Private Lending Made Simple: Automating Real Estate Loan Servicing with ZimpleMoney CEO Ted Tekippe

Ted Tekippe (00:00)
So I think that the integration to payment networks is one, right? So we have integrated ACH, which enables anybody in the US to pay from one bank to another. And we’ve enabled auto pay on that. So once you get a loan set up, you can turn on auto pay and kind of set it and forget it. We’ve also integrated credit and debit card payments. So sometimes in contract for deed scenarios, ⁓ borrowers can pay with their cards. And that’s something that’s pretty unique too. I think that kind of tight integration

saves lenders a lot of time if they are managing this themselves versus like trying to do another spreadsheet and ⁓ reconcile that with their bank statement or collect a check and go deposit it and wait for it to clear.

Michelle Kesil (02:13)
Hey everybody, welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil and today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Ted Tekippe who is the CEO of Zimple Money, a loan self-servicing platform that helps real estate investors and private lenders easily manage and service their loans. excited to have you here today, Ted.

Ted Tekippe (02:38)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Michelle. I’m really excited to be here.

Michelle Kesil (02:41)
Great, let’s dive in. So first off, those not familiar with you and your world, can you share what your main focus is?

Ted Tekippe (02:49)
Sure. So like you said, my name is Ted Tekippe. I’m the CEO of ZimpleMoney. I am a serial entrepreneur. I’ve spent my whole career in financial services about the last 17 or 18 years in payments and fintech. But I started off my career in mortgage banking. I spent five years with one of the top 10 lenders in the country. And that has led me to the journey that I’m on today with ZimpleMoney. ZimpleMoney is an online platform that makes it really easy.

for private lenders to set up and manage loans. So anybody who’s doing private lending in real estate could be a great customer for us. ⁓ And we take what’s traditionally been kind of a dusty world in real estate lending. I remember in my mortgage days that like mortgage servicing was kind of the neglected stepchild. It was like the last thing that any mortgage broker or banker thought about. ⁓ And the solution sort of reflected that.

that yet, you know, wasn’t very customer friendly, wasn’t very friendly to borrowers. And what’s funny is that’s such a big part of the life of the loan on an ongoing basis, like how you make your mortgage payment or how you make your payment on a commercial property. You know, it was really ⁓ something that lasts for years, sometimes decades, but it’s kind of been given very little thought or resources over the years. So we wanted to build a platform, particularly for private lenders.

that made that really easy to do, had lots of robust features and functionality to kind of take care of all parties involved in that loan, from the day that it funds all the way through the final date of payment.

Michelle Kesil (04:25)
Awesome. And so how does the platform work? Like, is it just a subscription? And yeah, can you walk me through what the steps look like?

Ted Tekippe (05:22)
Sure, I like to say that somebody could sign up for our platform in about five minutes and create their first loan on our platform in about five minutes. It’s a really easy web-based tool. You can go to zimplemoney.com. Although we also have private label versions and APIs available, so some of our loans get onboarded that way. But once you go through registration, we’ve got a really easy, a really simple loan builder wizard that walks you through kind of inputting all the key terms.

the different other participants in the loan, whether that’s co-lenders, like other investors that might be coming in on this loan with you. Obviously, the borrower, any co-borrower, you kind of put in all of that information, link your bank account, and then we send out an invitation to all of the other participants, especially the borrower who links their bank account. You can turn on auto pay and we’re kind of off to the races. The solution has a complete loan ledger that keeps track of everything that happens on the loan, like from the day that it funds.

to any recurring servicing fees, to every payment that happens. If a payment’s late, we know that it’s late, because we’re processing payments. We can automatically assess a late fee. We give lenders lots of capabilities to do things themselves in our platform as well. So if they wanted to waive that late fee, if they wanted to issue a credit, if they wanted to extend the principal balance on the loan, like do another draw on a fix and flip loan, they can do all of that in the platform themselves instead of having to like,

email a servicer and hope that they get it and hope that they apply it correctly. They kind of have a lot more real time control that of course being web based they can access, you know, 24 seven. It also makes it really easy for borrowers. They get their own login. They can log in and see, you know, what their daily interest is, what their payoff amount is, when their next payment is due. If they need to request a payment extension, they can do that through our application as well. We also do great things like

document storage so could update your loan agreement or your abstracted title or whatever. We have ⁓ integrated email and SMS notifications. So when a payment is coming up, we send out a notification that’s got a link in it that enables one click to pay so borrowers can pay right from their phone. So yeah, lots of cool features and functionality, all based on the web, but integrated into people’s mobile devices as well to make life easy.

Michelle Kesil (07:41)
Awesome. And so is this applicable for any real estate investor? yeah, how would an investor use this platform? Does it connect them to the lenders?

