Katie Hill’s dream home isn’t on the market — but one day, it will be, and she wants dibs. That, and a bit of neighborly envy, is how she got the idea for her startup, Unlisted Homes, which is a Top 20 Startup Battlefield finalist at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025.
“I’ve always imagined myself as an old lady with a big hat and big sunglasses, sipping a martini by the pool,” said Hill, a longtime entrepreneur. As her children grow into adults and move away from home, her neighbor’s lot across the street seems perfect: It’s a smaller home that’s perfect for downsizing, but more importantly, it has a pool.
“I mentioned to my neighbor one day while he was cutting his grass that if he ever wants to sell his house, I was interested in buying it, which I knew was kind of a bold move, but I don’t know, I was possessed to do it,” she told TechCrunch. “He lit up, and he was like, ‘Are you serious? Because I’m starting to think about retirement.’”
A casual conversation turned into something potentially life-changing; Hill and her neighbor decided that when he finally puts the house on the market, she will get a right of first refusal, getting her one step closer to her dream poolside retirement.
“I’m not really in the market to buy a house, and he’s not really in the market to sell a house, but we were having a pretty meaningful conversation about a future transaction,” she said. “I felt a sense of relief that I was going to hear from him before I drove home from the grocery store and saw a sign in the front yard and had to scramble, so I was thinking, how many other people up and down the block are thinking the same thing?”
Unlisted is like Zillow, but for houses that are not yet on the market — previously, this was a web platform only, but the company announced onstage at Disrupt that it’s launching an iOS app. Using public records of 21 million homes, Unlisted created “profiles” for each property, providing the same kind of information that you would find on any other real estate listings site.
“We put a waitlist on every single property profile, so a buyer that admires a home can add themselves to a waiting list, and then what they’re doing is definitely expressing interest in a property,” Hill said. “We notify the homeowner that there’s a waitlist for their home and drive them back to the site.”
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From there, homeowners can update the listing of their home, add more information, and chat with the people on the waitlist.
Unlisted doesn’t plan to facilitate real estate transactions through the platform, since the resources for those transactions already exist. Rather, Unlisted will sell sponsorships on individual ZIP codes to real estate agents, whose information will be linked to every home in that ZIP code as a local expert. Later, the company hopes to connect local homeowners with resources that a homeowner might need, like roofers or electricians.
“Our goal is to be a national platform, but at the end of the day, real estate ends up local, and so we want to connect people to those local resources,” she said. “So far, most of those have been real estate agents … We just had our first mortgage company join.”
In June, Unlisted launched the waitlist feature, which Hill says has generated waitlists for 5,700 homes, or about $4 billion worth of potential real estate transactions.
“One of the really important components of getting this business off the ground was the mentorship that I have received,” Hill said.
After listening to Kayak co-founder Paul English tell his story on an episode of the podcast How I Built This, she emailed him an early pitch deck and asked if he knew someone she could talk to for technical assistance. English was intrigued enough that he connected her with Kayak’s former chief architect, Bill O’Donnell, who became an angel investor and board member for Unlisted.
“They’ve been absolutely incredible,” she said. “Their experience is so wild. They took [Kayak] public for $2 billion, took it back private for another $2 billion … They’ve seen it all.”
Hill founded the company in 2022, devoting nights and weekends with one other engineer. Over time, Hill was able to make the company her full-time job, raising close to $1 million from angel investors. Last November, she raised another $2.25 million led by HearstLab, which funds early-stage companies founded by women.
If you want to learn from Unlisted firsthand, and see dozens of additional pitches, attend valuable workshops, and make the connections that drive business results, head here to learn more about this year’s Disrupt, held this week in San Francisco.
