2024 Year in Review: Stable Climb
As always, with the year coming to an end and the New Year about to begin, I’ve taken a few days to reflect upon another trip around the sun with Inspectify. Keeping with tradition, I've stuck with an airplane theme and begun by rereading my review last year and, more importantly, reviewing my initial expectations for the year. By and large, the year progressed much as I anticipated, with a few exceptions, both good and bad.
Looking back over the past 12 months, I'm so proud of what our team has accomplished for both our customers and inspector partners. Year over year, we have more than doubled the number of inspections completed, grown gross profit by more than 70%, and further enhanced our technology platform with more automations and features. While the macro environment is still challenging, we've stabilized the business to position ourselves for a significantly stronger 2025.
Stable yet challenging real estate market
In January, I predicted a year with both tailwinds and headwinds facing the industries we served. This became a heavily repeatable trend for our business over the last 12 months. In some instances, we saw continued headwinds, such as in institutional investing, where higher interest rates and political uncertainty caused further contraction over the first three quarters of the year. It has also continued to be a challenging market for our Proptech customers, who rely on venture capital (VC) to operate while they obtain economies of scale. Unfortunately, the fundraising environment continues to be difficult, and we've seen an increasing amount of consolidation and, in some cases, bankruptcy for a few of our customers in that segment. In fact, VC-backed companies going out of business are expected to surge nearly 50-60% in 2024, meaning an estimated 6,000 to 7,000 companies will go out of business this year.
That being said, while we did see continued headwinds, our investments over the last two years created more tailwinds for our business, and we were able to show consistent, stable growth throughout the year. A great example of this is our construction lending and property management segment, which has grown over 3X year over year. In fact, we expect this to grow even more in 2025 as our brand becomes stronger in each of those segments. We've also seen the uncertainty of the presidential election dissipate in the latter half of the fourth quarter and are on track to have our best month ever in December, a month that is typically much slower given seasonal cyclicality.
Most importantly, over the past three years we have been able to course correct the business and get us back on track towards rapid growth. Over the year, we saw more predictability in our business.
Looking Towards 2025
While the broader macro market still contains uncertainty, there is a lot to be excited about in 2025 for our business. With the recent federal rate cuts and the end of history's longest inverted yield curve, there is improved optimism that the borrowing environment will be much more stable than in years past. This bodes well for our consumer and investor segments, and we expect much more growth in 2025 as a result. Additionally, with our most recent investment from Munich Re Ventures, we forecast a much more rapid expansion of our insurance segment and, specifically, adoption of our homeowner-led Self Inspect offering. Finally, we will see an enhanced focus on medium to large enterprise accounts and expect a higher mix of customers with more than $1M in annual contract value than ever before.
Having written this year in review on business outlook for four years now, I've never been more excited about the New Year than I am this year. I'm humbled by the opportunities in front of us and look forward to writing next year's review with a rocket ship theme.
:)