This shouldn’t occupi much time.

Pardon… the emerging tech company with local roots may seem like a cute little cartoon character facing a big problem to solve — more on that later — but Occupi comes from an informed place in the man- ufactured housing industry and has applied the latest in tech advances to how homes get filled and monthly payments get made.

Company co-founder Taylor Peake was a community owner long before she started Occupi. She owns parks in Walker County, Alabama, in the area where she grew up, including the community she lived near as a child. She bought that first one from her parents about 10 years ago.

“It’s really difficult to strike a balance between what meets the residents’ needs and what is efficient for the management team,” Peake said. Some of the challenges are obvious on the surface, but difficult in practice — especially around rent payments. “In the communities we serve, we have received a lot of local feedback,” Peake said. “I actually set up myself as a resident in my community and went through the process of submitting an application and walk-in cash payment to experience the process from both sides.”

In many cases, you have to find a local brick-and-mortar store, like Walgreens or another national chain, that has arrangements with payment services, allowing for residents to send money. “In some cases you have to wait in a pharmacy line,” Peake said.

Digital payment sources, particularly app-driven payments, are on the rise. Companies like Block, Inc., which owns Cash App, are making major strides. Today, 60 percent of U.S. mobile phone users take advantage of payment apps, transferring better than $7,000 per year, on average.

“The fees are lower, the service is better, and it is convenient,” Peake said.

Collect Rent Without Knocking on Doors

Peake purchased her second and third communities during the COVID pandemic, compounding the difficulty of communicating with residents, meeting their needs, and completing transactions. Most small to midsize operators in multi-family or manufactured housing community operations faced challenges never seen, never thought of, in the spring of 2020.

“USPS disruptions during Covid made paying and receiving rent via money order even more of a hassle than usual. During the pandemic, the postal service was unreliable and created a major hurdle,” Peake said. “Money orders, cashier’s checks, they were just vanishing.”

The Occupi Technology

Occupi’s software facilitates an easy screening process for applicants and enables multiple payment options in a central hub for renters, including Cash App, Chime, SoFi, Venmo, and PayPal, alongside traditional ACH and card payments.

Many tenants and residents are “underbanked or unbanked”, or simply prefer alternate means to get paid, keep revenue, and pay bills. Many of the Occupi customers have more than one employer, and little free time to run errands, go to the bank, or manage a character code while waiting to complete an in-person transaction. For walk-in or slip payments, the property managers are creating a character code to associate the payment with the resident’s account.

Instead, Occupi is identifying the resident’s account inside of the community’s property management system and (with their permission) associating the resident with their cash wallet or favorite alternative payment method. Using Cash App as an example, the resident can utilize Cash App’s cash deposit locations to quickly deposit cash or employer checks without the cumbersome slip or character code process.

“We see many residents paying rent after hours, when traditional financial solutions or walk-in payment locations are closed,” Occupi co-founder Emily Hart said.

Max Rykov, director of growth for Occupi, comes from the nonprofit housing sector in Alabama and Tennessee. He is was new to the company and new to the industry in 2025, but accustomed to the difficulty of a smooth application and monthly payment process. “It’s such a big issue,” Rykov said. “I assumed that this approach would have already existed. The future of payment will be via app-based solutions.”

Build the Idea, the Brand Emerges

Peake and Hart spent much of 2023 working on the big idea. They booked meetings with TransUnion. They reached out to all of the app-based payment services. They talked with residents, friends, and colleagues in the housing sector and in the tech space.

“It’s a lot of conversation and partnership,” Hart said. “That’s probably why no one else has done this. “We launched the service in 2024 on Taylor’s properties,” she said. “We took a lot of feedback, and, again, looked at what worked and what didn’t… We felt really good about our product.”

Occupi’s fast application process incorporates the use of tax IDs rather than solely Social Security numbers. This innovation opens the application process to legal residents who are not yet citizens. When they made the app available to the wider market, the Occupi team signed up 1,000 doors in two weeks. To date, Occupi has facilitated more than $385,000 in transaction volume. Hart said the application is largely invisible to property owners because it operates in conjunction with owners’ existing software, but also can be used as a standalone product.

“That’s something that fits well for smaller operators using only QuickBooks or Xero,” Hart said

The Origins of the Octopus

Hart has a marketing background and in recent years has been primarily in product development. When it came to naming the company, she wanted an active verb, she said.

“I found myself saying a lot ‘Is this unit vacant or occupied?’ I liked that. ‘Occupied.’ Occupy as a company name was already taken, but Occupi with an ‘i’ was there. And I felt like it worked.”

At bedtime several days later, she was struck by her son’s favorite companion, a plush beanie octopus that he called “Octi”.

“We should do an octopus!” She recalls exclaiming. Not so good for bedtime, but great for marketing.

“We went with an ocean color palette and Octi, the Occupi octopi, and it stuck,” she said.

Take the Product to the Industry

With roots in Alabama, it makes sense Occupi would make its debut at the Biloxi Manufactured Housing Show and Expo. The manufactured housing industry is a complex business. Products designed for other industries, or for other sectors of housing, often feel clunky when applied to the space.

Occupi is one of the very few novel fintech solutions designed for manufactured housing. It takes into account the varying models, from “on land” to scattered site, to community, and full-rentals versus land lease, and the varying utility options and fees associated. There’s no charge to property owners to implement Occupi, and a nominal flat fee is added to each payment, which can either be covered by the property owner or passed to the resident.

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