When Atticus LeBlanc decided to trade in his job as a land broker for a career in affordable housing in 2007, his colleagues were perplexed. But that didn't deter LeBlanc, who's spent the past 15 years working to find a way to help lower-income workers such as security guards and grocery store clerks find a place to live in the communities they serve.

"You can imagine I got a lot of flak for going into low-income single-family housing from people in the commercial brokerage world who looked at me and said, 'You're going to be fixing toilets at 11 p.m. What are you doing?'" LeBlanc said in an interview.

LeBlanc might not have known exactly what he was doing, but he knew what he eventually wanted to do. That was to find a way to make housing more accessible to people who needed somewhere to stay, typically on a short-term basis until they figured out their next move. He wanted to serve those who needed a housing bridge when they moved to a new city for a job, got divorced or faced a medical issue that drained their bank accounts.

In 2017, LeBlanc, Frank Furman and Jon O’Bryan launched PadSplit, a coliving company created to help renters find affordable housing and homeowners who have empty houses or available rooms to find people to rent them. While the company is fully remote, it's mailing address is in Atlanta's northeast suburbs.

"My objective was to try to solve a problem. And so to solve that problem, I wanted to be in the millions of units listed versus 50,000 houses, which is still a significant impact," LeBlanc said. "But the question was, how do you get the millions of listings?"

It'll take a lot of money, and to date PadSplit has raised more than $35 million in seed funding and from two subsequent fundraising rounds. The company has yet to make money, but LeBlanc said it's getting closer to breaking even and is on the path to profitability.

PadSplit has more than 4,800 rental units in its system and operates in 10 markets including Houston and Dallas in Texas; Indianapolis; New Orleans; Atlanta; and Richmond, Virginia. Over the summer it expanded to Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada. PadSplit residents have an average annual income of $25,000.

Its rooms in Atlanta rent for an average of $678.83 per month, including utilities, Wi-Fi, laundry and access to telemedicine. That's much lower than the $1,518 monthly rent before utilities and without furniture that the average Atlanta one-bedroom apartment goes for, though those units include private bathrooms and kitchens, according to CoStar data.

LeBlanc discovered a large group of people who could not access rental housing because it was too expensive or their incomes were too low to quality. And then there was the hefty security deposit requirement. After buying a home in the Atlanta area and renting rooms to people in need of housing, he spent a lot of in-market time in the neighborhoods where he rented rooms. When he started renting units, LeBlanc said he served as everything from "boots on the ground and the project manager, property manager, Spanish translator."

In those roles he saw up close the large-scale need for affordable housing and the thin line between living comfortably and worrying about a place to live. LeBlanc developed empathy for working people who struggled to find housing. He said it also made him feel "a sense of injustice."

LeBlanc grew up in New Orleans, where he was raised by his "very civically engaged" parents, he said. As a result, LeBlanc, named in honor of Atticus Finch, the justice-seeking attorney in the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," said he also had a civic mindset.

But it was spending ample time with people with solid jobs who could not find apartments they could afford that prompted him to come up with an idea to make unused rooms in single-family homes available to them. PadSplit also has some rooms in multifamily buildings available in its marketplace.

"My take was, there really wasn't a heck of a lot of difference other than just circumstance and opportunity with the people that I was engaging with on a daily basis relative to the commercial real estate investment world that I come out of," LeBlanc said. "Ultimately that front-row seat just made me much more passionate about the problem and seeing how disturbing it was that people with income and primarily with full-time jobs did not have access to housing. And that was a major aha moment for me coming from a very privileged background."

Having moved to Atlanta to be with the woman he later married, LeBlanc decided to leave the brokerage world about 15 years ago when his deal pipeline dried up. That's around the time they had the first of their four sons and his wife decided to leave her job with the United Nations.

"We didn't really make any income to speak of for 2007. The way I had paid for my foray into commercial brokerage was ultimately by buying an abandoned house next door to me, renovating it and then selling it," LeBlanc said. "When I was confronted with a more difficult challenge and knew that I needed to earn some income quickly, I knew that commercial brokerage was absolutely not going to be it. I started looking at housing again, saw that homes around Atlanta were far cheaper than they should be."

LeBlanc used a line of credit against his family's home to purchase properties in southwest Atlanta. "They were closing a lot of the public housing projects at the time, and so I started renting properties to families who had housing choice vouchers."

He then drove or walked the neighborhoods every day to understand the market "and memorize what was happening on specific streets or blocks," LeBlanc said.

“I saw a lot of rooming houses around the city that were in horrendous condition, and struggled to see why anyone would rent them," he said. "I got to know some of these residents over time and understood that they really just needed more and better choices.”

As a result, the idea that eventually served as the framework for PadSplit was hatched. However, the model is different because PadSplit works with other owners of rental properties to help match them with people in need of affordable housing.

An eternal optimist, LeBlanc said while PadSplit still is in startup mode, it's a sustainable business model.

"We have aspirations of profitability. On a unit economic basis, it works," he said. "It absolutely works."

PadSplit will need to go from the 4,800 units it has now to approximately 20,000 to have sufficient size and scale to be self-sustaining, LeBlanc said.

"We have a heck of a lot of overhead, and you can imagine the technology department and just the R-and-D side of our business is massive right now," he said. "There's no question that we should be able to break even, and hopefully our last fundraise should get us there. We certainly seem to be on the road right now, but there's still some distance between here and there."