A marketplace that sells rental homes without dragging the tenant through it

Put a paying tenant in a shopping centre and you have improved it. The rent roll is the pitch. A broker packages an offering memorandum, sends it to a list of investors, and the building trades on what it earns.

Put the same paying tenant in a three-bedroom house and you have, as far as the market is concerned, damaged it.

Same tenant. Same lease. Same cheque clearing every month. The only thing that changed is which market the property gets sent to.

That is the gap the Investor Exchange exists to close.

Why residential punishes the thing commercial pays for

Commercial real estate never sends an income property to a public portal full of people who want to move in. It goes to investors, with an offering memorandum, priced off the income. Occupancy is a feature. A vacant building is the one with a problem.

Residential does the opposite. A tenant-occupied house goes onto the same public listing as every owner-occupied home, in front of an audience that overwhelmingly wants possession at close. So the tenant stops being an asset and becomes an obstacle — and the property becomes the most illiquid thing in residential real estate.

You already know how that sale goes. Weeks of showings that need notice and a cooperative tenant. Days on market accumulating in public where every buyer can see them. A price reduction. Then another. Frequently no sale at all — and at the end of it, a tenant who has spent two months letting strangers walk through their home and now knows exactly how little say they had.

The property was never the problem. It was in the wrong marketplace.

In Los Gatos that is 2,212 properties owned by somebody who lives somewhere else. The rental stock here is mostly houses — 6,042 single-family parcels against 232 multi-family — so the dollars riding on a stalled sale are larger than anywhere else on this list.

Four steps, and the house stays occupied.

The same asset, two marketplaces

That table is the entire product. The Exchange moves residential investment property into the left-hand column.

If you own one

You list without emptying the property, and without listing it publicly at all. No showings. No sign. No days-on-market clock ticking where buyers can watch it. No sequence of reductions telling the market you are getting desperate. The tenancy continues untouched and transfers with the property, so nobody has to be moved, paid to leave, or told anything.

Your listing publishes to verified investors in this market only. Nothing you enter is visible to anyone before I approve it, and you can withdraw at any point.

And it goes out the way a commercial asset would: with an offering memorandum — the rent, the lease term, the terms, the numbers assembled in one document — plus a signed opinion of value written by me under my own name and licence number. Not an automated estimate.

If you are buying

Income from day one. No lease-up, no leasing commission, no vacancy between close and first rent, no turnover cost. The tenant, the rent and the remaining term are on the table before you write anything.

You underwrite from an offering memorandum, the way you would on any commercial deal, rather than reverse-engineering a rent roll out of a listing description.

And it is built for 1031 timing. Forty-five days to identify and 180 to close is a brutal clock to run against a public market where the good inventory is picked over and the rest needs a tenant found before it earns anything. A standing pool of already-occupied, already-producing residential assets is a different proposition entirely.

The counter returns a number and nothing else — no addresses, no owners, no pins.

There is also a research map covering every property in this market whose owner does not live in it. Set your criteria and see a live count of how many match before you create an account — a number, and nothing else.

How a trade happens

The owner publishes the facts. Address, asking price, current rent, remaining lease term, terms, photos. Your own numbers.

I sign an opinion of value and the offering memorandum is generated from the listing.

It publishes to verified investors in this market. Invisible until approved, withdrawable at any time.

An investor writes a Letter of Intent. Non-binding — price, terms, and which contingencies are kept or waived with days attached. Accept, decline, counter or ignore. Nothing binds either side until a California Purchase Agreement is signed by both, and the owner may nominate their own agent at that stage.

One more thing worth knowing if you are weighing whether to empty the property first: in California, wanting to sell is not by itself a lawful basis to end a tenancy. That is a conversation for your attorney — but it is another reason the commercial approach fits this asset better than the residential one ever did.

List a rental you would sell →

Create an investor account →

Listing is free. Investor accounts are free.

Tim McMullen, Broker · McMullen Properties · CA DRE #02016832
[email protected] · (415) 691-9272 · losgatosrealestatemarket.com

Parcel and ownership figures from county assessor records, current as of August 2026. Nothing here is legal, tax or 1031 advice — consult your attorney and your qualified intermediary. Nothing here is an offer to buy or sell real property or a solicitation of an offer. A Letter of Intent is not a binding contract. Information deemed reliable but not guaranteed.