Zero to PropHero: Mickael Roger with Jenny Fielding
Mickael Roger, co-founder and co-CEO of PropHero chats with Jenny Fielding, General Partner of Everywhere Ventures on episode 118: Zero to PropHero.
In episode 118 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Mickael Roger, co-founder and co-CEO of PropHero, a data-driven real estate investment platform that helps everyday investors identify, buy, and manage high-return properties globally. Mickael shares how a painful personal experience losing money on an investment inspired him to build a company that takes the guesswork out of real estate. He discusses how PropHero uses machine learning across 25 years of data and hundreds of variables to consistently deliver 16% average annual returns across 4,000+ properties, outperforming every major index, by pairing machine learning with the local insight that no dataset can fully replace.
In this episode, you will hear:
Predicting property performance with 25 years of machine learning data.
Managing the full investment lifecycle through a single digital platform.
Deploying AI for 24/7 support while keeping humans in high-stakes decisions.
Launching PropHero Academy to deepen client investment knowledge.
Building a lifetime wealth partnership over a transactional real estate model.
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Transcript:
00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:33 Jenny: All right, everyone, welcome to Venture Everywhere, where today, I’m very excited to have our special guest, Mickael Roger, who is the co-founder and co-CEO of PropHero. I’m particularly interested in talking to him, because he’s built a data-driven real estate investment platform that helps users identify, buy, manage high-return property investments globally.
00:00:54 Jenny: As someone who has a bunch of properties, never really knows how to manage it, and is interested in the category, but really doesn’t have the skills, I was super excited to be able to talk to you and support you guys. Welcome, Mickael, to the program.
00:01:08 Mickael: Hey. Thank you for having me.
00:01:09 Jenny: Awesome. I’d love to start off a little bit at the beginning, because you have such an interesting background. Half Australian, half French, grown up across cultures. But you also started a little bit less traditional than some of our founders in that you worked at big companies, finance, places like McKinsey. Just talk a little bit about your background before we get into PropHero.
00:01:28 Mickael: When I was 16, I had a big master plan. I’ve always wanted to launch my own business and make it successful. I felt that I need to know how the world works before, and especially in terms of finances, strategy, management, etc.
00:01:44 Mickael: And so the ideal path was to study maths, because maths runs the world. Even before AI, that was already the case 20 years ago. Learn about maths, then go to banking, then go to management consulting. That was my plan and feel ready before launching my own business.
00:02:00 Mickael: What happened is that about 10 years ago, I started to fall in love with AI and being absolutely convinced, so way before OpenAI, that AI was going to change humanity. I launched the McKinsey AI practice with other colleagues. Things went really well doing that, and then I thought, “Wow, the world is changing. I have to be part of it.”
00:02:20 Mickael: And so that was five years ago. Found the business idea that I believed in, and we launched PropHero. We are celebrating our fifth birthday next month.
00:02:27 Jenny: That’s awesome. You talk about PropHero. What was that like going from more big company? I know maybe you felt entrepreneurial, and I had a similar experience. I felt very entrepreneurial. My parents worked for themselves.
00:02:38 Jenny: There was a lot of that type of ethos in our family, but I went to law school. I worked at J.P. Morgan. I’d worked at big companies before I launched my first startup. So what was it like taking that leap?
00:02:48 Mickael: Learning that in real life nothing is ever perfect. When you work in investment banking at McKinsey, people get crazy for a comma missing somewhere. In startups, you can’t get mad about this part, otherwise you just become completely insane.
00:03:03 Mickael: I must say that. When I resigned from my corporate job, I remember dropping my son at daycare at like 7:34 a.m. back at my place, sitting alone on my couch thinking, “Wow, where do I start?”
00:03:17 Mickael: This feeling of like, “Wow, no one cares about me.” I have to learn how to create a company, create an email, create a website, find my first clients, build our tech, find money. Well, this is a huge mountain to climb. And the thing is just to go step by step. Because if you only look at the top of the mountain, you will panic. Just go step by step.
00:03:39 Jenny: I’d love to jump in and just hear really where the idea came from and what was the problem you were trying to solve? Again, I I mentioned that I’ve always been fascinated with real estate. I grew up in New York City, seeing booms and busts and have participated in a very inefficient way because I have a day job. So I’d love to hear where this idea came from.
