Our Story

Heidi Laros is the CEO and Founder of Cribbed.

Heidi started her career in marketing research, where she spent 15 years in the corporate world supporting well-known clients and brands in the packaged goods, financial and luxury markets. With a growing family in her midst, she moved away from global meetings (all in person back then) to the also-demanding world of real estate. Heidi parlayed her strong analytics and marketing background into the launch of a successful real estate career selling homes in Connecticut, Chicago and Wisconsin. With a consumer-focused background, home renovation and design experience, and a strong work ethic, she quickly became one of the top real estate agents in the country – catapulting to the top 10% her first year. A family move took her to Chicago’s beautiful North Shore where she tested her strengths yet again in a new market where she knew no one. Competing against locally-raised agents with an extensive network of family and friends, Heidi proved her value quickly once again, landing herself among the top 10 producing agents, among the hundreds who sold in her community.

Heidi loved helping families like her own find comfortable places to raise their children in a community she loved. She introduced new buyers to her town and helped them settle into the community. What she found the most rewarding, however, was coming up with creative strategies to help those with challenging properties or who were in difficult situations. Unlike many top agents, Heidi felt everyone deserved and needed a good agent, and that she should help them navigate their situations.

Heidi was well-known and respected for her work ethic, her out-of-the-box thinking, and her fierce loyalty to her client’s needs. She drew from past experiences to get in front of situations, preparing buyers and sellers, and standing by their side until the job was done.

Heidi was grateful for this career that allowed flexibility to attend her children’s important events, while at the same time earning a healthy income. But it settled in that her sellers were losing so much of their single largest investment to the process. All those years of hard work to pay down their mortgage, just to give it away for what was sometimes only a few hours of work.

At that moment she decided to pivot. With the advancement of technology, buyers and sellers were doing more and more of the work themselves, quite easily in fact. Buyers were finding their own homes, but had no way to connect with sellers directly. And sellers were their best advocates, but there was no professional platform to showcase their home. Heidi knew that solving this equation allowed for both sides to get out of that stronghold. By providing an experience for both the buyer and seller that emulated the current landscape, but without hurdles and middlemen, the process would have a very comfortable feeling, but ultimately better than today’s options.

So she began. Heidi started by designing high-level marketing materials; assembled a library of general advice; put together a carefully curated box of in-home marketing materials; and embarked on a journey to create a platform that far exceeded even her own discriminating and discerning expectations.

Heidi enlisted several trusted and respected colleagues to join her endeavor. They quickly realized not only what an amazing opportunity it was, but that even as good as they are they would be out of work when Cribbed hit the marketplace.

Now sellers everywhere can enjoy the freedom to sell while keeping their hard-earned equity. It’s a life-changing amount of money that should go toward YOUR treasured memories, not your real estate agent’s – a wedding, college, a new car, years of vacations. Or maybe it’s a down payment on a new home. Isn’t it worth it for doing essentially what you were already doing with an agent, and now it’s a whole lot easier? What will you do with your savings? Share your story here.