Biography
Four decades building software that tells people what things are worth.
From a software company founded at eight, to the analytics a generation of commercial real estate priced on, to a public company's turnaround, to a device built to solve his own pain.
01
Origin, 1981–1993
Palisade to a licence at eighteen.
Andrew Blount started at eight. The company was called High Altitude Software, and the first product was a database application general enough to track anything — sold, initially, to a coin collector. When a customer phoned for help and heard his voice, the man assumed he was speaking to a woman. “I went with it — it's a lot better than telling them you're eight,” Blount told the Orange County Register years later.
Over the following decade the company shipped MasterMind, a program that could take either side of the puzzle — playing against a person or setting the problem for them to solve — an attempt at machine reasoning written by a boy with no formal instruction in it. At sixteen he built LawBase, which ran time, billing and client management for a law firm.
In September 1987, at fourteen, he was published in Rainbow Magazine — “The Power of the Mind,” carried with a contributor biography giving his age. It was his first appearance in print. It would be seven years before his second.
He has no formal education. He left high school at seventeen because he had to work, and everything he knows about software, statistics and valuation he taught himself. At eighteen he took a Colorado real estate licence. Not long after, he moved to California with seventeen dollars.
02
The Standard, 1993–2002
Pricing a market in ruins.
California's commercial property crash had destroyed the assumptions the industry priced on, and nobody could say with confidence what a building was worth. Blount built the answer as software. Between 1993 and 1996 he wrote the algorithm and database behind Custom Market Research at COMPS InfoSystems — work cited by the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times and relied on in litigation arising from the crash. On 27 November 1994 the San Diego Union-Tribune quoted him on the state of the market:
“People are no longer scared that they're going to lose another million dollars if they hold on to their property for another year.”— San Diego Union-Tribune, 1994. He was twenty-one.
In February 1996 he founded the software company later known as Realhound. Over the next six years he built analytical infrastructure a large part of the industry ran on: TurboWaste for the Washington State Department of Ecology, recognised with a Governor's Award as one of the top fifty initiatives in the state; multivariate analytics for Grubb & Ellis under their chief economist; rental-trend systems for RealFacts cited by the Associated Press. In 1997 the national head of multifamily housing at Fannie Mae asked him to build a system for Congress to identify red-lining. From 1998 he ran the platform Bankers Mutual, Fannie Mae's second-largest DUS lender, used to close over ten billion dollars in multifamily loans. For two years he was an adjunct professor at California State University, Fullerton, teaching the algorithmic valuation of commercial real estate to people with degrees he did not have.
In 2001 he filed a provisional patent for a system determining weighted averages of commercial real estate rental statistics. Blount also describes authoring the original YieldStar pricing algorithm in this period, as a twenty per cent owner. In 2002 he conceived, built, licensed and sold Portfolio — multifamily housing's first widely adopted business-intelligence platform — inside six months.
That year was also the hardest of his career. CoStar sued him for a second time in March 2002, seeking contempt of a permanent injunction and threatening jail. The suit cost nearly four hundred thousand dollars in legal fees before it was dismissed, and it destroyed an exclusive distribution agreement with CB Richard Ellis — their chief information officer later testified under oath that they had cancelled because they expected CoStar to keep suing until Blount was out of business.
03
The first sale, 2002
An agreement RealPage paid on for nine years.
On 29 July 2002, Portfolio's assets transferred to RealPage, Inc. under an asset purchase agreement made not with a company but with Blount personally. The structure tells you what RealPage thought it was buying: rather than a lump sum, the agreement carried an instalment obligation the company was still paying nine years later — capped at $600,000 a year, and significant enough that RealPage's lenders wrote around it by name in the credit agreement they signed in December 2011. By Blount's own account in a memorandum written at the time, without Portfolio and that sale his company would have been bankrupt within two months.
He then sued CoStar Group and its chief executive in federal court in Santa Ana — as plaintiff. After three days of trial, the jury returned a unanimous verdict against CoStar. A post-trial Sherman Act claim settled.
Blount stayed at RealPage as an executive through 2004, managing the development of yield-management and portfolio-management software, then consulted for the company for eleven years while running Realhound.com.
04
The lights, 2009–2014
Six Decembers on Nellie Gail Road.
