Featured Startup Pitch: New York City-based Revaluate wants to be the Carfax of real estate

By Max Galka, Revaluate co-founder

ELEVATOR PITCH

Revaluate is a Carfax-like home history report, which allows buyers, renters, and real estate professionals to assess the ‘livability’ of a given address.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

Ratings and reviews are now a ubiquitous part of consumer decision making for nearly every product and service available. Most well known are online review sites, such as Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Angie’s List, but also:

• Diamond buyers rely on clarity ratings
• For cars, the government produces crash test safety ratings
• Mortgage lenders depend on borrower credit ratings
• Financial investments are assessed using financial credit ratings

However, when it comes to real estate, which is often the largest financial decision a person will ever make, buyers must base their decision almost entirely on their own judgment. This is the problem that Revaluate aims to change.

We have amassed a database of information from over 2,000 sources, which we use to rate the ‘livability’ of each home. In addition, each building is scored on safety, environment, quality-of-life, and expenses. These scores are standardized, making it easy to compare different housing options side-by-side.

For a given home, you can also dig in deeper and view the specific issues behind each of these scores. Revaluate can tell you if a building has an infestation problem, whether the heating works, if there are noise problems, whether the neighborhood is safe and even what celebrities live nearby.

MARKETING/PROMOTION STRATEGY

We are currently more focused on product development than we are on growth, but a secondary benefit of having lots of unique data/content is great SEO. After launching two months ago, we are growing at a week-over-week rate of 15 percent, and we are already ranking on page one for several competitive keywords.

MARKET OPPORTUNITY

The market, residential real estate, is enormous, with about $1.5 trillion transacted each year.

The opportunity itself has only recently been possible. With governments opening up public data, as well as the creation of new data through social media and the general growth of the Internet, there has only very recently been enough data available to build such a product.

In that regard, we are aware of few competitors, all of which were founded this year.

DIFFERENTIATORS VS. THE COMPETITION

What differentiates us from our competition is the sheer amount of data that we have, which we believe is orders-of-magnitude larger than anyone else. Whereas other businesses report their information as a list of isolated data points, we have enough data to present a comprehensive picture of what it would be like to live at a given address.

BUSINESS MODEL

We are currently in beta, so for the moment the product is free and we have not begun generating revenue.

CURRENT NEEDS

We are currently speaking to investors about raising a Seed round, so that is our most immediate need. Aside from that, we are looking for user feedback to help us develop the product.

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HEADQUARTERS: New York City

WEBSITE: www.revaluate.com

FOUNDERS: Max Galka, Chris Drayer, Tim Segraves

YEAR FOUNDED: 2013

INVESTORS: Angel investors

INCUBATOR/ACCELERATOR: Digital Sandbox

TWITTER: @RevaluateIt

YOUTUBE: youtube.com/watch?v=iv9lJpkdejA