Solving the Healthcare Housing Problem

Christina Henderson: Then when I got there, I realized that parts of the FaceTime had been left out and it was actually a hoarder's home. It wasn't until I started residency here in Madison that I started hearing from our visiting students coming across the country here that their housing experiences were terrible as well.

And that's when I started to really piece the puzzle together.

Jacob Miller: Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Startup Wisconsin Podcast, A show where you can learn about Wisconsin's growing tech scene through stories of startups, founders, investors, and the talented people making it all happen. Today I'm talking with Christina Henderson, who's doing something that sounds nearly impossible for many.

Building a startup while working as a full-time anesthesia resident in Madison, Wisconsin. Christina is the founder of Reliable Residents and they're solving a problem that affects thousands of healthcare workers, but gets almost no attention today when medical students and healthcare travelers need housing for rotations that last one to 12 months.

They're stuck between expensive short-term rentals and annual leases they can't commit to. Christina learned this the hard way during a rotation at Duke when she ended up in a hoarder's home and woke up to cockroaches crawling across her bed. Reliable residents creates that missing middle. Midterm housing specifically for healthcare professionals with every property personally vetted by Christina and her co-founder.

They've even partnered with major property owners, and it all started with Christina literally walking into someone's office. We talk about balancing a medical residency while building a company. The support of the Madison Startup Ecosystem and Christina's goal to help more healthcare professionals realize that they're in the perfect position to identify and solve problems.

So let's jump into my conversation with Christina Henderson from a Reliable Residence.

Christina Henderson: We just launched our platform today.

Jacob Miller: Like literally today.

Christina Henderson: Literally today.

Jacob Miller: That's awesome. That's, congrats that Good timing. It's like crazy timing. Yeah. That's cool. Uh, hopefully this wasn't like, oh crap, I gotta like fit that into like the launch day and all that kind of stuff.

But

Christina Henderson: no, all good. We did have one bug pop up, but we were able to fix it right before we hopped on. So. Nice.

Jacob Miller: All as

Christina Henderson: well.

Jacob Miller: Awesome. Well, cool. Well let, let's start with your story. Um, you're a full-time resident physician. What. What part of that experience led you to decide to like start a company as well?

Christina Henderson: I never really expected to be a founder.

I was pretty committed to the medical field and becoming a physician, but when I was a medical student in 2022, in 2023, I had a housing experience that just stuck with me. And then that turned into talking to other medical students who had terrible housing experiences. And eventually this just kind of snowballed into a project and eventually a company that's been just amazing to be a part of.

Jacob Miller: Yeah, that's great. That's great. Um, so what, what about like that experience? Um, I believe from what I looked up, uh, you were, um, in rotation at Duke it looks like, I dunno if that's correct or not. And then what, what kind of happened there to be like, oh, I really wanna make this thing called now called Reliable residence.

What? Like what, what was going on and like, what was kind of the, what were the pain points that were happening?

Christina Henderson: Yeah, it's, it's quite the story. So, so medical students are required to do rotations for the most part across the country, usually for a month at a time. I scored a great rotation at Duke in the hyperbaric medicine chamber, um, which is the only Navy SEAL approved hyperbaric chamber in the country.

So I was very excited to do that. Um, and then I flew out there, I did not drive. Mm-hmm. So I had to find housing that was close to Duke. It was walkable. I ended up finding a room for rent online and I FaceTimed the homeowner before I got there to make sure it checked out. Then when I got there, I realized that parts of the FaceTime had been left out and it was actually a hoarder's home, but, oh my gosh.

Yeah, I was stuck at the time because finding something last minute was just definitely not an option. So I stayed in my room for the most part, and then about two weeks into the four week rotation, I woke up to a cockroach crawling across my bed. Uh, so you could imagine that I got pretty much no sleep of the entire rest of the two weeks that I had left.

