PROPERTY DETECTIVE

Property Detective was founded in 2011 as the result of a home purchase that went badly wrong.In May 2010, Property Detective’s founder, Barry Bridges, finally got onto the property ladder and moved into a family home with his (then) fiancée. Over the course of the next year, however, he learnt the hard way that in spite of the surveys, searches, checks and questions asked, sometimes not everything is what it seemed.In October 2011 he teamed up with Jack Waley-Cohen and a well-respected devel... oper to build a prototype tool that helped homeowners find out whether their new home would be within range of church bells; together, they took the very first version of Property Detective to Seedcamp, where they were a London finalist in 2012 and invited back to the investment committee (but didn’t get investment).In April 2012 they secured a significant tranche of angel investment and set about building the first ‘proper’ version of Property Detective, which launched on the day of the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympic games. This was swiftly followed by more investment and a major re-launch in March 2013 with the site that you can see today.Over the past 3 and a bit years the site has grown and grown and grown…alongside the team of dedicated, innovative and entrepreneurial developers, statisticians, project managers and economists around it. We are very confident in calling ourselves the market leader in consumer property research and are very pleased that our reports have been recognised by COPSO as being of such a high standard that they qualify for PCCB accreditation (which is something usually reserved for the ‘official’ searches that a solicitor does during the conveyancing process).Slowly, but surely, Property Detective is changing the way that people move home. We’re helping people make more informed, smarter decisions about where they want to live, by giving them the complete picture – warts and all – as to what a property, street or neighbourhood can offer them and their lifestyle, from schools, crime rates, demographics, flightpaths, noise and smell nuisances, retail and leisure opportunities, broadband speeds and much more. No rose-tinted lenses: just the whole truth, in one report, at the click of a button.