SAN DIEGO – When vetting buying options for major life purchases, consumers are doing more research and becoming savvier than ever, but it hasn’t always been easy for home buyers.
CEO
PropertyLens
A lack of transparency and major information gaps in buying a home has cleared the way for PropertyLens, a company co-founded this year and set to launch later this month by CEO Bob Frady, President John Siegman and CTO Julie Jackson.
Similar to CARFAX, Inc., which focuses on detailing vehicles’ histories and sharing that information, PropertyLens offers a similar model for homebuying, offering both buyer and seller the ability to get data-backed proof and credibility in a home’s condition and value.
Nearly 95% of homebuyers find issues after closing and 60% of sellers admitted to selling a home with an issue the buyer was unaware of, according to Cinch Home Services, but Jackson notes that “an obvious, comprehensive product like PropertyLens does not exist.”
That’s about to change. Currently in beta testing and with $2 million invested in the company, PropertyLens is expected to launch later this month.
“We know buying a house is a very stressful thing,” Frady said. “You just never know what you’re walking into. It’s both stressful and exciting at the same time. What we’re trying to do is to say, ‘We’re experts at gathering and building data.’
“So we can put it all together and create a comprehensive history and then run it through some curated AI to say, ‘Here’s the questions you should be asking before you buy this house,’ or if you bought a house, ‘Here’s some things you should have the inspector look for or things that may impact your ability to get insurance.’”
Frady said the company is also interested in sharing their curated and detailed information with home sellers but they’re initially looking to attract people who are in the market to buy real estate.
“Everyone’s focused on the seller and making sure that the seller has a good outcome, and that’s great,” Frady said, “but nobody’s really looking out for the buyer. Even the buyer’s agent can only go on what’s disclosed by the seller. We try to uncover more rocks that they should ask the seller.”
Frady said a few other companies are doing similar work, but competitors concentrate on providing information to the real estate agent and not to the home buyer.
“I think it’s the wrong place to focus,” Frady said. “You need to focus on the buyer because the buyer is the one who takes all the risk.”
Frady said he believes that Realtors will get on board because it’s what the buyers will look for, and they will think, “Let’s get our hands around this early and make sure that there aren’t issues with selling the house.”
While concentrating on California home buying needs, if successful, Property Lens expects eventually to expand nationwide and further.
Co-founder
PropertyLens
“Long term, I want this to be part of every single real estate transaction in the U.S.,” Frady said. “Globally, we’ll see… but in the U.S., even in a ‘bad’ year, there’s still 3 ½ million home sales in a year. And people look at an average of 10 houses before they buy one. That’s 35 million opportunities to see whether we’re right. I like the odds on that.”
New Business Concerns
Although Startup Genome reports that close to 90% of startups completely fail, PropertyLens’s founding team has experienced both great success and the pain of failure in other endeavors.
The company’s founding leaders have decades of experience in both B2B and high-volume D2C marketing. PropertyLens is built by the same founders that in 2014 built and then grew San Diego-based HazardHub, a property risk data company which was sold to Guidewire Software in 2021.
“We have a deep history of building these sorts of data sets in the past,” Frady said. “So if you knew a whole lot of people, theoretically (they could) find a lot of this data but it takes hours or days to get it. We deliver it instantaneously.”
Frady said there may be some pushback for what PropertyLens is doing.
A lot like the CARFAX model, when it first launched in 1984, Frady said “no car dealership wanted it because all they thought is that it would mess around with the price of the car.”
He said while “most car dealers still don’t like it – because it messes with the price of the car” – consumers now demand it.
“It’s become a very big distribution channel through the car dealerships themselves,” Frady said. “And if you find a car without a CARFAX or something like it then you start to wonder, ‘What’s wrong with this car?’ And so I think the (real estate) industry will also adapt over time.”
Jackson said that the need for industry disruption is here, and that Property Lens is focused on getting things moving.
“The key to success is solving the right problem, with the right team, at the right time to create a product your customers love so much they tell everyone they know about it,” she said.
She said that for buyers, closing the information gap is long overdue, and while that may shift the status quo, “we can help increase industry integrity and transparency, providing realtors a competitive advantage and other businesses in the real estate ecosystem new revenue opportunities – even small businesses like local service providers right in our own neighborhoods.”
PropertyLens
FOUNDED: 2024
CO-FOUNDERS: Bob Frady (CEO); Julie Jackson (CTO); John Siegman (President)
HEADQUARTERS: San Diego
BUSINESS: Consumer-focused property data
FUNDING: $2 million, to date
EMPLOYEES: 10
WEBSITE: propertylens.com
CONTACT: support@propertylens.com
SOCIAL IMPACT: Company provides easily accessible information to ensure families purchase homes without unexpected expenses and issues
NOTABLE: PropertyLens is built by the same founders that built San Diego-based HazardHub, which was sold to Guidewire Software in 2021