It definitely stuck with me. I did not perform as well in that rotation as I could have if I had had a good housing experience. Mm. But ultimately I left there thinking, okay, maybe it's just me. This is kind of a one-off and rare. It wasn't until I started residency here in Madison that I started hearing from our visiting students coming across the country here that their housing experiences are terrible as well.

And that's when I started to really piece the puzzle together.

Jacob Miller: Why haven't like the hospital systems or the universities like tried to figure out a way to, to serve like these types of folks? Like, Hey, you're coming here. We're gonna help you. You know, ha have housing for the first three to six months until you can find a place.

Because finding a place is so difficult. Why do you think there like no one else has like figured this out yet?

Christina Henderson: Yeah. It's pretty surprising, right? Uh, it's very surprising that it's not more included in rotations and medical programs in general. Mm-hmm. Some do provide it, but I'd say it's more rare. Yeah.

And I think there's two reasons. I think cost is definitely one of them. Housing and healthcare hubs is typically very expensive. And two, it's so low on their priority list, which, which is really unfortunate because we're heavily reliant on healthcare travelers, like nurses and doctors to fill in the gaps.

But for some reason, the aspect of housing gets missed and then we end up losing a lot of those contracts and therefore we're short staffed at the hospitals.

Jacob Miller: Yeah, and you, I mean, you commented before like, because like. You have nowhere to, like, if you, if you can't find a place where you can sleep, get good sleep, feel safe, you know, you're just having some sort of quality of life outside of work, which is already stressful, right?

Like Right. You leave a stressful environment and, you know, not every, uh, you know, medical job is super stressful, but like yeah, you're working in a hospital environment. You, um. Get home and you're stressed out because I don't know if it's gonna be a cockroach or bugs or whatever, wherever I'm sleeping.

Um, and that's a big deal because like, you know, when you're trying to help other people, like with their own health problems and you can't function because you're like, didn't get any sleep, that's not great either. So it's just, yeah, it's just very fascinating that they wouldn't make that like, I guess not a priority, but like, make it more important than what it's today.

So.

Christina Henderson: Definitely. I think being your home is your escape from work and for people that have never been to these cities before, the home is just all that more important. Yeah. So to not have a good setup is huge impact for our healthcare travelers. And then it just trickles down and affects all of us early when er wait times or hours and hours and hours, and you can't get into elective surgeries and, and so really it affects the whole community.

Jacob Miller: Yeah, so you have a platform, it's a, it looks like it's a website and it's, it's, um, uh, has like in, you know, housing inventory similar to what you would see like on Airbnb or, or Zillow or something like that, where you can kind of see different, you know, living, arra living, um, opportunities. Um. Maybe talk about that.

Like how does, how does that your platform make the whole process of finding a place to live easier, and what are you guys doing to like, get those listings on there? Like what does that look like?

Christina Henderson: Yeah, absolutely. I, I love that you brought up Airbnb and, and Zillow, because I like. Comparing and contrasting them from us.

Sure. So we tackle a really unique niche of the market. So Airbnb, as everyone knows, does short term stays, weekends, vacations, stuff like that. They're great at that. The problem lies in that when you take a nightly rate, even if you price reduce it, and then you turn into a three month long stay, it's super expensive.

Um, and that's not even accounting for the 14% service fee that Airbnb charges. Then if you come over here to Zillow, they have mostly annual leases, and our travelers obviously can't sign an annual lease, and so they get stuck in these situations where if their contract gets canceled unexpectedly, they're pretty much locked into that place regardless.

We do something in the middle called midterm housing, which is one to 12 months stays, so really the sweet spot. And our healthcare travelers stay on average three to six months at a time.

Jacob Miller: Okay. Okay.

Christina Henderson: So we find our properties also in a unique way. We offer both property management companies that have professionally run units that are very well vetted.

We know exactly the quality we're getting. We have private homeowners where they're exactly the same. So we go in and we walk through every single unit before it goes up on our website. We talk to every single homeowner and we explain all the expectations of renting to a professional that vary significantly from renting to a vacationer or a long-term tenant.

