Truepad, a home search portal that claimed to offer more accurate home valuations than Zillow’s Zestimate, has shut down after expected funding failed to come through, according to the company’s director of agent operations.
Eileen Romito, the employee in that role, posted on Facebook on Friday that the startup had ceased operations after expected funding did not come through. Romito confirmed that news to Inman on Monday.
“Unfortunately, due to lack of funding we’ve had to cease operations,” Romito told Inman. “Funding we were counting on to get us through 2019 as we monetized our product suite failed to come through. We’re very sad to have to close the doors as we were getting good traction with agents and consumers, and our transition from free to paid agent subscriptions was showing good promise.”
Her Facebook post three days earlier had outlined a similar turn of events:
“Almost 3 years ago, I took a job on what was sort of a whim. The opportunity must have come to me at the right time because despite some ambiguity in the role itself, my gut told me ‘take it.’ Since then, I’ve been working for a real estate tech startup that put the expertise of real estate agents on display, reinforcing the value of the agent in buying or selling a home,” Romito wrote on Facebook.
“Very recently, we began to monetize the business. In June, we started selling the first version of one of our products to agents. Sadly and shockingly, in the time since then, we’ve learned that the funding we were counting on to get us through a period of growth and into a period of profitability would fail to materialize. Unfortunately, and to our team’s incredible dismay, this has forced us to shut down our operations. We thank all of the agents, homebuyers and homesellers, who saw the potential in Truepad,” she continued.
Truepad launched in 2015, according to Crunchbase. The Chicago-based company crowdsourced insights for the region from real estate agents to create its home valuations. The Truepad home search portal was still active for Chicago-area listings on Monday.
According to Romito, Truepad’s co-founders, Scott Hammack, Paul Lazarre and Gregory Hila, were unavailable for comment.
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