growth looks like. Of course, humans make the final decisions. 

Techvestor’s Success Story

With over $37MM and 75+ properties across 10+ markets, Techvestor is accomplishing the goals that Guler and Khafagi have set for it. Next, they’re setting their targets on building a $100MM+ portfolio and eventually, a $1B portfolio. 

The Short Term Rental Industry Offers Passive Income

“2023 is going to be a big year for short-term rentals,” says Guler. “It’s an emerging investment opportunity that is consistently growing as we continue to recover from the pandemic - people are taking longer vacations and opting for the privacy of STRs as opposed to traditional hotels, not to mention the competition in this industry is 99% smaller operators without scale and technology.” 

Investors are noticing the growing potential of the STR asset class, and this has helped Techvestor’s portfolio expand to 7 and 8 figures in commitments and LOIs. “Techvestor makes it easier than ever before, eliminating barriers to get into this asset class,” Khafagi says.