Jacob Miller: What have been, I guess, challenges that maybe have come up like with this, I mean, you're going there in person, or are you doing it yourself, or are you hiring someone else to do that? Or I guess, what does that look like right now?

Christina Henderson: Yeah, we do it ourselves. It's myself, my co-founder, Tyler. Okay. And we walk through every unit, which has been a lot recently actually, because as we've started to gain traction in the community, we've had a lot of homeowners reach out wanting to put their rental on our platform.

Jacob Miller: Oh, that's great. Yeah. Do you have a kind of like a of future plan of like, Hey, at some point, like we can't get to every property ourselves. Is there, do you kind of have a, a. A thought on who you could rely on or use in the future for that, something like that?

Christina Henderson: Yeah. We have a few recent college graduates that we rely on for some things with the company.

We are very careful. Just select the people that we work with because of course they represent our brand and sure, we wouldn't trust one of them to do that in the future. But for now, I really like vetting the property myself and kind of giving it the founder stamp that it deserves.

Jacob Miller: Yeah. What have there, has there been any challenges with that process?

Like, do you feel like, um, now that you've done it so many times, maybe the first like handful were like, oh, we should think about that moving forward. Like, are there, have there, were there any things, things like that, that kind of popped up through the, the learning process?

Christina Henderson: Yeah. A, a big learning thing for us has been property management companies and their structure of how they screen their incoming tenants.

Hmm. So they typically do a background check, a credit check, anything that they would do for someone signing a 12 month lease. Sure, but when you're moving every three months, that becomes really hard to repeat and expensive to repeat four times a year. So we've definitely noticed that as a problem and we've already taken steps to fix it.

Uh, something that we hope to roll out in the next three to six months would be everybody on our platform is screened by us and therefore it's ready to book when they find a unit.

Jacob Miller: Interesting. So like a third party screening that's already trusted and verified and all that kind of stuff. Interesting.

Christina Henderson: Exactly. To, to totally speed up the process because it, another really unique thing about this market is the travelers receive their contracts about a month out from when they have to be here. Wow. So really tight turnaround time to find something and they really can't spend one or two weeks waiting for background checks to come back.

Jacob Miller: Yeah. That's crazy that I didn't realize it was like that quick. I had figured like, oh, 90 days or something. At least something like, just because like obviously you're switching from city to city, but that's, that's pretty fast. Wow.

Christina Henderson: Yeah. Some of them are very fast.

Jacob Miller: Uh, so how are you balancing all this right now?

Like you, you're, I mean, you have a co-founder, uh, technical co-founder it sounds like, um, but you're still working full-time, right?

Christina Henderson: I am. Yeah. And residency is actually more than a full-time commitment, so it certainly is busy.

Jacob Miller: Yeah. So yeah. How do you, like, how do you handle it? How do you do it?

Christina Henderson: I really use my resources in time wisely.

So I'm a morning person. That's kind of how we roll in anesthesia anyway. Mm-hmm. So I'll wake up really early around four, work on reliable residence. I get to the operating room around six 30. I'm in the operating room for most of the day doing cases, and then we wrap up somewhere around four, and then I'm working on reliable residence until the minute I go to bed.

Wow. We, we definitely tie in, you know, breaks and balance in our life as my co-founder and myself, but it is definitely the grind. Uh, at this point, and that's okay with me because when I talk to travelers about the service we're providing them, it makes it all worth it.

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If you don't think we're working out within the first 45 days, ready to see how we can help you and your team, just head over to headway.io and book a free consultation today. It seems like you've, uh, partnered with some folks. Uh, it says, from my research it says TWA and neutral. Is that correct? Yes, that is.

Uh, so how did those relationships, you know, happen? Like what, what did that look like?