00:03:58 Mickael: From my own painful experience. 12-15 years ago, I was at McKinsey at the time. So making good money, but not that much time. I wanted to invest my money across multiple asset classes, including real estate. Because I had no time, I hired a buyer’s agent. Paid her about $50,000.
00:04:16 Mickael: I remember telling her, I’m into AI. I built this model. I’m predicting that right now in Australia, I should invest on the gold coast. I think prices are going to more than double in the next three years.
00:04:28 Mickael: “Ah, Mickael, you know nothing about real estate. I’ve been in Sydney for 20 years. Buy there. Okay?” So I spent one and a half million seven years ago. As of last week, as of CBA, my investment is worth 1.4 million. So actually, I lost money in seven years.
00:04:44 Mickael: Terrible investments, but amazing business idea. What if real estate investment was done by serious people who know about data and who make the experience ultra simple and digital and use data and local knowledge to outperform the markets? That was our vision from day one.
00:05:04 Mickael: Not thinking in real estate in transaction, okay, I just want to sell you something. But no, I’m going to help you for the rest of your life to build wealth through real estate. We’re going to use data and an amazing digital platform to make it super simple and super profitable. That’s how it started from a very bad investment, which in the end was maybe the best one.
00:05:24 Jenny: That’s an amazing story. A similar story. My investment turned out well, but it was buying when people just thought it was crazy. I bought an apartment in San Francisco in about 2010, and San Francisco was in this real estate slump.
00:05:38 Jenny: Everyone was like, “That city is dying.” I just was like, “I have a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. How can this city be dying?” But you get a lot of bad advice is my point. So can you talk a little bit how PropHero is using data as opposed to vibes?
00:05:53 Mickael: We don’t rely on gut feeling. We are relying on mathematics. If you think about it, what drives real estate? Growing demands, lack of supply, gentrifying population, growing economy, lack of land, et cetera, just like business sense.
00:06:09 Mickael: What we do, we convert these business principles into data. So evolution of land available, new build, time to market, liquidity. We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of variables over 25 years of data.
00:06:24 Mickael: We run a machine learning model on this to see – which I’m simplifying but which indicators are predictive of future price and rent growth. This is surprisingly not used by so many people.
00:06:37 Mickael: I was talking to one of the biggest trillion dollar company recently in London, and somehow they still use old school macroeconomic analysis. We use machine learning to predict where to invest and what to invest in.
00:06:50 Mickael: What’s great is we also measure our accuracy. So we know how good we are, and we know also how good we are over time during bullish and bearish times as well. Our performance is ultra consistent. So we’ve bought over 4,000 properties at PropHero over the past five years.
00:07:06 Mickael: Our average annual total return is 16% per year, 1-6, which is outperforming any index that you can look at. Great results and not because of luck, honestly. It’s just mathematics.
00:07:18 Mickael: Mathematics, and if I may just add, we have local people on the ground who find the best deals and data does not see everything. We are very well conscious of what the data doesn’t see. So we have people on the ground who know and see what the data models don’t see.
00:07:34 Jenny: Amazing. What’s been something that has surprised you most about building a startup in the property space? You hear a lot about real estate people being cutthroat. You hear about all the problems with management. What’s been something that’s actually surprised you?
00:07:49 Mickael: It will sound maybe a little bit arrogant, but how much people love us. I wanted to create a cool company that was useful for people, but in my previous life, clients didn’t really love us. It wasn’t really the point.
00:08:01 Mickael: Some of our clients are just like fanatics. My analysis on this is that most people are not passionate about real estate, but it brought them a financial independence and a peace of mind for which they feel proud of themselves for having made the decision and taken the risk.
00:08:17 Mickael: And also they feel, for many of them, grateful. I wasn’t expecting so much of that. I’ve got very often clients reaching out to me on LinkedIn, on Instagram, some even have my WhatsApp and say, “Hey, Michael, we don’t know each other. But FYI, I’m one of your clients. And thank you. We’ve done so well.”
00:08:32 Mickael: It’s one of the perks of this job. Apart from that, it’s a very fascinating industry. It’s much more complex than it seems, and it’s got a depth that I was not suspecting.
00:08:43 Mickael: While now as a business owner, I see it as a defensibility barrier. Because what we’ve built in all these country, all these revenue verticals, all these types of assets start to replicate. It’s actually a pretty deep industry.
00:08:56 Jenny: Interesting.