For six seasons the Blount family home in Laguna Hills was one of the best-known Christmas displays in America: 120,000 LEDs across 812 channels, every frame drawn by hand — a single song could take eighty hours — choreographed to music broadcast on 100.1 FM so visitors could listen from their cars. Roughly 100,000 people came in the peak season. Visitors texted a number and watched their words appear on a six-foot LED board in the front yard within sixty seconds; seven people used it to propose marriage. Some 1,800 gallons of hot cider went out each winter, much of it handed over by Blount himself in the driveway, and a fire engine came down Nellie Gail Road on Friday nights collecting more than two thousand toys a year for the Spark of Love drive. The whole season cost about $125 in electricity.
In December 2013 the display was featured in the premiere episode of ABC's The Great Christmas Light Fight, watched by 5.5 million people. It ran for the last time in 2014; the family moved a block away, and the show did not move with them.
05
Public service, 2012–2016
Council, the mayoralty, and a race left early.
Blount was elected to the Laguna Hills City Council in November 2012 at the top of a five-candidate field for two seats — 5,679 votes on certified results across all twenty-one precincts. The night he was sworn in, the council elected him Mayor Pro Tempore by unanimous vote. A year later, again unanimously, it elected him Mayor, and he served the 2014 mayoral year.
His signature initiative was his own proposal: a business plan for a South Orange County Family Justice Center, a single site where victims of domestic violence could reach police, prosecutors, medical care and counselling without retelling their story in four places. The council allocated a hundred thousand dollars to study it. The study concluded it could not be done — the case volume and the running costs were beyond a city of Laguna Hills' size — and on 25 November 2014 Blount, then Mayor, moved to receive and file the report that ended his own proposal. It passed five to nothing. He also pressed Moulton Niguel Water District on its tiered rate structure, meeting with district representatives alongside city staff.
In February 2014 he entered the Republican primary for Governor of California. On 29 April, five weeks before the election, he withdrew, telling the Orange County Register he had been fighting a cyst on his spinal cord for months and that it had cost him the energy the race required. It was too late to remove his name from the ballot. On 3 June 2014 he received 89,749 votes — in a race he had already left. He served one full council term, leaving in December 2016, and sat on the board of the Orange County School of the Arts Foundation from 2012 to 2015.
06
The return, 2015–2019
Joining RealPage at the bottom.
He came back to RealPage on 1 December 2015, and the timing is the whole story. The company was in the worst stretch of its public life: revenue growth had collapsed from 17 per cent to 7.3 per cent in 2014, a July guidance cut had halved the profit plan in a single release, the shares had fallen 57 per cent from their high, an activist investor had taken a 9.85 per cent position, and the chief financial officer would resign that January and reverse the decision three weeks later. The stock's closing low — a market capitalisation of about $1.3 billion — came ten weeks after Blount's start date.
He joined as Group Vice President of Consumer Solutions, became Executive Vice President of Consumer Solutions in March 2017, and in January 2018 was named Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation Officer — a named executive officer of the company in its 2018 and 2019 proxy statements.
Blount resigned effective 31 December 2019. On 20 December 2020, RealPage agreed to be acquired by Thoma Bravo for $88.75 per share in cash — an enterprise value of $10.2 billion, a 30.8 per cent premium, with no competing bid emerging from a 45-day go-shop. The company he had rejoined at a $1.3 billion valuation was sold for $10.2 billion five years later.
07
Biocurrent, 2020–
A device built to solve his own pain.
The origin of Biocurrent is personal, and Blount tells it plainly. He has lived with hydrocephalus, and with the chronic back pain that came with it. For twenty years he managed that pain the way American medicine managed pain: with opioids — by the end, 120 milligrams of oxycodone a day.
In 2020 he began building a device to treat the pain itself. In December of that year he stopped taking oxycodone. By his account, the withdrawal amounted to two hours of restless legs. The pain did not return, and he has not taken a painkiller since. He has since logged more than four thousand hours testing the device on himself.
Biocurrent is developing what the company describes as a closed-loop, EEG-guided transcutaneous electrical stimulation system for chronic pain: a headband reads the patient's brain activity, and software adjusts the stimulation's frequency, amplitude and waveform in real time in response — a feedback loop rather than a fixed programme. The company reports an investigational study underway in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and states that 88 per cent of participants have reported pain reduction greater than fifty per cent. Those results are preliminary and unpublished, and Blount's own experience is a single account, not clinical evidence. The device is investigational: it has not been cleared or approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is not commercially available. Two patent applications have been filed.
It is not an obvious third act for someone who spent thirty years pricing apartment buildings. Blount's account is that it is the same work: an instrument that measures something nobody could measure reliably, and adjusts to what it finds.
Figures on this page are drawn from SEC filings, certified election results and contemporaneous press coverage; market capitalisations are derived from reported shares outstanding and closing prices. Source documents are in the archive.