Rentsync is one of North America’s foremost real estate technology platform companies. It helps property managers and landlords manage operations for multi-family properties.
Its flagship platform streamlines listing syndication, lead management, and advertising campaigns and integrates with a range of property management and accounting platforms.
Headquartered in Toronto, the company has grown from a web development company for the real estate sector in 2010 before maturing, establishing with the Rentals.ca Network, and merging with other businesses to offer its customers the best marketing and property management technology.
As part of its growth trajectory, Rentsync acquired six companies in 2020 and 2021. Each of these companies had a different tech stack, written in various programming languages and running on various cloud or on-premise servers.
The company needed to consolidate this fragmented infrastructure, but that led to challenges with its resources with Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically its use of Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon S3, and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) services. Resources were a struggle to optimize and costs were getting out of control. Rentsync also had additional challenges related to Google Cloud services.
Rentsync had little specialized knowledge of cloud infrastructure and how to optimize it. As a result, complex issues received only incomplete or delayed fixes, creating a creeping amount of technical debt.
Rentsync was also keen to significantly improve its security and compliance and meet the requirements for higher-level security certifications, significantly lacking among its competitors in the Canadian market.
Brandon Axtmann, Rentsync’s Manager of IT & Cybersecurity, explained how Rentsync wants to invest in this now. “We’ve really noticed an increase in the number of requests we get about cybersecurity from customers as part of their procurement processes. Two years ago, nobody ever asked us about cybersecurity. But now I would say one in every four companies will ask.”
Rentsync found DoiT when Google Cloud services recommended DoiT to help them with their specific needs. Together, Rentsync and DoiT evaluated various scenarios, weighing the pros and cons of each option. This comprehensive approach enabled Rentsync to see beyond immediate technical challenges and consider long-term implications.
By providing insights and strategic planning support, DoiT empowered Rentsync to make informed decisions, transforming how it approached and solved its software challenges. As Brandon explains:
“The entire process with a lot of software when we onboard is: Here’s the guide. Click five buttons, and then you’re onboarded. We learned that this approach led to problems with cloud services. We would talk to DoiT, and their people would explain, ‘This is a direction you could go, but is that the full direction you want to go?”
“It wasn’t just 1-2-3 done. It was step 1. Then go and make sure things make sense so that whatever we did was going to last and not going to have to be rebuilt in two years.”
DoiT began the process by assessing Rentsync’s existing tech stacks and identifying pain points. Together, they created a roadmap to tackle tech consolidation, cloud cost management, and security.
Initially, DoiT helped Rentsync manage its Google Cloud resources, then expanded to help the company manage its AWS infrastructure as well. This included optimizing storage and compute resources, improving security, and helping bring costs down.
DoiT also helped Rentsync take advantage of the features of AWS CloudFormation so that deployment and permission configurations were consistent across all of Rentsync’s AWS accounts.
DoiT also implemented more data visibility into Rentsync’s systems through DoiT Cloud Intelligence.
“That was probably one of the most valuable things we got when we signed on with DoiT,” says Brandon. “We immediately got the ability to build dashboards. They give us just so much additional information about what’s going on. For a smaller company like us, we are so focused on expenses. That has been just such a big bonus for us.”
“Without DoiT, we would not be nearly as far along as we were if we were doing this ourselves. We have a good level of expertise here, but we don’t know every single AWS product and what the best practices are. DoiT was able to help us with that. If we identify that we need to do something, but we aren’t 100% sure how we can go to them and ask. It saves us time because we don’t have to spend two weeks trying to research and trial everything.”
Rentsync gained a more efficient, secure, and cost-effective approach to cloud operations.
The biggest result for the company is finally having a plan and process for consolidating the systems it has acquired from other companies. “The first thing we will be implementing is AWS Control Tower,” explains Brandon Axtmann. “A lot of what we’re going to be doing over the next little bit is moving a lot of workloads over, making sure we’re putting them into stable environments that meet our compliance needs.”
DoiT’s knowledge of cloud infrastructure and AWS allows Rentsync to avoid costly mistakes and speed up progress. It also frees up a lot of focus and time for their internal team. Says Brandon, “We’re not having to research random things with AWS, not having to troubleshoot something that we have no idea about or banging our heads against the wall. We’re offloading a lot of this work to DoiT.”
“These guys will answer our questions and give us the information that we need to solve the problem and even problems that we don’t even know about that they might be seeing.”
With DoiT FlexSave, Rentsync saved 22% on its cloud costs, surpassing the initial goal of 15%. This reduction was a direct result of improved cloud cost attribution and optimization. Rentsync also saved approximately 10% of dev ops time each month, allowing its team to focus on more strategic tasks.
Rentsync plans to scale and expand into new markets, and significantly expand its product offerings with the strategic acquisitions it’s made over the past few years. With DoiT continuously supporting its cloud infrastructure, there are now few technical barriers to this goal.
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