Meet the Real Estate Tech Founder: Sean Harper from Kin

In our latest real estate tech entrepreneur interview, we’re speaking with Sean Harper from Kin.

Without further ado…

What do you do?

Kin insures houses and condos. We are a technology company backed by top venture capitalists and insurance companies. While most insurers run on 1960s software we built ours from scratch using modern technologies. As a result we are much better at using the huge amount of real estate data that’s now available to create a really great user experience and beat the other insurers at pricing and risk selection.

As the CEO and co-founder I do a little bit of everything but especially post Series A my job has been mostly recruiting, business development, fundraising and regulatory. Regulations are a huge factor in the insurance business and I have had to learn a lot over the course of getting Kin to where it is now. It’s very important to the founders of Kin that the person with the most information make the decision, which is rarely me, so at Kin we hire people who are very self directed (we have lots of entrepreneurs at Kin) and pretty much set them loose. A big part of my job is making sure that I’m not blocking the efforts of my team, since they all run super fast.

What problem does your product/service solve?

Insuring a home is too much hassle and costs too much. Traditional insurance companies require lots of paperwork because they rely on the user and/or an insurance agent for information about the home (what kind of shingles are on the home, how old is the roof, etc). Traditional insurance companies also often spend about half the money they collect to pay claims, which begs the question – where does the rest of the money go? A lot of it goes to support a huge physical retail network (there are more insurance agencies than fast food restaurants), a lot goes to supporting old and inflexible software and a lot goes to humans doing tasks that a computer could do better. We don’t have those expenses which allows us to be cheaper for most customers.

What are you most excited about right now?

I’m particularly excited about the opportunity to embed insurance into contexts where its relevant to the consumer. For example, if you are getting a mortgage or buying a new house, why can’t there be an insurance button in the flow that gets you great insurance with one click?

The main reason why that doesn’t happen already is that the legacy insurance companies have such a manual conversion process (paperwork, talk to an agent, etc) that embedding it actually detracts from the experience rather than making it better.

We built our product to easily embed in those contexts, which I think is going to be huge since real estate transactions right now are way too complicated. I imagine a day where a homebuyer or homeowner has a dashboard he can use to manage the whole house, including the insurance and other financial products, all in one place, tied together with APIs.

What’s next for you?

Now that we have built an efficient insurance platform and have proven that we can use our data advantage to underwrite profitably, our main goal is to spread the word about Kin.

What’s a cause you’re passionate about and why?

I’m passionate about the environment and sustainability. As a property insurance company we pay a lot of attention to the weather, since that’s the source of many claims. Worse weather is one of the many negative impacts that results from that increase in temperature. I would like to find a way to at least slow down the accelerating pace of climate change so we can better adapt to those impacts.

Thanks to Sean for sharing his story. If you’d like to connect, find him on LinkedIn here.

We’re constantly looking for great real estate tech entrepreneurs to feature. If that’s you, please read this post — then drop me a line (drew @ geekestatelabs dot com).

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