00:10:09 Jenny: I was looking at your website before this call. You had a lot of properties in Spain. I’ve always dreamed of owning an apartment in Barcelona, but I saaw the interesting properties and probably the best value was kind of in the South, Alicante and some of these other places. So I was like, “Gosh, that’s so interesting.” So what makes a good customer and a good high return property? How do you define that?
00:08:57 Mickael: When you join PropHero, first of all, you talk to an investment advisor and this person will understand your profile and firstly, is PropHero the right company for you? If you’re looking for a purely emotional asset, don’t go with PropHero.
00:09:13 Jenny: Right, right. That’s the Jenny apartment in Barcelona. Don’t do that.
00:09:18 Mickael: We’re super honest. Yes, we could make money, but actually we don’t want to. Our investments are purely based on where we believe you are going to build wealth, not emotions at all.
00:09:27 Mickael: Then depending on your profile, we’ll build your investment strategy. And then once you sign up, we will start sending you properties to buy, either full properties or club deals. So buying a share in a building.
00:09:38 Mickael: Then on the app, you can buy this property or this club deal ticket completely digitally. And then you can, from your phone or computer, track your wealth growth over time. So all your properties are all connected in one place.
00:09:49 Mickael: And for us, a great investment is actually super simple. It’s the sum of capital growth and net rental return. The denominator is how much the investment, the property costs you: cost to buy, to renovate, to furnish in some markets, all the fees like stamp duty, etc.
00:10:06 Mickael: And then all the money you make is capital gains plus net rental return. So rent minus all the rental expenses. Super simple. Depending on your strategy, you may want to favor more capital growth or rental yield. And we’ve got different asset classes depending on how much of each you want. But, in short, we optimize for capital growth plus net rental return.
00:10:26 Jenny: And you guys manage everything. Is that correct?
00:10:28 Mickael: Everything. What you have to do is to decide which assets you want to buy, sign a few documents and make a few bank transfers. 99.9% of our clients have never seen the property with their own eyes.
00:10:40 Mickael: Me, myself, I invest almost all of my savings into PropHero properties. I know in which cities they are. I couldn’t tell you the neighborhood or how many rooms. I’m just seeing the returns. That’s it. Pure investments.
00:10:50 Jenny: That’s really cool because I think many of us have bought some properties. It’s just a hassle to manage. And then if you buy like a REIT, you’re so disconnected from the product that it’s just a financial product.
00:11:02 Jenny: And so I love this. That was why we got interested in being involved, in investing is I love this middle where you actually get to pick. You get to understand. You get to learn about how you guys are underwriting this. But you take care of everything, which is really cool.
00:11:15 Mickael: Speaking of this, what we launched a few months ago is the PropHero Academy, courses for those of our fans who want to learn more and become much more knowledgeable about the industry.
00:11:26 Mickael: We got a few thousand people who signed up almost overnight. We’re surprised to see how interested people were. You got some people who get really, really into this.
00:11:34 Jenny: That’s amazing. Can you talk about macro trends? Interest rates in the U.S. have gone up a lot, and that’s causing some interesting bumps here. Things like inflation, AI. What are some of the macro trends that are either headwinds or tailwinds for you guys?
00:11:49 Mickael: The big thing is that at any point in time, there are always good assets to buy and bad assets that you shouldn’t buy. At any point in time. The data is ultra clear. There has never been a time where you should not buy anywhere.
00:12:03 Mickael: Maybe 2008, I didn’t check this in detail, but I’m actually pretty sure that, yes. It’s even better when the market goes down is when you make the best deals. I’m not stressed about macroeconomics ever.
00:12:13 Mickael: Personally, I prefer buying when the market is going down. Some people prefer the opposite. When you get data on a 7 to 10 year holding period, it doesn’t change much.
00:12:23 Mickael: People tend to overpanic on the real estate changes. But what happens if you buy in the right areas, rents keep going up almost always. And when they go down, it’s only a few percentage points. And by the time your lease will not be over anyway, so it doesn’t affect you anyway.
00:12:41 Mickael: Our yields are constant or increasing. And property prices in the areas where we invest, the biggest fall we’ve seen are maybe 10 percent within one year, but then with a sharp catch up. And over a 7 to 10 year holding period, doesn’t change much.
00:12:57 Mickael: And so just like the stock market, don’t try to time the market. It’s just not working. If you can try to not put all your eggs into one basket. Try to buy one asset every two to three years. And if you do this, one will be bought at a small peak, one at a low, etc. But over time, you will flatten the timing risk and will just benefit from the long term trend.
