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fter receiving inquiries from state attorney general offices regarding his latest proptech startup, HelloData.ai, Marc Rutzen decided to make some changes to his approach. This was due to the government's increased scrutiny of RealPage, a competitor of Rutzen's, which was sued by the Department of Justice last month for alleged rent price fixing for major apartment landlords across the U.S.

    Rutzen, along with fellow HelloData.ai co-founders Nico Lassaux and Tim Gamble, started the firm to provide pricing recommendations to apartment owners based on market conditions at the time a renter signs a lease. RealPage recently announced that its clients could opt out of its "algorithmic pricing" service, which is at the center of antitrust accusations. RealPage has denied its revenue management software is not legally compliant.

    To stay on the right side of public officials, Rutzen and his team decided to base their pricing and property management advice on publicly available data, using AI to scrape websites of apartment buildings to calculate rental rates from listings, advertised concessions, and other public property records. This allows HelloData.ai to condense the work of dozens of multifamily acquisition analysts into calculations that can be spit out within a few minutes.

    Rutzen, who is based in the Chicago area and serves as HelloData.ai's CEO, previously founded another multifamily analytics firm called Enodo, which was bought by brokerage Walker & Dunlop in 2019. Lassaux and Gamble were his first and second employees, respectively. After spending a few years at Walker & Dunlop helping onboard Enodo, the trio decided to take a leap and founded HelloData.ai last year. The company has already landed multiple landlords on the National Multifamily Housing Council's list of the largest apartment owners in the U.S as clients.

    Rutzen anticipates that by the end of the year, HelloData.ai will be at $6 million to $7 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), given that they are a year into operations. Despite the challenges of branding a product as an alternative to a company facing antitrust allegations, Rutzen believes that proptech will rebound as innovation continues to be a priority in the industry.