Properly is on a mission to make all aspects of renting simple and secure. We take on each rental process (i.e. applications, tenant screening, rent payments, and more) and find a better and safer way to do it.

Our Story

In late 2014, after spending over six years working at JPMorgan,George Cen left the corporate finance world to pursue his entrepreneurial dreams. In the years living in New York City, George had moved to three different apartments. He was frustrated by the manual, slow, and paper-based tasks that he was forced to deal with when apartment hunting. Even when working with brokers and property management companies who charge expensive fees, the process was not any different.

Michael Lee is a landlord of multiple rental units in Manhattan and Las Vegas. Since he lives in Manhattan, he has firsthand experience of the frustrations with trying to find tenants from a distance for his Las Vegas apartment. Waiting for applicants to mail and fax applications took months while his apartment sat vacant.

Jerry Bai has been a renter in California and New York for over a decade. He has been charged late fees for rent checks that were lost in the mail. There was an incidence where a landlord mistakenly ran his credit report several times which damaged his credit score. 

George, Michael, and Jerry went on mission to talk to landlords and renters to see if they felt the same pain as they did. They quickly discovered that landlords and renters dealt with such tasks as applications, credit reports, background checks, and rent payments on paper because there were no inexpensive and easy-to-use software options available. They knew something had to be done to address this problem. Thus, Properly was born.

We are users of our own product. We built Properly because we personally understand the frustrations of navigating the rental cycle. We’ve taken our negative experiences associated with checks, mountains of paperwork, and inefficient communication practices to build a tech platform that solves these pain-points. We are determined to bring renting to the 21st century.

Nearly all of the rental management software in the marketplace has been developed for property management firms and large apartment complexes. For the average landlord who own between 1-10 units, the expense of setting up such software or hiring professional property managers can amount to thousands of dollars a year. Due to the cost, landlords often manage these tasks themselves manually, inefficiently, and un-securely (think lots and lots of paper). 

As a direct impact, renters are submitting their most private information such as social security numbers on paper applications to strangers which is extremely unsafe. Renters have to deal with the time and hassle of filling out the same information over and over on multiple applications. As tenants, the only time they take out their checkbooks, envelopes, and stamps is to pay rent and utilities.

The traditional software options are costly and were not designed for the independent landlord and renter.


The Solution

Properly empowers landlords to manage their properties themselves. Properly is a free rental management platform for do-it-yourself landlords and renters with features that include:

This is just the beginning. Our vision for Properly is to be the one-stop shop for landlords and renters by providing the entire suite of rental management services (maintenance, accounting, taxes, legal, and more). We want our users to be able to do everything simply, safely, and securely.


The Founders

George Cen graduated from Columbia University in 2008 and worked at JPMorgan as a product risk manager covering real estate funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds. George was responsible for the end-to-end risks in business development, operations, technology, and finance. This product background, along with years spent covering the real estate industry, has helped George tremendously in starting Properly.

Jerry Bai has over 10 years of experience building web and mobile applications. Before jumping into a startup, he was previously working in New York agencies leading development for fortune 500 companies such as GE, Chase, and Intel. These roles taught him how to build reliable products with low resources and small time frames. Jerry built "The { } And" (theand.us) which won an Emmy for news documentary in 2014. Jerry also has passion and experience in product development, UX, and design which makes him a great technical partner for Properly.

Michael Lee graduated Harvard University in 2010 with a concentration in Economics. Upon graduation, he went into project management and operational consulting for a then-small financial technology firm that has now grown to over 2000+ employees. Michael is quite the disciple of the startup mindset as evidenced by his avid involvement with a New York-based Angel Group focused on FinTech. Over the past 3 years he has also made real estate investments in Manhattan and Las Vegas. As a landlord, Properly's motive resonates deeply with Michael.