Renew.

In most rental buildings, nearly half of the residents move out every year. It is one of the most expensive facts in real estate, and for a long time it was treated as weather - something operators endured rather than something they could change. Renew, a New York proptech founded in 2021, was built on the opposite premise: that the moment a lease comes up for renewal is not paperwork to be processed but the single most powerful decision point in the entire rental relationship.

Co-founders Rob Hayden and Kevin Murphy came at the problem from inside the industry. Murphy spent close to a decade at RentPath and later worked at the rental-insurance startup Jetty, where the two overlapped; Hayden brought the startup and venture side. What they kept noticing was a gap that no software addressed. "We noticed a lot of people talking about building long-term relationships with residents," Hayden has said, "but they had no plan for how to combat the fact that basically 50% of their customers move every year."

That sentence is the thesis. Renew's software reads the signals a resident gives off long before they announce a move - how they engage with pricing, how they respond to communications, how they interact with service and property content - and surfaces renewal risk while there is still time to act. Hayden describes it as letting operators go on "offense" at the renewal moment instead of reacting once a notice-to-vacate has already landed.

What the company actually does

Renew calls itself a retention management platform, a category it is effectively trying to define. The core is a Renewal Management System that automates the end-to-end renewal workflow - the reminders, offers, approvals and paperwork that used to eat leasing teams alive. Underneath sits a Data Engine that scores churn risk and an AI layer, branded the Momentum Score, that tells a team which residents are quietly drifting toward the door so effort goes where it matters.

The most distinctive piece arrived with the 2025 fundraise: the Resident Referral Network, which Renew bills as the rental industry's first. Its logic is disarmingly simple. Sometimes a resident is going to move no matter what you do - a job, a family change, a need for more space. Instead of treating that as a total loss, Renew guides the mover to another property inside the same operator's portfolio. The relationship survives even when the address doesn't.

None of it was rushed to market. The founders spent roughly two years in development before a public launch, prioritizing pilots and full-portfolio rollouts over a splashy debut - in part because a renewal tool has to satisfy an unusually crowded room at once. "We needed to make sure this was a solution that worked for all stakeholders," Hayden said, "both residents and everyone involved with operating apartment communities." In practice that means residents, owners, on-site teams, regional managers and the C-suite all have to get value from the same product.

For years the software that runs apartments has been organized around acquisition and accounting. Property-management and revenue systems - the Yardis, RealPages and Entratas of the world - are broad platforms of record. Renewals inside them tend to be a feature, not a focus. Renew's wager is that a moment worth half of every operator's customer base each year deserves a dedicated system of its own.

That framing - retention as the new acquisition - is gaining ground across the industry. Renew's early customer roster reflects it: named operators and pilots include J.C. Hart, WC Smith, Kettler, Gates Hudson, Bozzuto, Lindy, HP and Hayden Properties, with operators among the NMHC Top 50 running the platform. Mark Juleen's team at J.C. Hart reported that the renewal decision window shrank from roughly 45 days to 10-15, the kind of operational compression that turns into occupancy forecasting and fewer empty days.

The business model follows the product: B2B SaaS priced around the renewal and retention workflow, with an additional revenue-ecosystem and referral layer that monetizes resident movement across a portfolio. The $12M Series A, led by Haymaker Ventures with Goldcrest Capital, Upfront Ventures and several of Renew's own customers participating, is aimed squarely at scaling that platform and the referral network. It followed more than $8M in earlier seed funding.