The API for Every US Property
The U.S. property records system is a fragmented nightmare of 3,000+ counties. Here's the API to fix it.
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⚡ The Signal
Venture capital is starting to flow into one of the least sexy, most archaic corners of the U.S. economy: property records. When startups like Dono can raise $6.5M to build modern infrastructure for this space, it’s a clear signal that a massive, foundational industry is finally ready for a digital overhaul. The old guard’s reliance on paper, fax machines, and an aging workforce is no longer tenable.
🚧 The Problem
The U.S. property records system is a mess. It's a fragmented nightmare of over 3,000 counties, each with its own unique format for storing deeds, titles, and liens. There is no central database. Accessing this data requires manual, expensive, and slow processes that directly contribute to the misery of real estate transactions. When Zillow's CEO admits that more than half of homebuyers cry during the process, the glacial pace of title searches is a major culprit. This inefficiency is a tax on the entire market.
🚀 The Solution
Enter Deedry: a simple, developer-first API to instantly access standardized property title and ownership data from any US county. Deedry abstracts away the complexity of county-by-county data retrieval. Using a combination of OCR and AI-powered data extraction, it transforms scanned documents, PDFs, and legacy databases into clean, structured JSON. For developers building the next generation of proptech, lending, or insurance apps, Deedry becomes the Plaid for property data.
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💰 The Business Case
Revenue Model
Deedry will use a three-pronged approach. First, a pay-as-you-go model for low-volume users. Second, tiered monthly subscriptions that offer bulk discounts and access to premium features like webhooks for real-time updates. Finally, enterprise licenses for financial institutions or analytics firms that need bulk data downloads for entire counties.
Go-To-Market
The GTM is developer-centric. We’ll offer a free, embeddable "Title Risk Calculator" widget to drive top-of-funnel awareness. We will build a programmatic SEO moat by creating dedicated API documentation pages for every single U.S. county, capturing long-tail search intent. To win the hearts of builders, we’ll publish an open-source Python library for parsing common public record formats.
⚔️ The Moat
The unfair advantage is data accumulation. While competitors like First American and CoreLogic exist, they are incumbents built on legacy systems. By being API-first and focusing on developer experience, Deedry can move faster. Every API call that digitizes and standardizes a new record enriches our proprietary dataset, making it progressively more valuable and difficult for anyone else to replicate.
⏳ Why Now
The timing is perfect. The market is screaming for a solution to the stress of homebuying, a problem exacerbated by slow, opaque processes. Simultaneously, significant VC funding is validating the need for modern infrastructure in property records, signaling investor belief in the category. This coincides with a broader trend of AI transforming the proptech space, making it feasible for a lean team to tackle data-heavy problems that were previously insurmountable.
🛠️ Builder's Corner
This is a data extraction and delivery problem, making a Python-based stack a strong choice. This is just one way to build it, but here's a recommended MVP:
- API: FastAPI for its speed and automatic documentation.
- Data Extraction: A combination of BeautifulSoup for web scraping county portals and Pytesseract (a Python wrapper for Google's Tesseract-OCR Engine) for pulling text from scanned deeds and PDFs.
- Background Jobs: Celery with Redis or RabbitMQ to manage the time-intensive OCR and data cleaning tasks asynchronously, so the API remains responsive.
- Database: PostgreSQL is a rock-solid choice for storing the structured relational data (property history, ownership, liens) once it's extracted.
Legal Disclaimer: GammaVibe is provided for inspiration only. The ideas and names suggested have not been vetted for viability, legality, or intellectual property infringement (including patents and trademarks). This is not financial or legal advice. Always perform your own due diligence and clearance searches before executing on any concept.
