Episode 55: A Transparent Rental Ecosystem with Openroom CEO
Co-host, RISE Network
Weiting Bollu discusses the legality of Openroom and non-payment of rent statistics in Ontario.
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This podcast features an interview with Weiting Bollu, CEO and co-founder of Openroom by realtor Kenneth Yim.
Openroom aggregates court orders and tribunal decisions related to landlord-tenant disputes, primarily in Ontario, and makes them searchable by the public. The platform aims to provide up-to-date information for both landlords and tenants to screen each other, addressing delays in other public databases like CanLII.
Weiting emphasizes that Openroom focuses on first-party data crowdsourced from people who have gone through tribunals or courts, making it a unique and valuable resource in the rental ecosystem.
The interview also covers Openroom's evolution and future plans. Initially accepting various types of applications and notices, Openroom now only accepts final decisions from tribunals or courts to ensure accuracy.
Openroom offers a subscription model for extended search results and is working on partnerships with tenant screening companies. Openroom can help prevent fraudulent rental situations and improve the overall health of the rental market, while acknowledging that problematic tenants represent outlier cases in the broader landlord-tenant ecosystem.
Kenneth Yim: Hey guys, okay, welcome to Broadway Table Talks. So, you know, we've been managing properties for a long time. We have close to 200 properties under management and one of our checklists, one of our main processes is to obviously screen the tenants, right? Because if you screen the tenant properly, then you won't have any issues down the road. Likely you won't have any issues. Like it's not to say it's forever, but you never know, right? Because people's situations change. An important part of screening comes to something called Openroom. So I'm...actually really honored to be joined by Weiting Bollu from Openroom. She started a process where you basically look at all the screening, all the court decisions of any past troublesome tenants, I guess. So I'm going to let Weiting go through some of her scenario of why this whole thing started and a bit of your background as well.
Weiting Bollu: Thank you, Ken, for having me. You and I have been talking since last year. It's been over a year and you've been helping our team test the products that we've been sharing with the community. So thank you very much to you and your team for helping us with that.
Openroom got started when I was going through a tenancy dispute about three years ago. Now I had wanted to move back into my property because I wanted to grow my family. And then I had requested my tenants, can you please move out? Gave the compensation, the notices. And then what they had told me was I'm not moving out and I'm no longer going to be paying rent anymore. That went on for about two years as I was trying to get to the LTB, the landlord tenant board to get the official eviction. So all through that process, lost about $35 ,000. And then when I came out of the LTB, I was like, okay, these are public documents, the court decisions or the LTB decisions. Why isn't this made public to everybody? So that's how we really got started with our seven original orders. We posted it online and then through word of mouth, people started talking about us and that's how we grew last year.
Kenneth Yim: Okay, actually, 35 grand, that sucks. I hope they recover from that. But tell me a little bit about, I guess, or tell people what Openroom does in a nutshell.
Weiting Bollu: Absolutely. Openroom, we aggregate orders, court orders, from across the country, but mainly in Ontario, which is the LTB tribunal decisions. Then we make it publicly searchable by the public. What that means is that if you are trying to screen a tenant or a tenant wants to screen a potential future landlord, then they can come in here, do a search about who they want to rent to and who they want to rent from.
And what's so unique about Openroom is that this data is not available anywhere else. If it's available somewhere else, it means that it is delayed or it's not cohesive. so Openroom tries to get that first party data from people who have gone to the tribunals or the courts and then we crowdsource it.
Kenneth Yim: Right, right. So this is things like when people have non -payment of rent or any kind of damage or disputes, they show up in the tribunal orders that you get from the landlord or tenant board. And yes, you can search it through CanLII and any kind of things like that, but they're generally delayed, right? You said the last one that was uploaded was when? For this year.
Weiting Bollu: Well, there are, yeah, I mean, in 2024, there are less than a hundred orders inside CanLII. And back in the day, back in 2023, when we were looking at these orders, we went to CanLII at first and then we were like, well, why aren't these made public? I sent it multiple times and it just kept getting denied. And that's really how Openroom got started because we were born out of frustration that it wasn't posted to CanLII fast enough.
Kenneth Yim: Right, because if somebody gets kicked out of their place because they haven't paid rent for whatever, eight months, nine months, whatever it might be, they're looking for something else. And if you’re a landlord looking for that and you can't find anything about them because it's their first time doing it, then that's not a good thing, right? So as soon as you get the L1 order in there, that's when people can post it to Openroom, correct? Or has that changed?
Weiting Bollu: No, we no longer accept that. It has changed. So we only accept that final decision now. Yes. And you know what? Right now, when we look at non -payment of rent, because that's the majority of the types of orders that we would get into the system, we're looking at $16 ,000 on average of non -payment of rent if a landlord ended up in that situation. So that's because of the delays at the landlord and tenant board, even though the LTB has tried many, many avenues to reduce the backlog. Good on them. They're working on it. It's coming. It has improved. Okay. And then it's also like sheriff eviction dates when you're trying to file for enforcement for eviction. All of that really adds up. and when tenants file for reviews stays, that also delays things.
Kenneth Yim: Because they always say things like bankruptcy or whatever, and then just delay it a little bit more for a few months.
Weiting Bollu:You know what, they're, yeah, if they claim for bankruptcy, I believe that they get a clean slate of whether they owe money back or not, right? But sometimes the tenants, when they get that original order from the LTB, they'll say, I wasn't able to attend that meeting, that hearing. So I want to do a rehearing and then they get to appeal and do it again. And then again, or that they have, maybe they have kids or mental health situations. And then that's how various tenants who know how to game the system will try to game the system.
Kenneth Yim: Okay, well I just want to remind everybody that landlording is not a horrible thing. These are the outlier cases. it actually goes to the tribunal, the Landlord Tenant Board. Then it's only the outlier cases of the people that know how to game the system, that want to take advantage of landlords. And systems like yours, like Openroom, will find these delinquent tenants and have a record of it somewhere that people can search with accurate information. So we all appreciate what you're doing, first of all.
A question is how are you going to monetize this? What's the whole business behind it? Because obviously, I assume you're not doing this as a complete nonprofit, right?
Weiting Bollu: Correct. Not a nonprofit, but we definitely really much appreciate the community who has helped us get to where we are today because it was very grassroots from the very beginning.
But a couple of ways where we look at monetization is number one, right now, folks can subscribe to a $10 a month where they can get more results than they see today. So as a free user, Ken, if you go onto our system, you can search anything in the system from name, address, and you get 10 results. But if you pay a little bit extra, then there is that extra, you can see a hundred results. Okay. So that's for, yeah. If so the use case there is if you wanted to look at a specific city, that could be of a use case.
Weiting Bollu: Okay. And then another aspect of monetization is that we're actually working with tenant screening companies. So Openroom will be a data point inside reports that are pulled by data screening companies for landlords. So they'll be pulling Equifax and then there will also be Openroom inside there. So coming soon in 2025.
Kenneth Yim: And also another use case is obviously for real estate agents or property managers that are helping clients find places. If you have multiple properties, that's another way obviously you want to do that.
Weiting Bollu: Yes, absolutely. Hey, I'm actually curious. How do you use Openroom in your workflow today?
Kenneth Yim: Well, it's part of our tenant screening checklist, right? So I guess we haven't hit our 10 searches yet, so we haven't paid for it, but we will, certainly will, because it's a valuable piece of, sorry, what's up?
Weiting Bollu: Correction on that one. It's not 10 searches. You can make unlimited searches. It's more results as you see. So if I type in Weiting Bollu, you'll see up to 10 results that come up. So don't worry. You will not hit a maximum. Okay. Yes. All right. Now continue.
Kenneth Yim: Okay, okay, okay. So if it's a common name, then you'll see more than 10 results, obviously, right? So that's where if so, yeah, eventually, we'll have to pay for it. Yeah, so that's part of our checklist, definitely, along with, you know, couple other things that we do in our checklist. But this is where our major is actually the first thing in our checklist, to see if they show up in Openroom. And then we check CanLII to see if there's anything that we missed, but you're saying that you'd have more than what can be would have, right?
Weiting Bollu: Eventually, eventually, but remember to all those who are listening, sites do not allow scraping. It is not ethical to go and scrape another site to get all of their orders. So we don't scrape any other sites for the orders. What we have is the very organic community driven ones. So some people might go onto CanLII and see, Hey, there's a CanLII order that Openroom might not have. So then they actually go and download and then submit it into our system. So we only rely on our community or we ourselves go to the tribunals to request it directly from the courts.
Kenneth Yim: Okay, so you're getting the court orders directly from the tribunals. That's a lot of work. Like, how often is that happening?
Weiting Bollu: Yeah, it's not all of it. So we don't have all of the orders, but sometimes we'll be in hearings and then we'll say, that's a very interesting case. We're going to go and request for that. It's not all of the cases. And yes, it is a lot of work. It is a lot.
Kenneth Yim: good for you guys. All right, so then what's the future? So other than searching for tenants, what else are you going to offer to your system? So you have the credit reporting stuff as well, rent reporting. So on -time rent reporting. What's up with that?
Weiting Bollu: Ooh, okay. So if we dive into the rent reporting side right now, what we have just gone out with is the bad debt, rental debt reporting. So what that means is if you have an order from the landlord and tenant board and it has rent owing to you, then you can come into our system and report it into the system. That way we'll track all of the interest every single day, how much is owed to you because every cent counts. And then we send all of that once a month to Equifax. Later on, we're looking at how do we go into the on-time rent payments? Because that will help folks reduce the delinquency possibilities.
Kenneth Yim: So that's important because typically the process of affecting somebody's credit for not paying rent, right? Like maybe you want to get back to the tenant or maybe you should let the rest of the community know that this is happening and they should be penalized somehow because they took advantage of the landlord. Then the typical process would be to get the judgment or the order from the landlord -tenant board. Then you have to go to the small claims to get a judgment and then go through collections and that affects it. Or how's a normal process of affecting credit for a tenant that's delinquent?
Weiting Bollu: Right. So there are a few ways that someone can go about this when it comes to systems or software when Openroom doesn't exist, then someone can actually go straight to the collections agency and give them the file with, which is the lease, the information about you and the tenants, the actual order. And then the collections agency will sometimes take anywhere between 20 to 50 % of what you end up collecting from the tenants.
And then they can report that into the credit bureau Equifax. Okay. But they don't actually need to enforce it at the Small Claims Court just yet in order to do that. Yeah. I believe so.
Kenneth Yim: I see. I see. But you still have to wait for the decision though, right? Like, whereas if it's not, whereas your system is it's still the same process as well too?
Weiting Bollu: We are also the same process. I believe that some collections agencies do not have to wait for that final decision. So you could technically go to them as soon as there is rent owed. But from an Openroom perspective, we're saying we operate on factual objective basis. We want to make sure that there is actually something owed to you that has been declared by the courts or the tribunals. And then we get involved because otherwise-Ken, we're a very small team over here. I don't think that we can handle all of the disputes that come in if landlords decide to act in bad faith, right? Because we know that there are bad landlords out there.
Kenneth Yim: Okay, so how can, speaking of landlords, bad landlords, how can tenants screen bad landlords using your system?
Weiting Bollu: Right. When tenants want to screen, I'd highly suggest coming into Openroom, go into our search bar, type in the property manager's name or the landlord's name or their corporation, whatever that lease has, the name on the lease, punch it in or punch in the address and then see what kind of orders have been or they have been involved in in the past. Maybe there's nothing.
99% of the chance you'd get no return, no matches. But if there is something, read through it, see what's going on. Is it that they never do maintenance when requested? Is it that they had a bad faith eviction? Then you better watch out for those. So those are our top two.
Kenneth Yim: What kind of interesting cases have you seen so far? Because you see a lot, I'm sure.
Weiting Bollu: Ooh, yes, my team looks at a lot. And actually there are cases where people would talk about it on Reddit as well. And then it prompts me to go check. Wow, what is this? There are like seven or nine orders on this. So one of the interesting cases that popped up recently is someone who rented Iceboat Terrace, multiple condo units at Iceboat. You know where the Roger Center is, right? Downtown Toronto. And they actually rented it out as an Airbnb. And then-
Kenneth Yim: I know which I know which tenant you are before you say that I know which tenant you're talking about. We just took that tenant in by the way because I met I know it's okay. It's okay. It's fine. It was during COVID. It's fine. I him actually met him in person in our office. So I think we're okay. I think we're okay. I'm okay with it. I'm comfortable that I saw it show up in Openroom. I'm okay with it. Go on. Sorry.
Weiting Bollu: Yeah. Okay. Okay. But I don't know if we're talking about the same individual, but that individual at the Ice Voters, they ended up not paying rent, but yet they are renting out those properties on Airbnb. Okay. Well, you know what, fingers on yours. During COVID, Openroom doesn't exist yet. Didn't exist yet. Like we were born after the COVID pandemic. So that is so interesting.
Kenneth Yim: Yeah, it's just I was like, man, I anyway, the final decision was that so you know, if something goes wrong, we're gonna come over there with a chokehold and strangle him a little bit. So anyway, no, it's okay. I'm No, no. Okay. Okay. What else? What else? Yeah, it's funny. That's funny. That's you saying that's the most interesting case you've seen. Yeah.
Weiting Bollu: Yeah. What a coincidence. Recently that that is one of the most recent ones. And then there are just some, Ken that are really, really sad because you and I, both have kids. You've got three. I've got two. are pretty young. And there are individuals who are moving all the time. Like we see some tenants who consistently don't pay rent to multiple landlords. And these landlords are actually gathering together. But what's very sad or unfortunate in these cases is that their kids end up moving multiple times and getting evicted.
Like they wait until the very end, they go through the stays, the reviews of the orders. And it's just, it's heartbreaking when I read those.
Kenneth Yim: But at the end of they're still taking advantage of the landlord though, right? I mean, there's other options available. Yes, you have kids. If you don't have the income or something, a fortune happens to your situation, you can't pay rent. I get it, but you're still stealing from somebody. You know, it's heartbreaking too. And if I was ever in that situation, I would just move to a different province even, you know, move somewhere like lower cost of living.
Weiting Bollu: Exactly.
Weiting Bollu: Right. I mean, it's easier said than done, but you're right. And there was one case that happened in Cambridge in Waterloo region where there were multiple landlords that ended up with non -payment of rent from these two tenants and they had two kids. So that was very unfortunate.
Kenneth Yim: But like, okay, so I have a problem with that because landlords shouldn't be there for the social safety net. At the end of the day, yes, it's a for profit business. I'm not saying monetize every single tenant and look at them as dollar signs or customers any day and you're providing housing for them, which is a basic fundamental right. And I get that. But like, the private sector is not where the social social security safety net should be. It should be for the government. And yes, I get there's wait long wait time for the government.
But like I said, I know it's easier said than done, but like if you don't have any other options, don't steal from landlords, like an individual landlord, because you don't know what that individual landlord is going through, what they're sacrificing.
Weiting Bollu: Absolutely.
Kenneth Yim:I mean, you see the horror stories all the time on the media, right, about landlords that, well, maybe you can talk about some of the cases that you've seen with landlords that are going through major suffering because of the rights of the tenants' rights.
Weiting Bollu: Yeah. I'll comment on that. I agree with you. When I say that it's unfortunate, I'm saying it's unfortunate that the, the, to the husband and wife ended up doing things like this that impact the kids. Absolutely that they shouldn't be doing that. It's just so sad that there are kids involved. Right. And then, yeah.
Kenneth Yim: Well, you push against the wall. Yeah, that's what you got to do, right? Like you have to do what you do for your family. I get that. I just know it comes at a cost, right? So I don't know.
Weiting Bollu: Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Yeah, I hear you. And then when it comes to some of these very unfortunate cases from landlords, like there's a misconception that landlords are all rich. There are some big REITs and big, large property management firms and they, that's another story.
But when it comes to the small mom and pop shops, recently something that made the news was where a landlord ended up living in her car because of tenants who didn't end up paying rent.
Kenneth Yim: That's right.
Weiting Bollu: So she's still going through the whole process and we know who she is. We've been talking to her. She's been communicating with us. There have been other stories and landlords trying to help her. So we see a lot of those coming in. I get hundreds of emails every month, with stories like this, and it adds a lot of pressure for us at Openroom to do this right.
Kenneth Yim: Yeah, yeah, you're right. Well, I just again, as a reminder, this like the the cases that make it to the landlord, tend to where the cases that make it to the media, they're the outlier cases. It's not the normal. For the most part, landlords and tenants do get along. There's good landlords and there's good tenants and they all get along. They pay their rent and oftentimes it's lower than the cost of actually owning the place, you know, because real estate is so expensive in Toronto and in Ontario anyway. So it's generally cheaper to be a tenant than it is to be a landlord. So but at the end of day, in the long run, landlords probably do win out because it's an asset at the end of the day. So anyway, all that to say that they're all getting along. It's just that the outlier cases.
Weiting Bollu: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Earlier we were mentioning that 99% of the cases people are fantastic. All right. Well, the great renters, the great landlords, and then it's just these outlier cases that pop up on my desk a lot because this is the nature of the work that I do. All I see every day are the orders that come out from the worst of the worst cases, but not all cases are bad.
So say for example, there are just tenants who are requesting to look at their rights, or it could be a tenant taking a landlord for bath faith evictions. And there are ways that we're actually protecting the tenant side where we actually make their names not searchable in the system. So we never redact the orders anymore. So there's no blackout of any of the PDFs that we receive, but we do try to make certain types of orders not searchable in the system. Yeah.
Kenneth Yim: Okay. Okay.
Weiting Bollu:Yeah, I think that at the end of the day, Ken, if we do this right at Openroom, we can help bring back confidence into the small landlords to bring out their vacant properties. Thousands. know, you know, thousands of people who keep their units vacant, their basements. They don't want to build additional laneway houses because why go through the stress, right? But if we do this right, we believe that we can help with the supply of the housing and therefore bringing it back out to people within this high demand of housing.
Kenneth Yim: We appreciate what you're doing in the landlord community for sure. Even the tenant community, we all appreciate for keeping, for you guys keeping it fair for everyone. Yeah, you know, even like the groups. So there's a couple of groups for landlords if you need to know, that's how I met you through Solo, right? Small ownership landlords of Ontario. They're a great organization and they're doing great things, nonprofit for what they're doing.
Weiting Bollu: Mm -hmm.
Kenneth Yim: And systems like yours, which essentially, in my opinion, is nonprofit. I hope you guys monetize and I hope you guys get rich off of this. essentially what you're doing is nonprofit in my eyes anyway, right? So hopefully you have enough.
Weiting Bollu: We consider it a social enterprise. There's a whole social element to it, but yet in order for my team and I to sustain running this, there has to be money. Deep down, we know that the small landlords and the great tenants got us to where we are today. There will always be a portion that is specifically for the small landlords that help the small landlords and the renters get to a better future.
Kenneth Yim: There you go.
Weiting Bollu: And then there is the additional, additional, additional, additional pieces that are like, okay, well, if you want the extra piece, then you can pay us for that.
Kenneth Yim: Sure, getting rich is the wrong thing, I shouldn't say that. But there should be some incentive, I'm a capitalist, so I'm fine with it. But you know, a lot of people aren't, I totally get it, right? So it's just, I hope you guys have enough oxygen to continue on doing what you're doing, because we love what you're doing, because you're doing a great thing for both sides. So thank you for that.
Weiting Bollu: Thank you. Well, you know what, maybe next year, if I'm looking for funds, you can then invest in us.
Kenneth Yim: For sure. For sure. It's gotta be profitable first.
Weiting Bollu: It's true, it's true. You can then look at all of our financials, see how we're doing. Absolutely.
Kenneth Yim: So how can people support you? Like what can we do? Our listeners here, what can we do to support you?
Weiting Bollu: Ooh, great question. So there are a few ways to support us. If you have a podcast, if you have an organization that we can speak at, I'd love to show up and share more of the Openroom story. So please send me an invite if that's in that realm.
And then another way is submit the orders that you might have or the landlords or tenants that you have spoken to share their orders, right? Ask them to share with us.
And then the third one is we're looking at other ways to expand the services that we offer. So if people have ideas or connections in other provinces, I'd love a reach out as well.
Kenneth Yim: Yeah, but then other problems are different rules as well too, right? I don't know, hopefully.
Weiting Bollu: Yes, they might have different rules and they might, like every jurisdiction is a little bit different, but at the fundamental levels is that these are public documents. So there are opportunities to do things, very, very uniquely or innovatively in those provinces as well.
Kenneth Yim: Okay, and so if you don't have a podcast, you don't have a platform to send information out and you don't have any orders or anything like that, at the very, very, very least, you can give them a follow at Openroom HQ for Instagram and where else? TikTok? Or also you? Okay.
Weiting Bollu: We don't do TikTok as much anymore. haven't found success on TikTok, but Instagram definitely doing very well over there where I share tips and free things in there. Or if, if you're a small landlord and you actually just want to learn more, we also offer an educational course. So we go through the RTA, the LTB, because, man, if I were to go back rewind, I didn't even know what the LTV was when I got into this business. So if people want to learn a bit more, stay educated because knowledge is power. All right.
Kenneth Yim: Well, it's not even that. It's just also how to be a good landlord, right? Because there's not very many, there's a lot of bad landlords. It's not to fault them. It's just they don't know, right? So they think what's right and what's wrong in their heads. And then they realize if you don't look at the other side, you don't know what's going on. You don't understand from the tenant's perspective what they're doing and why it's fair. I personally think the RTA is pretty fair. And I think that the Landlord Tenant Board is actually really fair. Even though there's a lot of delays and tenants can game system, I get why it's the case and I'm fine with it perfectly.
Weiting Bollu: Yes.
Kenneth Yim: I’m fine with it because I understand the RTA. So if you don't understand the RTA, meaning the Residential Tenancies Act, definitely go through their course and understand what it is. think that's important.
Weiting Bollu: Absolutely, because if I look at my trajectory of when I first got started, I didn't know about what the RTA was, the Landlord Tenant Board, and that really, really sucks. And that's why I spent two years, nearly two years at going through the LTB because I didn't know what I was doing. And so now I spent thousands of hours learning everything, but that's the unfortunate situation where many small landlords end up in because they think they know everything and it's just collect rent, but there's so much more to that. And let's keep educating.
Kenneth Yim: Yeah, it's someone's home, right? Even though it's your property, it's someone, they're living there, they made it their home for the short little while, they're renting it from you. Is there a cost to your program?
Weiting Bollu: Yes. There is a cost to the Landlord program, but if you message in, there are all sorts of discounts that we can offer to folks.
Kenneth Yim: Awesome, awesome. All right, well thank you for what you do. Is there anything last minute things you wanna say? What did I ask you? What did I not ask you that you should?
Weiting Bollu: The one thing I want to leave everybody with is that we're trying to build for a more transparent and connected rental ecosystem. And what does that mean? Transparent in the ways that if there's data, we should share that with the public so that you can make more informed decisions. And then from a connected standpoint, is, there are millions of renters, there are hundreds of thousands of small landlords, and it's a very fragmented space. But in order to get to a better future, we need to work together.
So therefore the great tenants and the great landlords, we need to be connected. That's all. Okay. Thanks everybody.
Kenneth Yim: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you for what do. Okay. Bye.
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