In 2014, Michael Lucarelli found a good apartment in Los Angeles and a small piece of accidental theater. His new landlord placed a stack of forms in front of him, asked him to fill them out by hand, and told him to fax the lot back. Lucarelli had never used a fax machine. The apartment was waiting on the other side of a technology he knew mainly as office furniture.
He found one. He got the apartment. Then he kept thinking about the errand. The paperwork carried sensitive information, the process was repeated property by property, and nobody involved seemed to have a satisfying tool. A lesser inconvenience might have produced a complaint over dinner. This one produced a research project.
The interesting part of the RentSpree story is not that Lucarelli saw clumsy paperwork and imagined software. Every queue now contains somebody imagining software. The interesting part is how deliberately he moved from irritation to understanding. He looked at the problem as a renter, then earned a California real estate license and hung it at a local RE/MAX office. There, the other half of the market appeared: agents handling leases without much technology, guidance or economic glamour.
A finance brain enters the rental office
Lucarelli grew up on Long Island in a family with a long memory for making things. He has described earlier generations as leather workers in Italy who made saddles and other goods. In America, relatives opened upholstery shops. His grandfather ran one in Queens, and stories about “the shop” gave business a human scale: craft, employees, independence, work.
His own first professional language was finance. After the University of Delaware, where he completed his undergraduate studies in 2012, he worked as a financial analyst in Pennsylvania. Moving west for Pepperdine’s MBA program changed the setting and supplied the fax machine. It also supplied Paul Sirisuphang, the classmate who would become RentSpree’s co-founder and chief operating officer.
Pepperdine gave the pair a place to turn annoyance into a model. Lucarelli credits the program with a framework for spotting inefficiency, practice presenting ideas, and the relationship with Sirisuphang. They founded RentSpree in 2016, the year Lucarelli completed his MBA, and deployed the software in 2017.
The expensive romance of raising money
The early company had a clean proposition: replace repetitive rental applications and manual screening with one secure digital process. But young companies collect distractions as efficiently as apartment seekers collect application fees. Lucarelli has written candidly about a costly one. He began pursuing institutional funding before RentSpree had the usage and metrics investors wanted.
Meeting followed meeting. Promises remained promises. The pitch circuit felt like company-building because it involved calendars, slides and consequential rooms. In practice, it pulled him away from the product and the people using it. He eventually called the months spent chasing capital a massive waste.
His correction was wonderfully uncinematic. He went back across Los Angeles, presenting to real estate professionals, earning partnerships and refining the product from their feedback. Customer activity became the argument that the pitch deck could not yet make. Capital arrived later, including an $8 million Series A in 2021 and a $17.3 million Series B in 2022.
This is the founder lesson worth stealing: fundraising is not automatically progress, and refusing it for the moment is not small ambition. The sequence matters. Lucarelli returned to evidence, then allowed the money to follow.
Distribution with good manners
RentSpree’s early product was an application and screening tool. Its durable strategic move was finding where that tool should live. Agents already worked inside multiple listing services. Brokerages and Realtor associations had membership, trust and existing routines. Rather than demand that the industry wander into a separate universe, RentSpree integrated with the institutions that coordinated the work.
The company’s first MLS relationship came through an introduction to California Regional MLS. By 2022, Lucarelli was speaking about roughly 250 partners. The network later moved past 300 MLSs, associations, brokerages and proptech platforms. This was distribution with good manners: arrive inside the workflow at the moment the need appears.
The approach required patience with an industry that is local, regulated and attached to established procedures. Lucarelli’s advice to startup builders in real estate is correspondingly sober. Learn the policies. Attend the conferences. Ask how the data works. Remember that a prospective client is thinking about much more than your product. His line on the subject is compact: “You simply can’t stop learning.”
There is another subtlety in this route to market. RentSpree did not use institutions only as bulk sources of leads. The institutions shaped the product. An MLS knows the regional vocabulary of a listing. An association understands the forms and compliance habits its members inherit. A brokerage sees where agents lose time. Treating those organizations as collaborators gave a young company access to context that could not be purchased with an advertisement.
It also made growth less theatrical. One integration could put the tool within reach of thousands of professionals, but each relationship required technical work, trust and patient support. The result looked slow at the level of a meeting and fast at the level of a network. RentSpree was assembling a path through the market while competitors could still be counting individual sign-ups.
The form becomes a financial relationship
Once RentSpree sat inside the rental workflow, the adjacent problems were hard to ignore. Screening led to reusable applications. Applications led to leases. Landlords needed payments, reminders and market data. Renters could benefit from reporting on-time payments to build credit. The company added insurance, income verification and tools for agents to understand when renters might be ready to buy. In 2025 it introduced RentEdge, bringing rental functions more directly into MLS systems. Landlord banking followed.
The expansion reflects Lucarelli’s broader idea about renting. Real estate often treats the lease as the waiting room before the important transaction. He sees a continuum. As he put it on a 2025 industry panel, “The renter of today is the buyer tomorrow and the landlord of next week.” An agent who serves the renter well is not merely processing a smaller deal. The agent may be beginning a relationship that crosses years and roles.
It is also a useful antidote to product myopia. RentSpree did not remain enchanted by its original form. The form was a door. Behind it sat payments, identity, compliance, data, credit and a long customer life. The product suite widened because the company kept following the work instead of defending the first diagram.
An operator who leaves the rough edges in
Lucarelli’s public record is refreshingly willing to retain the awkward scenes. The hunt for a fax machine survives. So do the failed investor conversations. He has spoken about the difficulty of building a team capable of taking over tasks once handled by two founders, an ordinary scaling problem that does not look ordinary when every decision still feels personal.
His connections have tended to emerge through listening: Sirisuphang at Pepperdine, the experienced MLS people who explained their systems, and a brief conversation with a former Zillow chief executive whose feedback he sought early on. Even a playful interview about the University of Delaware revealed the same unpolished quality. Asked to name a notable graduate named Joe, he answered President Joe Biden. The interviewer wanted Super Bowl quarterback Joe Flacco. Lucarelli protested that Flacco was what he had been about to say and remembered his photograph hanging near a favorite campus pizza place.
Away from the industry circuit, he has described himself as an avid skier who enjoys backpacking and multiday hikes. The hobbies suit the company story almost suspiciously well: find a line through difficult terrain, carry what matters, and accept that the map will not spare you the climb.
What comes after four million
By 2025, RentSpree had crossed four million users. Lucarelli was recognized as a HousingWire Tech Trendsetter for the fourth consecutive year, and in January 2026 he was named an Inman Power Player again. He also became a more regular interviewer himself, hosting RentSpree’s It’s Closing Time podcast and talking with operators about technology, MLSs and the habits beneath real estate work.
The company’s ambition is no longer confined to removing paper. It is trying to become infrastructure for the financial and operational life of a rental, from the listing through screening and payment. Lucarelli has told Pepperdine that he would like RentSpree to file for an IPO. It is a plain answer, admirably free of incense.
Still, the clearest summary of his work remains a small scene. A renter is handed a form. The process is absurd. He does not assume the people involved are absurd. He learns why the process exists, meets the institutions that maintain it, and earns a place inside their daily work. The fax machine supplied the irritation. Listening supplied the company.