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.
Image Credits:Unlisted
“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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