Nine Four Insights

Why We Invested: Inspectify

We’re delighted to announce our lead investment in Inspectify’s $8M Series A. The round included participation from a consortium of VCs and strategic investors, including Munich RE, Redfin, Foundation Capital, and prominent PropTech executives such as Darren Nix (Steadily), Chase Gilbert and Nichole Wischoff (Built Technologies), Tushar Garg (Flyhomes), Guy Gal (Side) and Josh Stech (Sundae), among others. Nine Four Ventures is excited to partner with Josh, Denis, and the Inspectify team to build a category-defining home inspection software platform. Here is a bit more about the business, opportunity, and why we invested.

Inspectify is a home inspection marketplace and software platform that structures data and standardizes inspection workflows in the cloud between buyers, sellers, agents, and inspectors. It allows home buyers to book and coordinate home inspections, purchase insurance and warranties, fulfill work orders, and serve as an ‘operating manual’ for the home. Inspectify’s vision is to provide an API of your home, and provide any and all service providers, lenders, buyers, and sellers the data they need, seamlessly.

Inspectify was born out of Josh’s previous role as VP of Operations at Flyhomes, where he experienced the pain of manually managing inspections while buying and selling hundreds of homes first-hand. The amount of time and number of shadow costs involved were expensive and made it difficult to make decisions, which slowed down deals. Josh knew there had to be a better way. That’s when he left to attend Y Combinator and founded Inspectify.

In 2020, ~5.5M existing single-family homes were bought and sold in the US1. The vast majority of those transactions involve a formal inspection. Traditional institutional home buyers and more tech-enabled offerings (e.g. iBuyers such as Zillow Instant Offers, Redfin Now, and Opendoor, as well as fix-and-flip, brokerage, rent-to-own, or sale-lease-back alternatives) have flooded into the market and are acquiring thousands of homes across the US every month, increasing the importance of accurate and efficient home inspections.

Using Inspectify’s platform, retail and institutional buyers can finally procure cloud-native, standardized inspection reports that structure data and enable better data-driven acquisition decisions and improved returns. In the future, Inspectify’s home inspection reports will provide an inventory of what repairs are needed, provide dynamic pricing and booking of repairs, create accurate inventories of appliances and home systems, and streamline the lending process. We’re not the only ones that have taken notice of Inspectify’s potential. Inspectify has already earned the trust of prominent real estate companies such as Redfin, Flyhomes, Sundae, Amherst, Homie, Compass, Homelight, Mynd, Bungalow, Orchard, and Roofstock, among others. Inspectify’s structured data and standardized workflows are game changing, and soon buyers not leveraging Inspectify will be at a disadvantage.

The Nine Four team has spent a lot of time in and around the home inspection space. It’s an industry that feels like it has been overlooked, yet it focuses on pain points at the intersection of multibillion dollar industries. Insurance carriers, lenders, home services providers, suppliers, and lenders can all benefit from Inspectify’s structured reports too. Insurers and lenders benefit from cleaner and more granular data that can be cross-referenced in the cloud to prevent losses/claims and reduce default risk. Service pros and suppliers can benefit from plugging into Inspectify’s integrated platform for automated work orders, and to better understand what appliances are in the home, the condition they’re in, their warranty type/length, etc. to get smarter around replacement lifecycles, or home care subscriptions, for example.

As the institutional SFR market continues to grow, it will present opportunities for Inspectify to work with stakeholders in bigger and more meaningful ways that produce value for everyone. It’s exciting for a company like Inspectify to consider the possibilities for how it’s data can be used and where their product can go along the spectrum. In short, home inspection automation is just in its infancy. As the company continues to productize its home inspection platform and layer additional products and services on top it will be fun for us to ‘plug in’ and watch how the business evolves over time.

Congrats again to Josh, Denis and the entire team. If you’re interested in helping build the future of home inspections, Inspectify is hiring!

1 https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/quick-real-estate-statistics

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