Christina Henderson: I loved te telling the Terrence Wall story because it's, it's so funny. I was brand new to building this company. I really had no idea what I was doing. Of course, I don't have an MBA, I've never built a company, nobody in my family has ever started a company.

So I just thought, how am I gonna get? Holmes first and then traveler second. So I looked up all the major real estate owners in Madison and Terrance came up as one of them. Hmm. One day I just threw on my blazer and walked up to his office and I said, is Terrance Wall here? And he popped his head out of the office and right then and there we sat down at the table and started going through my idea and he loved it.

Wow. He loved it. So he was actually the first one to sign on with the unit with us.

Jacob Miller: Wow, that's cool. Did you like, what was like, so I'm assuming you walked in there, had some kind of pitch. Was it, did you have a computer or was it just like, Hey, I'm gonna share some stuff. I have a notebook with some things.

Like how did you, how did you do it?

Christina Henderson: Right? Yeah. No computer. We had nothing tangible. I just said, I'm in healthcare, I noticed this problem. You have units. And my value proposition is I'm gonna give you a really good renter. And he was like, okay. And so that's sort of the snowball effect.

Jacob Miller: That's actually, I didn't even thought about it that way.

Yeah. It's like, I'll give you a really good renter. 'cause that is something they think about. Like, Hey, we want people that are reliable. They'll respect our property, uh, that we're renting to them. That I never thought about that. That's interesting. Wow.

Christina Henderson: Yeah, exactly. They're just, they're always at work 'cause they're here for work.

Uh, very respectful, very clean. Mm-hmm. Typically, they typically don't travel with, uh, you know, other people or pets. It depends. But

Jacob Miller: yeah, of course. Yeah. So

Christina Henderson: great. Uh, group to rent to.

Jacob Miller: Yeah. Uh, how have you found support, um, in Madison in general, in the startup ecosystem? Do you feel, do you feel like one aspect of it has been more valuable than any other parts of it, or just kind of curious?

Christina Henderson: I have been surprised by the amazing support in Madison. It, it's just such a friendly startup community from. Pitch competitions to our mentoring system. Everything in between. We've joined Merlin mentors. We've had, you know, legal assistance through word of mouth, uh, so many different resources at the tips of our fingers.

And because of that networking and those options, that's really how we built our supply here in Madison. It's pretty unheard of to get a bunch of property management companies to flip. Unfurnished units to furnish units and go monthly. So that's been, that's been amazing.

Jacob Miller: Yeah. That's great. Is there a certain pers, you mentioned Merlin mentors.

Is there a certain person or, or group or organization, um, that you feel like has been the most helpful to you? Um, over the past like six months or so?

Christina Henderson: Yes, I have. Suzy Kel and Merlin mentors has been amazing. She knows everybody. She's wonderful. I would say two other people that have been incredible has been a mentor of mine at the hospital that actually started a biotech company.

Oh, and so while a different perspective to have somebody in medicine who's also an entrepreneur, has been really insightful. And then the third one would be a real estate mentor, uh, Craig Colts. And he's been wonderful as well. He knows a lot of people, uh, in the Madison community and that's been extremely helpful for us.

Jacob Miller: Yeah, that's cool. I, I'm like hearing you say, I have someone that has experience doing, you know, uh, an entrepreneur that's also in, in the medical field, but also someone that's an entrepreneur within real estate. Like, if it's almost like you're building your mini like board of directors. 'cause they all have their unique expertise to share with you.

Like you're kind of doing it as you're like launching the product. It's very, very, very cool. Um, yeah. Thank you. I, I do hope

Christina Henderson: and time to create a startup community. In the healthcare system, I've noticed that more and more medical students and nurses want to create something, but they just feel like they can't get there or don't know how.

And so I am in the process of trying to start some sort of meetup organization through our hospital system here.

Jacob Miller: Well let us know. We would love to help amplify it. I, I, I don't know how many contexts we have, but we'll definitely get it, um, amplified through our, our website and through our newsletter. To let folks know, um, thank you.

