Roxana Baiceanu 
Ten years after PropertyShark.com was launched, we’re very happy to announce that we’ve passed the 1-million registered members milestone, just in time for our anniversary. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our users for helping us grow through giving us their business, passing on recommendations, or simply for browsing our site.
Because we want to give something back, we have some great prizes for you in our Facebook contest, so make sure you check it out. Also, since we’re looking back at what we’ve done in these past 10 years, we’d like to take you on this journey, so we’ve prepared a graphic to mark the occasion (click on the image below to enlarge it).
How we got to 1 million registered users
Although back in 2003 the beginnings were modest (like most start-ups), founder Matthew Haines has quite a story to tell, as turning a real estate business into a success during the difficult years of the financial crisis is no small feat.
Having experienced firsthand how tough it was for a real estate investor to find reliable data on properties in NYC, Haines quickly turned his frustration into something more proactive. The online real estate data aggregator he and a handful of people created was meant to help other real estate professionals minimize research time by offering vital property information in a single place.
The first data packages, initially available only for the NYC real estate marketplace, included property reports, foreclosure listings, and real estate maps. Soon after, the comparables tool was added, and coverage expanded to Florida, California, and Pennsylvania.
The focus has always been on innovation and on providing users with comprehensive products and services they can rely on and which address the market’s constantly changing needs.
By the time the company reached half a million registered users, it had become trusted by well-known real estate companies such as Corcoran, Elliman, and Town Residential, was named by Time.com one of the 50 best websites –alongside giants such as Google, Facebook and Wikipedia—and was offering one of the most complete product suites on the NYC market. Street-level photographs and an important lead generating tool were also added.
In 2010 real estate software company Yardi Systems acquired PropertyShark. Gordon Morrell, Yardi Systems’ executive vice president and COO, commented on the value of the acquisition: “PropertyShark’s aggregation of real estate data from hundreds of sources into a single property research website has changed the way real estate investors, professionals, and consumers educate themselves and make decisions about property in hubs like New York and Los Angeles.” The ownership tool was added the same year.
PropertyShark now provides data to more than 1 million real estate brokers, investors, and other professionals in 46 states. It currently partners more than 300 companies, and the number of corporate clients is constantly increasing, Wells Fargo being one of the latest to join. The constant growth in terms of traffic, as PropertyShark now registers more than 1 million visits per month, is yet another sign for the general upward trend.