00:13:18 Mickael: And as a fact, I was saying where I sold, so we’ve bought thousands of properties for our clients. So 100% have outperformed the S&P and all other indexes. And all of them have outperformed the real estate market.
00:13:30 Mickael: Yes, interest rates can be a pain, especially in markets where interest rates are viable. So you should really be careful on your cash flows. But apart from that, as long as you can manage your cash flows, don’t worry too much about it. Based on thousands of properties bought.
00:13:43 Mickael: One mistake I see, which I think is such a shame, is people who buy at their limit borrowing capacity. And then when interest rates go up, massive trouble.
00:13:52 Mickael: My sincere advice is that brokers will often tell you, “Hey, you should borrow one million, two million streaming.” No, don’t borrow at your maximum capacity, borrow much, much less and try to invest in multiple assets in different locations to hedge your timing and location risk.
00:14:08 Jenny: Great advice. I think I read that you studied engineering. That’s your background. You just said that you were obsessed with AI before the LLM models made an appearance.
00:14:17 Jenny: Can you talk about a little bit of that journey going from V1, which was more about machine intelligence, machine learning to how you’re able to really utilize AI now and how that’s reshaping real estate in general?
00:14:30 Mickael: When we launched PropHero, AI was mainly machine learning so predicting what to buy. That’s how we started PropHero and how our clients got great investments.
00:14:40 Mickael: Now, AI, of course, with LLMs is a whole different game. What we launched about one year ago is brand new. We call it the ecosystem ERP software. It’s like a big software that runs all real estate for the entire industry for PropHero, for real estate agents, mortgage brokers, notaries, renovators, property managers, etc.
00:15:02 Mickael: So we’re building this big software to run the industry. And this, of course, we’ve got some massive help from vibe coding. What we are building now in one month before would have taken us one year. And I think we can still go even much faster.
00:15:16 Mickael: That’s one big area. So building the platform, a much more robust and comprehensive platform with LLMs. The big dream we have, which was only a dream five years ago and which is now becoming a reality, is using generative AI to have your own real estate wealth advisor.
00:15:33 Mickael: And so we are connecting LLMs to our data sets, connecting tens of thousands of properties and hundreds of hours of our call recordings, so of our advisors talking to clients. Retrain the model with all this data. And now we’re starting to advise clients with an AI model.
00:15:52 Mickael: What we’re seeing is that for simple queries, this is really amazing. Because clients can get answers 24/7 straight away. What we see, however, is that when the time comes to make the big decision, writing a big check to buy a property, our clients still want to talk to their human wealth advisor.
00:16:09 Mickael: And this, I’m actually not seeing it change because it’s such a massive amount of money. People feel safer talking to a real human being. And so that’s why we keep our wealth advisor team, who are complemented by our AI wealth advisors.
00:16:23 Jenny: That was actually one of my questions I wanted to ask you is like, what parts of the investment decision do you think will never be fully automated? So I guess you answered that.
00:16:32 Mickael: Making the big check, making the big bank transfer. This is always the big moment where we think, “Hey, am I really trusting this company? Is it really a great deal?” This is where things get serious.
00:16:43 Jenny: All right. Well, humans still have a fighting chance. This is kind of more of a macro question, not just about PropHero, but do you think that traditional real estate agents or brokers are going to be disrupted in general by AI or empowered or both?
00:16:56 Mickael: Real estate agents will remain for owner occupiers, so for emotional purchases. I don’t really see a world where they are necessary, for investors, to be honest. Mortgage brokers, apologies to my friends who are brokers, but I know they agree with me.
00:17:11 Mickael: I actually just bought a house… I don’t see why the broker was necessary. It’s the bank’s job to improve their processes and automate their processes to provide instant mortgages or mortgage approvals.
00:17:25 Mickael: I’m certain this will come. I was expecting them to be faster to deploy this, to be honest. But I think with AI development and AI checks now, I think this will accelerate. I’m not watching mortgage brokerage business.
00:17:38 Jenny: Good to know. What’s one idea that experts in your field say that you just totally disagree with?
00:17:44 Mickael: People, especially venture capital funds, always tell me, “Oh, it’s a transactional business.” Absolutely not. It’s a wealth business focusing on customer lifetime value. We are our clients’ lifetime wealth partner.