Or, you know, because everyone knows somebody that works in, in healthcare. It's like at some point, you know, hopefully that'll help kind of amplify the reach as well.

Christina Henderson: Absolutely. That'd be great.

Jacob Miller: Yeah. Yeah. In your mind, what does that look like? I'm kind of curious, uh, have you been chatting with other organizations about how to make that happen?

Because there's like, you know, bio forward and things like that. I wasn't sure if you're just like, Hey, I'm just gonna start doing it and like, you know, use use like Eventbrite or meetup.com and just start hosting a thing. I guess what has been your process for that so far? Or is it just still kind of in your head right now?

Christina Henderson: Yeah, maybe like how I approach Terrence Wall. I'll probably go about it the same way of, hey. Mm-hmm. This is what I'm gonna start, this is what I can offer and take it from there. Yeah. And then hosting speakers like Lee, who created a, a new technology in the biomedical field. Um, one of my mentors, having people like him speak.

Mm-hmm. And just provides some real encouragement to medical professionals. I think unfortunately, there's this narrative that we tell ourselves in healthcare that we are too busy, too stressed, we don't have the financial income to be able to start our own company. When really it's the exact opposite. I mean, we are in the best spot to recognize issues in healthcare and then suggest the solution.

Jacob Miller: Yeah. That's awesome. I love that. I love that you're, it's like you already your plate's full, but you're like, I think I can put a little more, or get a side dish of that. You're just like, I can, I love that. I think, uh, I think, uh, when I think about Wisconsin, a lot of the things that. When things happen, it's because of people like you.

Like, Hey, I am super passionate about this thing. I have a lot of experience in this field. I'm gonna make a thing happen. Like, I don't, you know, it's like when you think about like the, the community you wanna build, it's like the outcomes of it are like, I just wanna do it because no one else is doing it, and if I don't do it, who will?

Yeah. I mean, right. It's just, that's, that's how I feel at least like when with something like this, like, I don't know who else will do it if I don't do it. Right. I mean

Christina Henderson: Exactly. Yeah. And, and you know that you're passionate about it and you can bring value and hopefully it can live on, even if you've progressed past that, that startup, that point, whatever it may be.

Jacob Miller: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. Um. So what's next for reliable residents? Like where, where do you feel like you need the biggest help right now? If someone's listening, um, they, if they were reaching out or just like, you know, what are the next kind of, uh, phases of you kind of building and growing it as a business?

Christina Henderson: Well, as we said, we just launched so day one of launch, uh, which is. Which is so cool to see happen. Yeah. I've been hand matching travelers actually, for the last six months. So yeah, while we have proved out that the matchmaking works, we are now shifted to a platform model, which is just all the more exciting because then we can dedicate time and resources to starting to move outside of Madison.

Um, into other areas of healthcare, uh, fields in Wisconsin, like Marshfield, Eau Claire, things like that. Where we could use the most help would be visiting our website and sharing us among the community. We know that we're still pretty new. We need to get the word out and ultimately we're a local backyard company and we would love the community support with that.

Jacob Miller: Hopefully someone listening can be, can be a part of that and hope. There's a stat that I've, I don't know if you've shared it or I, where I've read it, but only if it's true. Only 5% of physicians ever start a company. And what do you wish more people in healthcare knew about building something on their own?

Christina Henderson: I wish more people in healthcare knew the major advantage that they're in by being in healthcare. As I mentioned, I think we get this narrative, you know, to ourselves. We tell ourselves this narrative that in fact it's a disadvantage, but it's, it's not. We are there day in and day out. We communicate with patients every single day and ultimately we're gonna be the best ones to recognize the issue.

I think that by bringing in resources like technical help. Fundraising, Merlin mentors is huge. Things like that. We can really help grow up this community and, and turn it into really a powerhouse of healthcare professionals that are creating their own solutions. And I wanted to start with medical students.