Ted Tekippe (07:53)
Great question. So lenders are really our customers. And today they come to us usually with a loan, you know, that they’re ready to onboard with a borrower in mind. It’s not like a lender-borrower marketplace, like LendingTree or somewhere where you would go to try to find somebody to give you a loan. That’s not really what we do. We’re more of a platform and a tool for those lenders. And it’s applicable to, you know, any real estate investor that’s doing debt financing. So like seller finance or seller carry.

on a property, that’s really kind of the world that we play in, which is a little bit different than if you’re doing an equity investment in a real estate property, like you’re buying a building and are going to rent it out. But if you are a landlord of a building and you want to sell off your units and offer seller financing, great tool for that. If you are a hard money lender and you’ve got a whole portfolio of 12 to 24 month loans that are in the middle of development projects, we’re great for managing that.

⁓ So yeah, we meet lots of use cases all kind of involving debt in the real estate.

Michelle Kesil (08:53)
Yeah, makes sense. And what are some of the main features that make your service unique?

Ted Tekippe (09:35)
So I think that the integration to payment networks is one, right? So we have integrated ACH, which enables anybody in the US to pay from one bank to another. And we’ve enabled auto pay on that. So once you get a loan set up, you can turn on auto pay and kind of set it and forget it. We’ve also integrated credit and debit card payments. So sometimes in contract for deed scenarios, ⁓ borrowers can pay with their cards. And that’s something that’s pretty unique too. I think that kind of tight integration

saves lenders a lot of time if they are managing this themselves versus like trying to do another spreadsheet and ⁓ reconcile that with their bank statement or collect a check and go deposit it and wait for it to clear.

Like again, it speeds up and automates all of that. I think being web-based is really important because we’re constantly rolling out new features and functionality to kind of meet our customers’ requests and needs. One of the coolest and latest things that we rolled out is an AI-driven contract generator.

So we’ll take all of the key terms that you put in our loan builder and we can generate ⁓ a contract that can download and or eSign. ⁓ We also have the ability for Ledger to upload a contract template and we’ll populate all of that using AI, which is pretty cool. ⁓ So I think being a two-sided web-based solution that gives full visibility and transparency to everybody involved is a pretty powerful solution and kind of a step level change

over and above traditional servicing models where really neither party have real time visibility into the source of truth, if you will. But yeah, think that’s what makes our solution.

Michelle Kesil (11:17)
and what have been some of the main keys that have allowed your business to be able to grow and run successfully.

Ted Tekippe (11:26)
That’s a great question. I think like any successful business, we spend a lot of time and energy ⁓ listening to our customers. So we sponsor about a half a dozen different conferences a year where we go talk to private lenders in real estate or note investors in real estate, get to understand like what their use cases are, what their pain points are, what we can do to help make their lives easier and frankly differentiate us from the competition.

So that’s really kind of, I think, been a part of the key to our success is really being customer focused. And then obviously being ⁓ a software, B2B SaaS, web-based application, having that ability to constantly roll out new features, functionalities, change things that might be confusing or don’t make sense, we’re certainly not perfect. And sometimes we got to update stuff or fix bugs. I think having the ability to do that and kind of marry

customer focus, with technological capability, with experience in the industry and in the banking and payments world, I think that that’s really been pretty key to our success.

Michelle Kesil (12:31)
Yeah, definitely. And what would you say you’re most focused on solving or scaling to next?

Ted Tekippe (12:38)
Great question. I one thing that we have found over the last few years is that while we’re a great solution for self-servicing real estate back notes, our customers have other needs that we think we can help address as well. Any growing business, particularly in real estate, one of the key constraints in that business is access to capital. Most folks don’t have an unlimited source of capital all in their bank account to be able to do all of the deals that they want to do.

So that’s something that we’re actively working on right now, and we think is a big opportunity, is bringing ⁓ private credit folks and other investors that want to lend to our lenders, offering them credit facilities, warehouse lines, ⁓ or term loans that can help them continue to grow their real estate business and build their portfolio. I think that that’s something that we’re really excited about here. We’re also thinking about other capabilities.

like loan origination functionality, building that into our platform. We’ve gotten a lot of those requests and tying into secondary marketplaces where folks might want to sell off the loans that they’ve originated. ⁓ So that’s something that that’s part of the rationale between behind building out our API capabilities is to be able to tie into that. So that’s something we’re exploring this year as well.

Michelle Kesil (13:56)
Absolutely. And what type of real estate investors normally are being serviced? it like multifamily or all kinds?

