Should you rent that apartment? Revaluate will help you decide

Signing the lease on a new apartment or purchasing a home can be stressful, especially if you aren’t familiar with the neighborhood or the property’s history. Is the neighborhood safe? Has the building been well-maintained? Will street noise keep you awake at night?

Photo courtesy of Chris Drayer

Photo courtesy of Chris Drayer

KANSAS CITY—Signing a lease on a new apartment or purchasing a home can be stressful, especially if you aren’t familiar with the neighborhood or the property’s history.

Is the neighborhood safe? Has the building been well-maintained? Will street noise keep you up at night? Oftentimes it’s difficult to track down all the info you may want to know before deciding where to live.

Now Revaluate pulls everything into one place.

“Basically what we’re trying to do is answer the real estate question that everyone moving has: ‘What’s it really like to live here,’” Revaluate co-founder Chris Drayer told SPN.

With Revaluate, potential renters or homebuyers can log on, search an address and find out how their potential new home scores. Based on factors like safety, environment and quality of life, the startup’s algorithm calculates an overall score for the address.Photo courtesy of Drayer

The beta version launched exclusively in Manhattan Monday, where Drayer says the large, concentrated population will help the startup get the user feedback it’s seeking more quickly.

“We wanted to create more than a Carfax for homes,” Drayer (right) said. “We wanted to be able to compare the unique differences of homes of similar high quality.”

For the past 10 months, the Revaluate team has worked on creating a large database of public and private data to help make the process of finding a place to live a little bit easier. While Revaluate will tell you if there’s a persistent maintenance problem in the building or if the neighborhood’s crime rate is high, you can also look up novelty items like famous neighbors and notable attractions nearby.

The service isn’t available outside of New York City yet, but Drayer says Kansas City is high on the list of cities to launch Revaluate next.

Drayer, who lives in Kansas City, has two fellow co-founders scattered across the country in New York City and Boulder. Despite their various locations and decision to launch exclusively in New York at first, Revaluate has a number of other ties to Kansas City like working with Digital Sandbox KC and the Kauffman Foundation’s FastTrac program.

While the team hasn’t figured out the price point for Revaluate yet, Drayer says they’ll be communicating extensively with early users to determine what aspects of the software they value and how much they would likely pay to have access to the database.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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3 responses to “Should you rent that apartment? Revaluate will help you decide”

  1. Parker Hills Avatar

    Congrats on the launch Chris!

  2. Chris Drayer Avatar

    Thanks Parker! We were blown away by all the support. 🙂

  3. […] Silicon Prairie News reviewed the launch from the tech startup renters slant “Signing a lease on a new apartment or purchasing a home can be stressful, especially if you aren’t familiar with the neighborhood or the property’s history.” Techies moving to New York or Omaha* to work on startups – we feel you.  Let us help you  know more before you sign on the dotted line. *You may have to wait a while for that data in Omaha, working on it.  […]