A Property History for Your Home
An interview with Bob Frady, by Sean Murphy
Last month a friend of Bob Frady's was closing on a house in Nashville and asked him to run the address. Frady came back with a puzzle. The place had clearly been improved, yet there was not a single permit on record, which meant that on paper everything was original. The estate agent insisted the work was only two years old. Then why, Frady asked, are there no permits? He told his friend to hold on to the inspection contingency whatever happened, and mentioned that the soil in that part of Tennessee tends to run off and is prone to sinkholes. The realtor was livid and claimed that “PropertyLens doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”
Unfortunately, the inspector duly found the house collapsing on itself, its supports failing, a repair worth seventy-five thousand dollars that the buyer negotiated at the close instead of discovering afterwards.
Stories like that are the reason that Frady's third company exists. He is the chief executive and co-founder of PropertyLens, a San Diego business built on a simple offer: type in any address in the United States and it will pull from around ninety data sources and tell you what it can work out about the house, whether you are buying, selling or investing. His ambition is for the report to become as unremarkable as the straightforward vehicle history check that nobody skips when buying a used car. His logic is “You wouldn’t buy a used car without knowing the history so why would you buy a used house without one?”
As is often the case Frady was the product’s first user. Having sold HazardHub, the geospatial risk firm he built and sold in 2021, he went looking for a history report on the home he wanted and found nothing of the kind existed. So he pulled together his old data and called in favours from friends across the industry, and what came back was a radon problem and a roof problem, none of them disclosed. He bought the house anyway, using what he knew to negotiate ten per cent off the asking price, and concluded he could not be the only buyer who wanted to see behind the listing.
Much of what PropertyLens does comes from the experience gained at HazardHub but this time the consumer is benefiting rather than just the insurers. The roof is a neat example. The company partners with an aerial imagery firm, the same kind that flies over neighbourhoods after a tornado or hailstorm so insurers can triage claims. That footage is usually used once and left; PropertyLens reads it for the roof's condition, checks permits for evidence of replacement, and weighs tree overhang and past storm damage. The findings resolve into two grades. A PropertyScore, from A to F, judges the house itself. A SafePlaceScore judges everything around it.
The business runs on two tracks. Over a thousand reports have been sold directly to consumers, while a data arm grew almost of its own accord when some of their old -customers asked to be let back in. An API launched about a year ago has just signed, by his count, its fifty-third customer. Insurance is where the tracks converge. Premiums in some American states have been rising ten to twelve per cent a year by his account, and his own bill doubled inside three years; PropertyLens now tracks six years of insurance premium movement so buyers can see the direction of travel before it reaches them. The pressure is not confined to the United States, with insurers in wildfire and flood-exposed markets pulling back or pricing cover beyond reach. Frady argues that some billion-dollar incumbents are still running on models built decades ago, while his data enjoys what he calls the advantage of a later birth date.
Frady tried retirement once, after the prior company sale, but quickly figured out that he wasn’t quite done yet. His customers, he points out, came back to him without being asked. Making a property report as automatic as a car history check is, he admits, a long road, but he has built this kind of business twice before, and he talks like a man who expects to do it a third time.
