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Inspectify, a company using software to modernize and push for national standardization of how home inspections are facilitated, has secured $5.76 million in funding.
Fundrise led the funding round, Inspectify said in a July 24 announcement, a consumer-level investing platform that opens up participation opportunities typically reserved for institutional players.
Inspectify works with agents and their clients but also serves investors, property managers, lenders and insurance carriers. In addition, it offers brokerage-level enterprise deals.
CEO and co-founder Josh Jensen told Inman in an email that his company’s features and intrinsic purpose will continue to evolve as more data is harnessed from inspections and other real estate sources.
“We have a vision that homes should be inspected, not just when the home is bought and sold, but yearly if not quarterly,” Jensen told Inman. “The data and determined insights from an inspection creates exponentially more efficiency in terms of how homes are owned and operated.“
Inspectify raised $8 million in 2021, two years after its founding. It provides an automated solution for booking and conducting home and property inspections, using dynamic, smart interfaces that can greatly reduce time spent at homes, data integrity and improve downstream workflows.
However, Jensen admits barriers remain.
“The main blocker of making this a reality is that inspections are still too analogous and un-standardized to be, one, able to unlock the efficiency in the data and two, hit a price point necessary for more frequent inspections viable,” he said.
If homes can be inspected more frequently, according to Jensen, the more all stakeholders can understand about market activity and long-term home ownership.
The Y Combinator alumnus emphasizes imagery, captured in-app, and offers a repair estimate based on a deep database of national repair cost averages and labor prices, benchmarked against a record of 1,800 standard-home deficiencies. Other features include an online calendaring feature, branded inspection reports, brokerage white-labeling and a fully mobile companion app.
Jensen’s goal is to prevent the inspection from derailing home sales or further contributing to their delay as a result of conflicting reports, fragmented, market-by-market practices and subjective degrees of property condition. There’s no reason for a transaction to be renegotiated midway through escrow, Jensen believes.
Inspectify wants to balance the importance of understanding a home’s physical limitations with increased efficiency. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Jensen told Geekwire that Inspectify’s services have experienced an 80% year-over-year decrease in demand from institutional real estate investors.
“But the startup is still growing its market share,” Jensen told the technology news company. “[We’re] expanding into other verticals, such as property management, insurance, lending and data services.”
The company let go of 16 employees at the end of 2022, BizJournals reported. The market slowdown was to blame, and Inspectify is hardly alone on that front. Jensen told Inman that the company can only control so much.
“We are focusing our energy on controlling what we can control and ignoring the rest. We can’t make the Fed lower interest rates and we can’t make people buy more homes,” Jensen said. “What we can do is continue adding more customers and continue to iterate on our products to better fit their needs.
“We are also focusing on building better processes and software to enable scale for when (not if) the market turns around, we are best equipped to take advantage of that growth.“
