Rent College Pads, a countrywide housing platform for students, is launching its end-to-end property management arm College Pads Pro on Aug.1.
The Milwaukee-based company at 1101 N. Market St. started as CEO Dominic Anzalone's college project in 2012. It's since become a top platform universities use to match students to off-campus rental listings. The software is managed by Rent College Pads but takes on the branding of the individual university, which enables students to search for listings from a university-backed platform.
“We’ve kind of really become the name brand of the country,” said Anzalone.
College Pads Pro is a radical update to the services the company currently offers. Right now, students can use the platform to search for rentals, subleases, roommates as well as to calculate walking distances to class. College Pads Pro would expand on this, allowing renters and landlords to transact all of their business on the platform.
“Originally, all we were handling was, you know, a renter looking for a property and finding a renter. We want to be end-to-end now,” said Anzalone.
The service would compete with property management platforms like AppFolio and Entrata, allowing students to sign leases and make payments all within the platform, said Anzalone. Over 3.5 million students use the platform to find housing every year, said Anzalone in an email.
Anzalone originally thought of the idea as a junior at University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in 2012. He left school to build the business, overseeing its significant expansion. The company saw a three-year growth rate of 980% between 2015 and 2017, according to previous Business Journal reporting.
That growth rate was good enough to land the company at No. 514 on the 2018 Inc. 5000, the premier list of the top 5,000-fastest growing private companies in the U.S.
In 2020, the company had a 30-person team, but has since ramped up its hiring efforts.
“It’s a big investment in Milwaukee in that we're, we're hiring like crazy now in Milwaukee,” said Anzalone.
The platform partners with universities across the country, including the majority of UW System schools and the Milwaukee School of Engineering. In the last two years, the company added 70 more university partnerships, including Arizona State University and University of Texas Austin, to a list that already boasted over a hundred universities, said Anzalone.
