A technology company that specializes in making it easier for landlords to comply with affordable housing programs announced this week in a exclusive statement to Inman that it has closed on a $2 million in seed funding.
The company, Pronto Housing, has now raised a total of $4.5 million to support its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that automates applicant data collection and helps landlords ensure federal compliance for Section 8 housing.
Investors in the seed round include, Fifth Wall, PSP Growth, Alate Partners, Valley National Bank (NASDAQ: VLY) and Noho Ventures. Pronto Housing will direct funds toward ongoing product engineering and hiring.
Verifying property compliance and helping prospective tenants understand application regulations are often behind landlords’ collective hesitancy to work with housing assistance programs, which perpetuates the many national challenges of finding homes for the financially distressed.
Pronto claims to be the first “off-the-shelf” technology to address these challenges. It’s developed an intuitive, web-based questionnaire for renters to provide initial personal data and documents, as well as a mechanism to make annual recertification much easier.
An interface for property managers offers insight into tenant status, provides tools for storing and interacting with critical documents, generates lease milestone notifications, and enables multi-party communication.
Landlords can also input property information, link tenants to units and remain connected to specific assistance programs and agencies.
Christine Wendell is CEO & co-founder of Pronto Housing. She thanked her investors in a statement, citing their belief in the benefits of helping both ends of the transaction.
“Affordable housing processes have been notoriously cumbersome, manual, and paper-driven,” Wendell said. “We remain laser-focused on ensuring a quick and easy process for both sides of the equation.”
Today’s searing housing market is causing problems for more than the financially challenged. Renters are experiencing steep increases and aspiring single-family homeowners are turning to a host of alternative financing entities, or “power buyers.”
Wendell co-founded Pronto Housing in 2020 with KC Crosby with the intent of helping millions of housing-insecure Americans gain access to comfortable homes.
The company said in a statement that its technology expedites lease-up by over five times the traditional compliance process.
