Why We Invested In Rentlogic: The Future of Apartment Searching

We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Rentlogic, a New York City company that provides tech-enabled apartment building grades based on health and safety standards, similar to how cities grade restaurants. Welcome Yale and the Rentlogic team to the Prototype Capital Family!

Coming in, we saw three relevant fundamental truths:

1. Millennials living in big cities spend ~50%+ of their paychecks on rent. Given how much is spent on rent, there is very little visibility and clarity in housing. Much of our spending and investments are informed by ratings. When we go to restaurants we look on sites like Yelp or Zagat. For car purchases we go to Carfax. Yet there is no equivalent service for housing which for many people is their biggest monthly expense.
2. Cities provide important information about apartment buildings, but without a background in city planning, it’s almost impossible to navigate and make use of the data. Local governments already track issues such as persistent heat, hot water problems, mold, bedbugs, etc., but the average consumer has no idea where to find or how to properly contextualize the information that is provided.
3. Objectivity is severely lacking in apartment research. The little information available about apartment buildings tends to be filled with anecdotal evidence on review sites (typically from renters who had negative experiences) and marketing materials written by the apartment company itself, leaving the vast majority of apartment seekers with virtually no objective information to inform their apartment search.

We believe Rentlogic provides much needed customer solutions while realizing these fundamental truths. By leveraging technology in data mining and artificial intelligence, Rentlogic can begin to bring clarity to renters frustrated by the “black box” of apartment building information. Not only will renters benefit from making better informed housing decisions, but landlords will also benefit from being able to demonstrate that their properties are well managed. In addition to renters and landlords, we believe cities will benefit from Rentlogic’s service as they’ll be able to better understand their housing stock and enforce their maintenance codes.

Currently focused exclusively in New York City, Rentlogic already has amassed an impressive client list that includes BlackRock, Phipps Houses, and DSA Property Group.

Ultimately though, our partnership and investment into Rentlogic was mainly predicated on the team. The CEO, Yale Fox, is a TED Fellow and Kairos Fellow who has been profiled by Gerson Lehrman Group as a Top 5 AI/ML researcher. Lead Engineer, Christian Flores, has been building machine learning models for real estate technology for the last 6 years and SVP of Data Analytics, Luke Hutchinson, worked at Google Accelerated Science, and was the first member of Ray Kurzweil’s artificial intelligence team at Google.

We’re excited to be working with an impressive team tackling a large and all-too-real problem for many apartment seekers. We look forward to a future where apartment searching is transparent and driven by objective standards.

Let’s build the future, together.

Team Prototype Capital