SAN DIEGO – With year-over-year revenue growth already over 60%, Deckard Technologies raised its ceiling even further this month with the acquisition of Delaware-based short-term rental analytics and data company AllTheRooms.
The acquisition, terms undisclosed, will bolster Deckard’s existing short- and long-term rental data and property tax management tools for local governments, primarily the company’s Rentalscape platform, which can analyze bookings and rental activity for more than 15 million rental listings across over 10,000 websites.
AllTheRooms’ expertise is expected to add new capabilities to Rentalscape, according to Deckard, including an expanded data set for property tax compliance, historical rental data and real-time analytics.
According to Deckard CEO Nick Del Pego, the two companies complemented each other’s strengths, with Deckard focused primarily on the compliance aspects of the property rental market and AllTheRooms focused on the commercial portion.
“I would have told you six months ago we had the best-in-class analysis for how much revenue was going to a property, we have this rich data and rich history,” he said. “With their complementary data and their complementary analysis, the synthesis of the two if going to be better than anything either of us individually would put out and pretty dominant on the market.”
Pivot to Compliance Management
Del Pego, a former Qualcomm employee of more than a decade, joined Deckard in 2018 around six weeks after the company’s founding by around a half-dozen other fellow Qualcomm veterans. Initially COO, Del Pego elevated to become the company’s CEO in early 2020.
Deckard’s early focus was on building a data platform to help local governments detect unpaid property taxes as well as real estate improvements completed without proper permitting.
While the company’s early employees believed in the technology, convincing local governments to become clients was a different matter.
“In the summer of 2019 I went to the board and said, ‘our first property tax idea based on the data we’ve been gathering was a great idea, but really actually hard to sell,’” Del Pego said. “We kind of learned the government market, it’s a hard, hard penetration to do unless you’re a big, established entity, and we’re a bunch of lean, scrappy startup types.”
That difficulty led Deckard to pivot to offering a compliance data management system for property rentals specifically. That was just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We pivoted right before COVID, and then we spent six months after COVID where my major investor out of New York kind of came to us and said, ‘you guys are great, but you should just quit,’” Del Pego said.
That suggestion was rebuffed primarily by co-founder Greg Rose, a former senior vice president of engineering at Qualcomm, who argued that the Deckard team at that point was essentially an all-star team of former Qualcomm engineers and data scientists.
Rapid Growth at Home and Abroad
Deckard would eventually weather the nadir of the pandemic, due in large part to Rose personally funding the company for roughly 18 months, and picked up some of its first clients, mainly in California, while netting its first quarter-million in revenue.
The company has since grown rapidly, counting some 400 jurisdictions across 34 states among its client list, including the top 10 most popular states in the U.S. for short- and long-term property rentals.
Deckard also has clients in Canada and Australia and has signed deals with more than 150 new customer cities and counties over the past year across states like California, Arizona, Ohio, Vermont and Alabama. Overall, Deckard provides data for more than a quarter-million property rentals.
The company hauled in some $8 million in the second quarter and Del Pego estimated it would bring in another $9 million in the current quarter and continue to grow at a rate of 50% or 60% over the next couple years.
“About a third of our business is us replacing existing, legacy, antiquated systems, but about two-thirds of our business is that there are still a lot of places who are trying to get their hands wrapped around the speed in which their residential neighborhoods are changing, and they haven’t had a solution in the past,” Del Pego said. “So we’re doing a tremendous amount of education.”
A Path to Profitability
Deckard’s relationship with AllTheRooms dates to 2019, when one of the former’s investors had a minor investment in the latter. Del Pego reconnected with AllTheRooms CEO Will Pearson in 2024 at a time when AllTheRooms had hit something of a ceiling and was in search of a potential acquisition, lest the startup simply shut down.
In addition to AllTheRooms’ data and analytics methodologies, the acquisition will shift six patents held by AllTheRooms to Deckard that are expected to strengthen the latter’s property management platform by preventing duplication of rental listings and validating legitimate rental activity.
As part of the acquisition, Pearson will join Deckard as director of operations.
“We’re thrilled to be joining the Deckard Technologies team and combining our capabilities,” he stated. “We are really excited about what this talented team will be able to deliver for STR property management software customers and the new opportunities we can explore together.”
Del Pego said he estimates Deckard could reach profitability by the middle of 2026 for its short-term rental management platform.
The company is still building out its long-term rental management platform, which could briefly stall Deckard’s overall timeline to profitability, but it will also cut down on time as the long-term platform is essentially built using the same existing technology as the short-term platform.
The biggest factor limiting Deckard’s growth, Del Pego argued, is simply how fast its sales and marketing team can talk to potential clients. The company has already pre-built the rental property data and software platform for every jurisdiction in the U.S., enabling Deckard to immediately demonstrate its utility to potential clients.
Deckard has expanded its go-to-market and sales staff by some 50% over the last seven months to maintain its momentum.
“The solution is great, works great for people, really happy client base,” Del Pego said. “Now it’s just getting in front of the rest of those that don’t know.”
Deckard Technologies
FOUNDED: 2018
CEO: Nick Del Pego
HEADQUARTERS: San Diego
BUSINESS: Short- and long-term rental analytics and management tools for governments
REVENUE: $8 million (Q2)
EMPLOYEES: Around 120 globally
WEBSITE: deckard.com
NOTABLE: Deckard has signed 150 new clients over the past year.
Eli is an award-winning reporter primarily covering the tech and life sciences industries. He previously worked as the San Diego City Hall reporter for the regional wire City News Service. He has also covered public health, transportation and state and local politics in the San Francisco Bay Area for Local News Matters, the nonprofit arm of the regional wire Bay City News Service, where he also oversaw the development and daily content management of the outlet’s public health and COVID-19 news and resource webpage. He is also a contributing writer covering Minor League Baseball for the analysis and commentary website Baseball Prospectus. Eli is a graduate of San Francisco State University and a native of Northern California.
