Startup Unlisted alerts homeowners about buyer interest in their homes

“The idea is less ‘I need to move tomorrow’ than ‘I’ve seen houses in my community that I’d really like to live in when they’re available,’ ” said Hill, a 2013 MBA graduate of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

The $40,000 prize Hill received brings the amount she has raised to about $260,000 since launching Unlisted in December. She said she’s working on raising a total of about $1.5 million to $2 million. Hill lives near Dayton, Ohio, and has rolled out Unlisted in that state and her native Illinois. She hopes to be operational nationally by the end of 2022.

Unlisted rewards people who are patient, said one judge in the new venture challenge. “If you’re in the real estate market at any given time, you’re restricted to what sellers have listed on the market,” said Mark Tebbe, an adjunct professor at Booth and a veteran of two startups, including Answers.com.

“Katie’s solution is for people who love a certain house, its style, its neighborhood,” Tebbe said, “and would hate to wake up one day and find out it’s been sold.”

Users identify a house they love by its address, and Unlisted lets the owner know.

“They get a sparkly gold package with a letter and some cookies,” Hill said. “It’s nice to know someone likes your house enough” to ask about it. The letter to potential sellers includes a code they can use at the website to communicate with the potential buyers, who have paid $25 for the letter and cookies to go out.

All communication is anonymous, and it’s strictly preliminary, Hill says. Price, inspection of the property conditions and other details that would come before an actual transaction would be handled through real estate agents or attorneys, she said.

Unlisted “is for an expression of interest, and we leave it at that,” Hill said. In future versions, she said, existing homeowners who haven’t been approached will be able to go to the site, claim their house and upload photos, details of the condition and an intended asking price.

If a potential buyer or buyers then expresses an interest, the homeowners may feel more confident moving forward with their plans, and have some data to show a listing agent, Hill said.

From interactions on Unlisted, “they see that there’s a market for their house,” Tebbe said.

The idea for Unlisted came from Hill’s own experience. Stuck at home in a suburb of Dayton with her two bored children during the pandemic, Hill happened to notice that a house on the other side of the street had a pool.

When a different house she had also admired sold in an off-market transaction, she said, “that fired me up to go walk across the street to say, ‘If you’re ever interested . . . ’ and to my surprise, they were packing their car to go look for a home” in a locale where they planned to retire.

The neighbors have not yet retired and Hill has not yet bought their house, but the ease of the interaction “told me this is how we should do this more often,” she said.

Hill has experience with startups. She launched CommuterAds with her ex-husband. The firm, which places ads on public transportation, is now in Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland and several other cities. Now a board member at CommuterAds, Hill is an entrepreneur-in-residence at the not-for-profit Entrepreneurs’ Center in Dayton.

In the new venture competition, Tebbe said, Unlisted stood out as “an innovative solution to a problem many people have,” but on top of that, “Katie was very infectious, even presenting on Zoom, very personable.”

And that presentation didn’t even come with cookies.