You may have seen some stories earlier this month about Flipt, yet another new real estate site based here in the Seattle area.
Here’s an excerpt from GeekWire’s May 1 story about the launch of Flipt:
A new Seattle startup wants to fill what it believes is a gap left by real estate sites like Zillow and Trulia.
Flipt launched today to provide home buyers and investors with detailed property information pertaining to potential investment value. The company crunches data from a variety of sources and then scores homes on three categories: Fix & Flip, Buy & Hold, or Rent.
…
Nokhrin told GeekWire that his new company differentiates from fellow real estate sites like Seattle-based Zillow and Trulia because of its complex algorithm that was developed with machine-learning capabilities.
Sounds pretty cool, right? I tried out the site the same day as the GeekWire story, and something odd immediately stuck out to me. When I pulled up my home on Flipt, they were showing a rather recognizable photo—one that I actually shot myself…
There is only one place I’ve uploaded this photo of my home with Seattle Bubble’s pink pony mascot Crystal and associated it with my address: Zillow.
Just a day after launching, all the features on the Flipt website disappeared, and everything redirected to their front page, which had been replaced with a message that said “We will be back shortly.”
This week, after that message changed to just “We will be back,” I decided to dig into the issue with the guys at GeekWire and figure out what happened. John Cook has the write-up of what we found:
Zillow slaps down Flipt, issues cease-and-desist over hijacked real estate data