As of Oct. 1, 5744 homes valued at $4.7 billion were waiting on the list, positioned for their market moment.
Unlisted is beginning to emerge in a national way. The company is preparing to join TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, an event for promising startups slated for late October in San Francisco.
Unlisted has been added to TechCrunch’s 2025 Startup Battlefield 200, a competitive showcase for early-stage companies on the move.
The top 20 winners get to make a six-minute “elevator pitch” on a main stage and a shot of $100,000; everybody, though, gets a two-minute pitch on a side stage, to an audience that will no doubt have plenty of prospective investors and tech C-level executives.
“That feels like another one of those giant leaps forward,” Hill said in a new interview.
It’s the latest chapter for Hill, known by many in the Dayton business community for her work with Commuter Advertising (which moved from Chicago to Dayton in 2008), the Entrepreneurs Center and the University of Dayton.
“This idea (for Unlisted) was born four blocks that way,” Hill said, pointing roughly to the south from where she sat in the sunroom of an unlisted home on Beverly Place in Oakwood.
An Oakwood neighbor’s house caught her eye as a great place for her and her two daughters about three years ago. Hill recalled approaching her neighbor.
“Just so you know, if you ever want to sell your house, I’m interested in buying it,” she said.
The neighbor wasn’t offended. Hill approached him at a time when he and his wife were exploring options.
That was Hill’s lightbulb moment for her new company.
“The big vision is that ultimately Unlisted becomes a data asset that sits next to the physical asset,” Hill said.
Her site’s data is public, with home information populated from county recorders’ and assessors’ offices across the nation — 121 million properties, more than enough to dizzy any prospective homebuyer.
The site has some 240,000 new users, about 220,000 of those in the past 90 days, Hill said.
Think of Unlisted as a Zillow for every home, not just homes on the market. What makes Unlisted different is that owners can take control of their property profile, updating photos, rewriting descriptions, adding information and editing “to their heart’s content,” as Hill put it.
If an owner insists he or she is in their “forever home” and will never list, the site’s algorithm will push the property down, making it less likely to pop up in a search.
Since its inception, Unlisted has won pitch competitions at the University of Dayton and the University of Chicago, attracted investor support from HearstLab, a venture capital firm owned by Hearst, which publishes Good Housekeeping. In fact, HearstLab is her biggest investor.
Oakwood resident Lisa Weser called the idea behind Unlisted “brilliant.”
Searches are customizable, allowing the curious to look for homes within a certain distance of a school, for example, or with a certain number of bedrooms and other characteristics.
“As a homeowner, I love the model of being able to influence how my home is presented online,” said Weser, whose Beverly Place home is currently unlisted. “To be able to reflect all of the updates I’ve made, because this is my biggest investment.”
Scott Koorndyk, president of the Entrepreneurs Center, said he invested in Commuter Advertising in 2010 with the Dayton Region Signature Fund, the second deal he executed when he was with the Dayton Development Coalition, where he served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at the time.
If you were to design a solid entrepreneur, you would design Katie Hill or someone like her, he said.
“There’s no obstacle that Katie will not take on or take down or push through,” Koorndyk said.
“She’s a credit to the Dayton region,” he added. “She’s someone to watch.”
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