Justin Alanis had a product to sell before he had a product to show. In the early days of Rentlytics, he was asking property people to believe that software could fix a problem they already knew rather well. The software was still to come. The frustration required no demonstration.
Years later, he described the arrangement candidly. Remembering an early conference encounter, he described the pitch as “vaporware.” There is a certain economy to the word: all the promise of a technology business, temporarily relieved of the technology. His eventual job was to make good on it.
That is a useful place to meet Alanis. The acquisition belongs later in the story. So do the investors, the second property venture, and the company he would build with his brother. First came someone who understood a customer’s irritation well enough to sell a possible remedy.
The numbers were there. The view was missing.
Before Rentlytics, Alanis worked in commercial real estate private equity, moving from analyst to vice president and partner. He had graduated from Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree in economics and the classics. By the time he became a software founder, he had managed extensive property portfolios.
He knew the peculiar imbalance of the work: responsibility for large investments, accompanied by information arriving on a monthly or quarterly schedule. Owning the decision did not necessarily mean having timely access to the facts behind it. A portfolio could be substantial while the view through its reporting remained frustratingly narrow.
Alanis moved to San Francisco in 2010. Friends working in technology offered a different professional reference point. The reporting problems he had encountered in property began to look like something a business could address, rather than another administrative inconvenience to survive.
He and technical co-founder Phil Plante built Rentlytics around connecting the information that property owners and managers needed. Financial records, operations and marketing could sit in different systems. Rentlytics would bring them together so a portfolio could be examined without first assembling a small festival of spreadsheets.
A conceptual view of the product’s job, not a measured performance comparison.
A lender buys the argument
The early financing had a personal beginning. His friend Sean Conway supplied an initial $25,000 check, Alanis later recalled. Expressions of interest from prospective customers helped him raise money while the product remained unfinished. Knowing the buyer’s problem was doing some of the work that a demonstration would eventually do.
Rentlytics’ business intelligence product launched in January 2015. A year later, Walker & Dunlop led a $9.1 million Series A. The lender had its own reason to understand the pitch: it was handling asset management and servicing across more than 4,700 properties.
That investment brought industry experience as well as money. The software was intended to help people make decisions across property portfolios; the investor spent its working days in the same market. Alanis described the funding as a way to develop the product and extend its reach.
His explanation of the customer relationship was equally practical. Investors and operating partners often worked across complicated combinations of funds, managers and partnerships. A common set of information could make their conversations more useful, giving both parties a way to investigate performance together.
There was a human proposition underneath the analytics. Better information could change a meeting. Instead of spending the discussion establishing whose figures were current, the people responsible for a property could spend it considering what to do. A good report occasionally earns its keep by shortening the argument about the report.
Seventeen hires and a useful kind of impatience
Building the company also meant building a team. At a San Francisco industry event in 2016, Alanis said he had hired 17 people in three months. Asked about candidates, he emphasized culture fit and described the people he wanted as “resourceful, hardworking, adaptable and curious.”
“resourceful, hardworking, adaptable and curious”
Justin Alanis on the people he wanted to hire, 2016
Those words give a more precise glimpse of his management preferences than a collection of borrowed personality adjectives would. He was recruiting people to work in a business that was still learning what its customers needed. Experience mattered, but he wanted colleagues capable of responding when the answer changed.
At the same event, he pushed back on doing things simply because they had always been done that way. He also stressed the value of interpersonal skills. The combination fits the business he was running: software needed adoption, and adoption still required people to understand and trust one another.
Even a dashboard needs an editor
By April 2018, Rentlytics was addressing a complication familiar to anyone who has opened an ambitious software dashboard. A person can have access to more information than they know how to use. The company released BI 2.0 with a redesigned homepage, navigation and dashboards.
Key property measures moved to the front. Users could begin with an issue and investigate the details behind it. They could filter information, examine individual properties and hide dashboards they did not use. Even enterprise software, it turned out, could benefit from knowing when to stop talking.
The redesign reflected what the team had learned from customers. Its practical test was whether someone could find the information needed for a decision. New leases, renewals and future leases became easier to distinguish; operational and financial views allowed deeper investigation.
In August, Alanis took the access argument further. Rentlytics launched Open Data Services with Avenue5 Residential, extending the platform’s ability to take in information beyond property-management systems. Specialist tools and a customer’s internal records could join the view.
Avenue5 then oversaw more than 48,000 units in 11 states. It was the first announced customer for the offering and would help guide it. The scale explains the appeal: more properties can mean more places for an important fact to hide. Alanis wanted customers to have one point of access to the information relevant to their business.
- APRBI 2.0 gives users a clearer route through the data.
- AUGOpen Data Services extends the inputs.
- OCTRealPage acquires Rentlytics.
A sale, then more beginnings
RealPage acquired Rentlytics in October 2018. Aggregate purchase consideration was $55.4 million. The buyer described the technology as a way to expand its analytics offering and normalize information from multiple third-party systems, reducing incompatibility and delays before analysis.
The transaction gave the Rentlytics chapter a clear financial landmark. Alanis’s subsequent work was less easily contained in a single line. He worked on Awning, another business concerned with making rental-property ownership easier, and appeared on its team page as CEO. He also hosted its Masters of Real Estate podcast.
Alongside operating companies, he invested. Fedora Capital’s public syndicate page lists him on its team and shows investments including Juniper Square, VTS, WattBuy and Obie. His working life had acquired several ways to engage with a new business: build it, discuss its problems, or help finance it.
A family business in fictional worlds
StoryCo brought another collaborator into the picture: his brother, J.P. Alanis. Justin arrived with technology and private-equity experience. J.P. brought an entertainment-development background, including co-creating and leading Golf Media, the platform and production company founded by Tyler, The Creator.
Their shared company proposed a way for creators and fans to contribute to stories and participate in their success. In January 2023, StoryCo announced $6 million in seed funding, co-led by Collab + Currency and Patron. Its first announced story universe was The Disco Ball.
The production paired writer Kyle Killen with artists shelby and sandy. When it launched in November 2023, its cast included Stephanie Beatriz and Costa Ronin. The story followed Captain Alma Cooke and fellow astronauts on a mission to save the multiverse. Property reporting rarely offers such generous scope for a third act.
StoryCo’s contribution model invited writers, artists, musicians and other creators to make material that could enter the narrative. Participants could receive upfront compensation and a share of future proceeds through its Profit Points initiative. Creative participation had an accompanying economic structure.
Justin’s enthusiasm focused on the people joining the work. “I think that the real story here is of the creators who are now involved in this production in a material way,” he said. The telling word is “material”: contributing meant having work inside the production.
The next frame
The company has continued to change. StoryCo’s current website presents it as a vertical animation studio, adapting existing intellectual property and making original stories. Its leadership page lists both Alanis brothers as co-CEOs. The work now includes animation, voice performances, sound and production.
In a public update about its Ho Chi Minh City studio, Justin described a team that had grown to more than 80 people. He dwelt on friendships, office energy and the craft in each frame. A career that began with property information had led him to the organization of creative work.
There is a connection across those chapters, though it need not have been a plan. Rentlytics asked how the people responsible for a building could get closer to its information. StoryCo explored how people who cared about a story could take part in making it.
Alanis has worked on the arrangements that make participation possible: the data connection, the customer conversation, the production system. The early salesman eventually had software to show. His later work has supplied him with a different kind of demonstration: something people can watch.