00:17:58 Mickael: I don’t care if they buy today or tomorrow. What I want is to help them throughout their lives, helping them buy, sell, renovate, manage, finance, whatever they need to build real estate wealth. And so it’s a lifetime wealth business, not a transactional business.
00:18:14 Mickael: And I think that is one of the reasons why real estate agents have sometimes some bad press, because they push you so much to buy, not procure. We are not here for the short term and just to have you make one transaction. We are here to help you for the rest of your life. Especially for investments, it’s a lifetime value optimization game, not a transaction game.
00:18:33 Jenny: For sure. So tell us a little bit just more about your team. Are you still spread across continents or mostly concentrated in Spain now?
00:18:40 Mickael: We used to think that we would hire people anywhere, just hire the best talents. That was our people and culture policy for about three years.
00:18:51 Mickael: What we realized that for the most senior roles, being able to be in the same room at least twice a month changes everything. So now the most senior roles are all in Spain. Not necessarily in the same city or Spain but at least 45 minutes flight or one hour flight from each other to be able to see each other once or twice a month at least.
00:19:12 Mickael: All the other roles can be anywhere. And what we try is for the top talents to have them see each other once or twice a year. So we went back from we don’t care where you are to well, actually, for some role, we do care. Our biggest offices now are in Spain. We still have people all around the world.
00:19:28 Jenny: Got it. So what’s next for PropHero? What should we expect next? What are some of the things that are on the horizon?
00:19:34 Mickael: So we’ve got big dreams. To be honest, when I launched PropHero, for me, success was just having a good business, maybe 10 employees, just making some revenue, being profitable, being sustainable. That was success.
00:19:49 Mickael: Well, now we are 250 people, profitable, four countries. My first dream is already achieved. So now the next one is how do we build a global sustainable institution?
00:20:00 Mickael: And so we’ve got many, many big dreams. One of them is to build this software that will run the entire real estate industry. It’s a big ERP or CRM for all the industry. It’s crazy, but I know we’re going to get there.
00:20:13 Mickael: I really, really want to launch a real estate investment fund, a listed investment fund, because I think we have the best supply. And for so many people, it would be so much easier. I know if you’re institutional, also, if you cannot have at least 50 or 100K to invest, this would be so helpful for so many people.
00:20:30 Mickael: Many dreams. Keep enjoying the ride, opening new countries and having a lasting impact on our client’s lives and our employees.
00:20:37 Jenny: I love it. Okay, speed round. So just quick answers here. Is there a book, newsletter, podcast or some type of media that you’re enjoying right now?
00:20:44 Mickael: You have to listen to A Short History on Spotify. For the past 100 years, history has accelerated like never before in human history. Understanding the past helps you so much understand what’s happening today. So A Short History Of. I listen to dozens of history podcasts. It’s by far the best one.
00:21:03 Jenny: I love it. If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?
00:21:08 Mickael: So I’ve lived in 12 countries, five continents already. When I could, I will do a one year road trip across Africa. So I’ve lived in Morocco and Tunisia in the past. I miss Africa. I love this continent so much and it’s so big. I want to discover the rest.
00:21:22 Jenny: I love it. Favorite productivity hack. What keeps you super efficient?
00:21:26 Mickael: If you’re anyone doing some form of corporate job, if you don’t have Claude Cowork open 24/7 on your laptop doing 80% of your work, something is wrong. Claude yesterday did the work that I would have done myself in one month and did it in one afternoon.
00:21:44 Mickael: So honestly, whatever you do, as long as there is a computer needed, have Claude Cowork open 24/7 and force yourself to use it and not do things. I know it’s not crazy. Most people are now doing it. But if you’re not doing it already, you have to.
00:22:00 Jenny: Love it. Okay, Claude Code. Where can listeners find you? Where is the best way to get in touch with PropHero?
00:22:05 Mickael: Airport lounges is where you will most likely find me. Otherwise, go to www.prophero.com, book a call with one of our wealth advisors and they will walk you through our investments and what we can do for you.
00:22:18 Jenny: Amazing. This was so fun, Mickael. Might be your next customer, so we can talk about that. But excited to see you in Spain this summer. So thanks so much.
00:22:25 Mickael: Thank you. See you. Have a great week. Bye bye.
00:22:29 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Mickael Roger in Founders Everywhere.