I don't want people to think, well, I have to be in an attending position. I have to have graduated residency and be really settled into my career to do so. Um, because that's currently the trend we're seeing is most per uh, physicians who start companies are in their forties or fifties. And I think we can start a lot earlier than that.

Jacob Miller: It's funny 'cause I was gonna ask you, what do you feel like is missing from like, the community, whether in Madison or Wisconsin? Um, but it sounds like you already know what it is and you're gonna fix it yourself, you know, building your own kind of community within, within healthcare. So I think that's awesome.

I I will say like maybe on a personal level. From you building this thing, do you feel like. Of all the support you got, is there anything else you feel like, oh, I really wish I could have gotten access to this or met someone, uh, like that, that could help me with a specific thing that I kind of had to figure out on my own?

I'm just kind of curious.

Christina Henderson: Yeah. The coding piece of this platform has been, I. Huge for us. We did find two recent UW students who were able to code out the MVP, which, uh, we're so grateful for. Yeah. But finding that technical co-founder role can be quite challenging when you're not somebody in software development day in and day out.

I do have a friend in the Madison community who's actually doing a startup with this exact intent in mind, and so I hope he takes off. I'm really cheering him on, but he pairs non-technical founders with a technical co-founder. Wow. Okay. Make all the difference.

Jacob Miller: What is, what is that, or who is it?

Christina Henderson: His name is Ben and he is building a way for non-technical founders to find a technical co-founder.

I don't believe he has a website yet, but he's reachable via LinkedIn. Which I'd be happy to provide the link for, and I think anybody who doesn't have technical experience would find this immensely helpful, especially if you're just newly starting.

Jacob Miller: Were you ever involved with, um, any other startup ecosystems like inden?

Because you said you were in Colorado, um, or was it until you got here that you started to kind of expose yourself to entrepreneurship?

Christina Henderson: I originally started building this company as a fourth year med student when I had a little bit of a break from rotations. Mm-hmm. So we were living up in Silverthorne, Colorado, in the mountains at the time, which as you could probably imagine weren't, there weren't a ton of resources up there, but I started on my business plan at that time.

When I got into residency and I was an intern, I just got really busy. So I put it on hold for a little bit and then kicked it back up shortly after. And so really this company was born in Madison. That's where we incorporated with our new name. We were originally co trek changed reliable residents. And here we are.

Jacob Miller: Well, I don't have any more questions for you. I think, uh, I learned a lot. First of all, I learned a lot about like the thing that you're building, the industry and the issues that you're dealing with. You know, where can people to go to learn more about, um, reliable residents, but also like get connected with you if you're open to it.

And if people like in the healthcare field wanna connect with you and just say, Hey, I actually have an idea. What should I do? You know, may maybe, uh, share, share some of that.

Christina Henderson: Yeah, you can go to reliable residence.com to check out our page, our product that we've been working so hard on. I'm really excited to hear your feedback and then to get in touch with me directly, you can do one of two things.

You can go to the website and there will be a Google number that says contact the founder. So you can reach out to me there, or you can find me on LinkedIn at Christina Henderson and send me a message there as well. And I would love to chat with you.

Jacob Miller: I really appreciate you taking the time outta your, I mean, you're, you're a very busy person it sounds like, from the, just like today's discussion.

Um, so I really appreciate your time, um, and I wish you the best of luck with everything and congrats again on launch day today. That's crazy timing. Did not realize. Yeah. Um, and, uh, I wish you the best of luck. Yeah,

Christina Henderson: thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me on, and I just love being able to share this with the community and give back.

Jacob Miller: Thanks for joining us on the Startup Wisconsin Podcast. Wanna support the show. Don't forget to subscribe and get updates. If you're feeling generous, you can share, rate and review our podcast to help others find us. Alright folks, until next time, let's keep moving Wisconsin forward.

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