Earlier this year, the LA-homebuying site
was having a difficult time targeting professional homebuyers.
Their site had taken off with individual buyers by allowing them to purchase homes without the fees associated with real estate agents and refunding half the commission back to customers. But while the business model made sense for professional buyers, there wasn’t enough exposure in the market to bring them to the site.
“We didn’t have any money to advertise. It’s a crowded content space,” said co-founder and CEO Judd Shoenholtz. “But we did have every listing on the MLS in real-time. It’s easy to search by things like location or price, but it was impossible to search by quality. So we built an algorithm to filter out only the worst listings and it was immediately useful.”
And thus, Shitty Listings was born.
Focusing on fixers and distressed properties, the site started as a weekend project and was subsequently launched on Product Hunt and Reddit to a solid response. Listing agents were receiving an increasing number of calls on properties that had seen very little traction, serving as confirmation to Schoenholtz that the product was working.
The Open Listings team launched Shitty Listings 2.0 this week. Upon user request, they added more cities and better filtering. The site currently has over 3,000 active properties for sale and sees 50-100 new listings each day.
Shitty Listings is hoping to climb the ladder in the distressed properties market, and I doubt they’ll settle for being number two.
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