


Customers pick out a home and Divvy purchases it on their behalf with the renter contributing an initial 1-2 percent of the home value. Rather than buy homes and look for renters, the company does the opposite. “So while traditional financing dried up, we saw a really good tailwind for our business.”ĭivvy declined to disclose the valuation at which this round was raised but Hefets said it was “very highly oversubscribed.” Rent to ownĭivvy claims to be different from other real estate tech companies in that it aims to digitize “the archaic, data-heavy processes buyers encounter along the way.” It works with renters who want to become homeowners by buying the home they want and renting it back to them for three years “while the savings needed to own it themselves.” “Mortgages were harder to get yet we were seeing this mad rush of people who wanted to move out of multifamily and downtown areas,” Hefets recalls. It also worked with its existing customers by offering flexibility and rent relief in the way of waived late fees and flexible payment scheduling, for example. Ultimately, over the course of 2020, Divvy expanded operations from 8 to 16 total markets and financed five times as many homes as it had in pre-pandemic times.

Divvy Homes CEO and co-founder Adena Hefets
