Announcement: KoalaData becomes Homer

15/10/2023

TL;DR: Thank you for the support. I’m delighted to announce that KoalaData has now teamed up with Homer. Homer’s vision is aligned with KoalaData’s mission to bring transparency to the real estate market to assist Australians in purchasing or renting a home. The app will stay free. More resources means being able to take the app to a whole new level and build all the cool features I wanted to but never had the time to.

It has been almost 4y since KoalaData's inception. It started out of frustration with the state of the current real estate market and the lack of available information to make such an important decision.

The first version was extremely basic: it would simply tell you how long a property had been on the market by inferring the date from the upload date of the pictures on a listing.

~1600 hours of work later, the app has more than 12,500 installations and 5,500 weekly active users. Thank you to all of you, from the first users on Whirlpool, to the messages and feedback from Reddit /r/AusFinance and all the emails and donations..

The app is a pure passion project and I have felt strongly that it should be free from day 1. In the end, I ended up spending about ~$13,000 of my own money (mostly server costs to take daily snapshots of the real estate market), on top of my free time to support the app. Your support and words of encouragement meant a lot to keep going.

4y ago, most of the products were focused on sellers and agents, as this is where most of the money is. Earlier this year, I started to notice a shift in general interest from companies and competitors to serve the demand side of the marketplace (buyers), to the point where I have been approached by 3 different companies. With a demanding day job, ongoing maintenance costs and my reluctance to monetize the app, it started to make sense to entertain the idea that another company would do a better job than myself to help solve this problem.

We have been chatting since March 2023 with the Homer team, and over time, the fit started to become obvious. The team is experienced in the real estate industry and they have the means to hire a team to work on it full-time. The rebranding will commence soon as well as a number of changes.

In addition to this you will begin to see more analysis of agents performance, property information and Homers very own valuation.

I will continue to stay working with the Homer team to provide you with the best in class service in the real estate industry.

Once again, thank you for the support and good luck in your real estate journey. I hope that KoalaData will continue to serve you well in its future iterations.