Balcony raised $14 million to build a connected digital infrastructure for U.S. real estate land records, starting with 370,000 real estate parcels in Bergen County, New Jersey.
More than 3,000 county offices maintain land records that support trillions of dollars of U.S. real estate. In most cases, these records do not interact with each other.
New York-area proptech startup Balcony wants to change that, and it just raised $14 million to do so. In May, the company announced a $12.7 million seed round led by Blockchange Ventures, bringing its total funding to $14 million.
The funding will be used to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams and drive its platform deeper into county and state governments across the country.
County land records are the legal foundation for every real estate transaction in the country, but they have traditionally been siled, paper-heavy, and difficult to access.
Balcony works directly with county clerk’s offices to digitize and structure these records, layering them with tools for use by title insurance companies, mortgage lenders and capital markets, and also offers mTrace, a threat detection product aimed at helping governments identify fraud and monitor foreign ownership.
The company says government agencies currently manage more than $400 billion in asset value on its platform.
370,000 New Jersey real estate lots
The most concrete proof of concept so far is a five-year agreement signed last year with the Bergen County Clerk’s Office in New Jersey to digitize 370,000 real estate parcels with a real estate value of about $240 billion.
This is the kind of partnership that is often underestimated by outsiders. The county clerk’s office isn’t exactly known for being a rapid adopter of technology, but that’s exactly what makes this partnership noteworthy.
“It is critical for counties like ours to modernize how land records are organized and accessed,” Bergen County Clerk John Hogan said in a statement. “Balcony’s platform works in conjunction with the systems we already use, helping us organize decades of records in a way that increases transparency and makes information more accessible to both our offices and the public.”
Beyond Bergen County, Balcony has signed contracts in New Jersey in Camden, Orange, Morristown, Cliffside Park, and Fort Lee. In Orange, a review of records revealed nearly $1 million in city revenue the city didn’t know it was missing.
National security perspective
What’s most interesting about Balcony’s framing is the argument as to why this has to happen now.
Ken Seiff, managing partner and lead investor at Blockchange Ventures, said he directly links the infrastructure gap to national security, particularly the difficulty of monitoring foreign ownership of U.S. land under the current fragmented system.
That’s a political debate at this point. In recent years, several states have passed or introduced restrictions on foreign land ownership, and Congress has taken up the issue at the federal level. Fragmented county-level records make it difficult to consistently enforce these restrictions.
“Real estate ownership is a pillar of our economy, and in today’s world it is also a national security issue,” Seif said. “Efforts to build these digital rails are essential because our fragmented, 100-year-old systems are fragile.”
Blockchange made a similar infrastructure layer bet with fintech company Figure Technologies. Seif says the balconies fit into the same strategy of rebuilding foundation rails that incumbents couldn’t or wouldn’t rebuild.
What ownership and financing mean?
The potential downstream value is real for title insurance companies and mortgage lenders. Cleaner, faster access to verified parcel data reduces the time and manual effort required for title searches and underwriting.
For years, the industry has attempted to partially solve this problem by licensing third-party data aggregators who scrape county records of varying quality.
Balcony’s model of going direct to the source — contracting with county employees rather than raking in county employees — is a different approach.
Gregg Lester, co-CEO and president of Balcony, was careful to view the product as additive rather than disruptive.
“Rather than replacing their critical systems, we are building digital rails alongside them so that these foundational records can drive more transparent and secure markets into the next century,” