Co-founder & CEO

Belong Co-Founders

Belong is welcoming 18 new cities across Florida, California, Washington, Utah, Texas, Georgia, North and South Carolina.

Belong Expands to 18 New Markets, Giving More Americans a Place to Belong

Our resolution for 2024? To double down on a core pillar of the American Dream and give more people a place to call home. A place to belong. Hot on the heels of our Belong PRO network expansion in Texas, Utah, and Florida, we’re ready to extend a warm southern welcome to the great states of Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.  

The mission of Belong is to create authentic belonging experiences, empowering residents to become homeowners and homeowners to become financially free. We’ve built the modern alternative to Property Management that puts people first and is enabled by best-in-class technology and services. 

In 2023 we celebrated a major milestone in that journey as we expanded our world-first residential network, Belong PRO, in eighteen new regions across the country. Our top-rated, industry-busting services will change what it means to own a rental home in:

Because for the millions of homeowners and residents in these cities, things don’t always feel like fair competition. Especially when it comes to the housing market. People are going against massive corporations and hedge funds to secure a home to live in or rent out. And the property management industry has long perpetuated the idea that landlords must profit at the expense of tenants — and it’s time for that to stop. 

Welcome Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina! 

It's an especially exciting time to own a rental home in the Southeastern states and we're ready to help rental homeowners make the most of the opportunities that 2024 brings. After wage growth outpaced inflation in 2022, CNBC again ranked North Carolina the top state for business in 2023. Workers are flocking there to take advantage of this booming economy and growing operations of major companies like Apple and Bosch. Mix in desirable universities and you’ve got the perfect formula for attracting renters all year round. Georgia ranked 4th on the same list. 

A recent survey of industry experts also ranked Dallas/Fort Worth, Atlanta, Austin, San Diego, San Antonio, Raleigh/Durham, Seattle, Houston, Denver, Charlotte, Miami as markets to watch in 2024. With all of these markets now on Belong PRO, you can reach your financial goals with our team taking care of everything.  

For homeowners, this means there’s never been a better time to rethink how your rental home is cared for. It’s time to join a modern alternative to property management that’s designed for rental homeowners of today, not decades past. We are making the terms landlords and tenants obsolete. By taking a more human-centric approach to housing, we can redefine the rental experience for both sides.  

Belong has a very different vision for the US housing market than the one that currently exists. This is why expanding our markets has been a key focus for our team across 2023 and into 2024. We want to address both sides of the housing crisis, giving homeowners the confidence to choose long-term renting and open their homes to residents. Every new region that we enter provides thousands of opportunities for people to get the rental experience and financial security they deserve,” says CEO of Belong, Ale Resnik.

This announcement is only the beginning. We have at least ten more markets in our sights. Learn more about the benefits of long-term renting here or visit our homeowner's page to find out more about how our services are helping people to ditch property management in Seattle, Redmond, Oakland, San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, Miami and many more.

Belong is expanding to fix the rental experience for homeowners and residents in Florida, California, Washington, Utah, Texas, Georgia, North and South Carolina

Ready To Belong?

Belong is building a residential network that connects people who own homes with people who want a place to belong. Here's what we achieved together in 2024.

2023 In Review: Giving More People A Place To Belong

Belong is building a network; connecting people who own much-loved homes with people who want a place to belong. Working together, we can put people first and change what it means to rent a home — creating lasting, positive impact on innumerable lives for decades to come. 

Redefining an entire industry is not a journey that can be made alone. It ‘takes a village’ of homeowners, residents, investors and team members. It takes innovative new services, industry recognition and support to spread the word. 

So before we take on 2024, we want to say thank you to our supporters. To our staff, to our community of homeowners and residents, to our financial backers, and to people who have talked or written about us so that we can grow. We invite you to join us in reflecting on four milestones and achievements of 2023 — we couldn’t have done it without you. 

1. We welcomed new neighbors in 15 cities

2023 was an incredible year for expanding our world-first residential network, with Belong PRO services launching in 15 new regions across the country. We’ve expanded our capacity in Florida and Washington and added Texas, Utah and North Carolina — with many more to come! 

We’ve received such a warm welcome and want to say a huge thank you to everyone who believes in our vision. You’re helping us to create authentic belonging experiences and change what it means to rent a home in: 

Our homeowners and residents love having 24/7 access to help and support. So much so that we decided to give our customer support services an upgrade, adding new teams of dedicated specialists in November 2023.  

Now when you contact us, in addition to support from a dedicated account manager, you’ll get direct and fast access to the team with the best knowledge and skills to answer your questions. We have dedicated teams with expertise in everything from Resident Placement and Leasing, Maintenance and Home Repairs to Taxes and HOA Management. 

Read More: Easier, Better, Faster, Stronger: Our Customer Support Service is Growing!

3. We now offer insurance to protect rented homes

Did you know that homeowners insurance is only available to owner-occupied homes and becomes void when you rent out the home? When you own a rental, be that long-term rental or a short-term vacation rental — you need a specific insurance policy to protect your asset. If you don't, you could have a claim denied and be liable for expensive repairs and legal fees.

Belong has addressed this by offering dedicated rental home insurance with the option to make flexible payments and spread the cost over your lease agreement. 

Read more: What Type of Insurance Should I Get For My Rental Property?

4. We outranked all property managers in San Francisco 

Belong is here to make waves and our new approach to renting is getting noticed. In 2023, SFist.com ranked Belong #1 of 11 Best Featured Property Managers in San Francisco. 

And when it comes to research, Expertise.com doesn’t muck around. They vet more than 60,000 businesses every month to find the best of the best. Belong sits on their 2023 list of Best Property Management Companies in San Francisco, giving Belong a glowing 5 stars for professionalism. 

Read More: The Best Property Manager in San Francisco According to SFist and Expertise.com

2024 is going to be even bigger and brighter with plenty of more people-led, industry-disrupting services coming to Belong homeowners and residents. Thank you to everyone who is joining us on this incredible journey to changing the world of home management and renting forever. 

For anyone not yet on our network, you can find out if your home is eligible for Belong here, or become a Belong resident by searching for available homes.

Marc Andreessen announced today via the a16z blog the firm has invested $350 million in WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s residential real estate company, ‘Flow.’

The future of Home just got hotter: Belong’s largest shareholder, A16Z, backs Adam Neumann’s Flow

Why it matters: The investment reflects investor interest in residential real estate market disruptors.

a16z is Belong’s largest shareholder. Belong and Flow share similar missions, both expressing a desire to make it easier for real people to participate in homeownership.



In the last ten years, the percentage of homes owned by hedge funds has increased dramatically (nearly doubling). Inventory is short and housing prices are higher than ever. This is driving investor interest in disruptive solutions to the global housing crisis.



How Belong is different: Though we exist to fight similar systemic issues, Belong is focused on alternative solutions to the housing crisis:

We do not own homes. Rather, we offer vertically integrated home management platform for homeowners so they never have to be a landlord, and can still have their home taken care of by high-quality residents and our in-home maintenance team. 


We focus on homes owned by individuals and small investors. Belong’s version of the housing market is one where homes are in the hands of regular people. While Flow seeks to purchase and manage multi-family (apartment) homes in an end-to-end manner, Belong primarily works with homeowners that own and invest in single-family homes. 



We help renters become owners. With each on-time rent payment, Belong residents save toward home ownership. We believe addressing the housing crisis requires addressing both sides of home ownership. This is how we do our part. 

The big picture: Investors (including Belong’s shareholders) are focusing on residential real estate disruptors because the problems caused by this housing crisis will require multiple concurrent solutions. Flow and Belong will tackle these problems differently, but we share a vision for the future of Home.



Belong’s largest shareholder, A16Z, backs Adam Neumann’s Flow

How and why Belong introduced a company wide policy of two days meeting-free and how to structure all necessary meetings to boost productivity and reduce costs.

Belong Meetings Manifesto | Working at Belong

A manager’s day is, as a rule, sliced up into tiny slots, each with a specific purpose decided in advance. Many of those slots are used for meetings, calls, or emails. The manager’s schedule may be planned for them by a secretary or assistant. 

Managers spend a lot of time, “putting out fires” and doing reactive work. An important call or email comes in, so it gets answered. A team members makes a mistake or needs advice, so the manager races to sort it out. To focus on one task for a substantial block of time, managers need to make an effort to prevent other people from distracting them. 

Managers don’t necessarily need the capacity for deep focus — they primarily need the ability to make fast, smart decisions. In a three-minute meeting, they have the potential to generate (or destroy) enormous value through their decisions and expertise. 

A maker’s schedule is different. It is made up of long blocks of time reserved for focusing on particular tasks, or the entire day might be devoted to one activity. Breaking their day up into slots of a few minutes each would be the equivalent of doing nothing. 

A maker could be the stereotypical reclusive novelist, locked away in a cabin in the woods with a typewriter, no internet, and a bottle of whiskey to hand. Or they could be a Red Bull–drinking Silicon Valley software developer working in an open-plan office with their headphones on. Although interdisciplinary knowledge is valuable, makers do not always need a wide circle of competence. They need to do one thing well and can leave the rest to the managers. 

Meetings are pricey for makers, restricting the time available for their real work, so they avoid them, batch them together, or schedule them at times of day when their energy levels are low. As Paul Graham writes:

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it. 

It makes sense. The two work styles could not be more different. 

A manager’s job is to, well, manage other people and systems. The point is that their job revolves around organizing other people and making decisions. As Andrew Grove writes in High Output Management: 

…a big part of a middle manager’s work is to supply information and know-how, and to impart a sense of the preferred method of handling things to the groups under his control and influence. A manager also makes and helps to make decisions. Both kinds of basic managerial tasks can only occur during face-to-face 

encounters, and therefore only during meetings. Thus, I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible. 

A maker’s job is to create some form of tangible value. Makers work alone or under a manager, although they might have people working with them. “Maker” is a very broad category. A maker could be a writer, artist, software developer, carpenter, chef, biohacker, web designer, or anyone else who designs, creates, serves, and thinks. 

Making anything significant requires time — lots of it — and having the right kind of schedule can help. Take a look at the quintessential maker schedule of the prolific (to say the least) writer Isaac Asimov, as described in his memoir:

I wake at five in the morning. I get to work as early as I can. I work as long as I can. I do this every day of the week, including holidays. I don’t take vacations voluntarily and I try to do my work even when I’m on vacation. (And even when I’m in the hospital.) 

In other words, I am still and forever in the candy store [where he worked as a child]. Of course, I’m not waiting on customers; I’m not taking money and making change; I’m not forced to be polite to everyone who comes in (in actual fact, I was never good at that). I am, instead, doing things I very much want to do — but the schedule is there; the schedule that was ground into me; the schedule you would think I would have rebelled against once I had the chance. 

Belong is suffering from stage 3 meeting disease. Meetings have become widespread across the entire company's body, and it is starting to hurt productivity for every team member truly. It's my responsibility to create an environment where people can do their life's best work for the world's benefit. I take that responsibility seriously, and that's what prompted this memo. 

We are going to try a completely new framework for meetings. For starters, we are going to declare a company-wide two NO MEETING DAYS. That's right, starting this following Monday, April 26th, please block your calendar completely on Tuesday and Thursday. Those days, all meetings that aren't the morning check-in / urgent working meetings will be discouraged. This is the time you can block to do deep thinking, whiteboard, or take time to plow through your Jira / Zendesk tickets. Hurray! 

For meetings to be effective, they need to be structured.

These are the seven different types of meetings. If you are initiating a meeting, please make sure to label the session accordingly. 

If you received an invitation to a meeting, please make sure to check for what kind of meeting you are attending. If the meeting isn't specified, your responsibility is to request that specification from the meeting organizer. 

The vast majority of meetings are longer than they should be. This benefits people that love to chat but have more difficulty producing deep work. To restore balance, we are going to add some structure to the meeting's time. 

Here is the structure we are going to try starting Monday, April 26th 2021. 

Meetings should ALWAYS be scheduled to start precisely at the hour or half an hour. It's essential that we are all ON TIME and READY for the meeting. 

Meetings should always be scheduled to finish 10 minutes before the hour or half an hour to allow for all participants to take a break and prepare physically and psychologically for the next meeting. 

Meeting's default length should be 20 minutes. There has to be a genuine reason for regular meetings to be more than 20 minutes long. 


Type A meeting (1:1): Requires that both attendees interchange topics ahead of time. 


Type B meeting (Morning Staff Meeting): Requires a clear lead specified in the meeting invitation. This lead is in charge of the meeting and determining the next steps discussed in the meeting.


Type C meeting (Decision Meeting): Requires a clear lead of the meeting. Requires precise specification of who's the decision-maker in that meeting. Requires a document/paragraph/slide prepared in advance of the meeting. Requires communication to all stakeholders on what decisions have been made and by whom. All of this should be included in the calendar invite. 


Type D meeting (Operational Reviews): Requires a clear lead of the meeting. Requires material shared in advance of the session (at least 12 hours). Requires company-wide participation. 


Type E meetings (Leadership Meetings). Requires a lead of the meeting. Requires a clear agenda in advance of the meeting with documentation on topics that will be discussed. Requires note-taking and follow-up. Requires sharing those notes with all participants and company-wide in the new leadership meetings channel in slack. 


Type F meetings (All Hands Meetings): Requires a lead of the meeting. Requires a clear agenda in advance of the meeting. 


Type G meetings (Working meetings): Requires a lead of the meeting. Requires a description of the topic that'll be discussed in advance. Requires notes to be shared with participants. 


If you are in a meeting, you are in all likelihood not taking care of one million other pressing topics on your agenda. It happens to all of us. When you encounter yourself in a meeting and thinking or working on different issues, this is a bad sign. 

Leave the meeting. We encourage everyone that feels they aren't adding or deriving value from a meeting to leave without saying goodbye. Just leave. You are free to go. 


Pay close attention: If you decide to stay in a meeting, please make sure to attend to it with all of your senses. Please refrain from answering slack, text messages, or browsing your favorite clothing brand while in a meeting. It's a waste of time, it's distracting, and it's disrespectful.


Cell phone/computer use: When in a meeting, the use of cell phones/computers is discouraged. We understand life happens, and you may be taking care of a non-work emergency. Absent that, touching or looking at your cell phone or computer during a meeting sends your co-workers the message that the meeting is unimportant and that there are many more crucial things you should be attending to. If that's the case, please go to point one above 


Start and end time: These need to be respected strictly. Starting late, is disrespectful to everyone that’s waiting for us in the meeting. Finishing late, is disrespectful to all the meeting attendees that are coming right after the meeting that’s ending. We must start and end strictly on time. 


I see this new meeting operating rhythm as crucial for Belong's culture. High performers expect a high level of organization and output. To attract and retain them, we must start holding ourselves to a higher standard of operation. 

So let's have fun, work hard, change the world. And meet the right way. Thank you.

https://belonghome.com/blog/working-for-a-startup

https://belonghome.com/blog/property-management-services

https://belonghome.com/blog/how-to-deal-with-a-bad-property-management-company

https://belonghome.com/blog/property-management-fees-how-much-do-property-managers-charge

https://belonghome.com/blog/becoming-a-landlord-how-to-become-a-landlord

Ale Resnik

Behind every truly great experience is a guardian who relentlessly pursues the perfection of that experience.

Ale, Owen & Tyler Founders

Belong

Ashleigh Graf

Melanie Kershaw

Harrison Kelly

Ale, Owen & Tyler Founders

Belong

Ashleigh Graf

Melanie Kershaw

Harrison Kelly