Ted Tekippe (14:48)
Good question. So we service lots of different types of real estate lenders. I would say the biggest chunks of our portfolio fall into one of three categories. That’s undeveloped land, folks that are offering seller financing on, like they’ll go buy a big track of land, subdivide it, and then sell it off with seller financing. That’s probably our biggest category. We also do, we see a fair amount of

kind of non-qualified or non-QM single-family homes. So these are essentially traditional 30-year mortgages on single-family homes. But those borrowers oftentimes don’t have the qualifications that a lot of traditional lenders require. Maybe they have their own business, but they don’t have kind of traditional W-2 and 1099. They don’t have kind of all the documentation you might expect. Or they’re relatively new and they don’t have like a thick

in established credit history. So there’s lenders that serve that market and we’re a really great solution for them. And then the third category where we see a lot of is ⁓ hard money lenders that are doing kind of fix and flip loans, lots of time tied to residential or commercial properties.

Michelle Kesil (15:59)
Awesome. And so what are some of the different, because you said you’re going to roll out some new features. What are some of the things that you’re looking forward or different opportunities that you’re excited to continue to grow with?

Ted Tekippe (16:17)
I’ll go back to that access to capital. think we see across our different lender types, there’s different buckets of types of loans that they originate. And I think finding sources of capital that meet those particular needs, like real estate lending is not a monolith. There’s lots of folks that are interested in different slices and different markets and finding, doing some matchmaking there on our platform is probably…

what we’re working on most urgently. Then we have ⁓ ongoing requests from our customers for different loan types, different features within our existing platform. That plus the loan origination capabilities. I think we’re going to start using some of our AI development tools to meet some of those needs.

Michelle Kesil (17:05)
⁓ And is there a certain application to join the platform or anyone can sign up?

Ted Tekippe (17:15)
Anyone can sign up. You can go to Zimple Money right now and register, like I said, in five to 10 minutes, probably. ⁓ We typically will walk through an onboarding session. While you can set up your first loan all by yourself, we like to of get an understanding of who our customers are, help them get familiar with the different functionality on our platform and get comfortable. There’s lots of nuance and details in real estate loans.

everything from the different interest rate bases to periods and kind of recasting amortization schedules and all kinds of different variables that you can have on a loan. So it can get pretty complicated pretty quickly and we kind of like to help guide people when they get on board. But ⁓ yeah, there’s no application to join. You can sign up and we’re happy to help you.

Michelle Kesil (18:05)
Awesome. And when someone joins, there a fee that they need to pay to be one of the lenders or?

Ted Tekippe (18:12)
Great question. Yeah, so we have three different monthly subscription models based on how many active loans you have. Our primary plan is like one to three loans. It’s as cheap as 23 bucks a month. Our middle tier, we call our professional tier, so that’s up to 20 active loans at any given time. I think that’s $47 a month. And then we have our unlimited tier, which as the name implies, you can add as many active loans as you want. It’s $77 a month.

So that’s the software subscription side. We charge a $23 loan onboarding fee when you, you know, it’s one time when you create a new loan on our platform. And then we charge transaction processing fees when we’re processing HHP.

So really, you know, pretty affordable. We’re generally 30 to 50 % cheaper than traditional third party servicing models. We’ve found we are a fraction of the price of some other servicing software companies out there that are traditionally used by mortgage servicing companies. So, you know, I think we’re a great affordable, scalable solution to meet lots of lenders’ needs.

Michelle Kesil (19:14)
Yeah, definitely. And where do you usually connect with the clients that come to you? Is there a sort of networking or online marketing strategies that you use?

Ted Tekippe (19:29)
Yeah, we do both. So as I mentioned, we sponsor five or six, you know, real estate lender or note investor conferences throughout the year. We meet a lot of great folks there. Some that become our customers, some that become partners, you know, in different aspects of our business. We also, you know, do invest heavily online, you know, both in kind of customer education.

⁓ and more organic stuff, but also we do some digital paid advertising as well, both kind of traditional search engine focused, ⁓ now AI focused, as well as social media.

Michelle Kesil (20:09)
And what would you say is a goal that you have for this year?

Ted Tekippe (20:15)
Besides the capabilities that I talked about, we’re a relatively young, nimble company and the name of the game for us is growth. ⁓ We doubled our company last year, we’re looking to double it again this year. I think what it comes down to is really staying focused on our customers, understanding their needs and meeting them as efficiently and effectively as we can. ⁓ That’s what I do every day when I show up at my desk.

⁓ And hopefully if we can keep executing on that, we’ll do okay.

Michelle Kesil (20:49)
Thank you for sharing.

Ted Tekippe (20:50)
Of course.

Michelle Kesil (20:51)
Well, before we begin to wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, and learn more, where can people find you?

Ted Tekippe (20:59)
You can just go to zimplemoney.com It’s like simple only with a Z. All of our contact channels are on there. So yeah, please do reach out. We’d love to hear from

Michelle Kesil (21:09)
Perfect. Well, appreciate your time and your story. Thank you so much for being here.

Ted Tekippe (21:14)
Michelle, thanks so much for having me. It’s been a real pleasure.

Michelle Kesil (21:16)
Of course. And for those tuning into the show, you got value, make sure you have subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Ted, who are building real businesses. And we’ll see you all on our next episode.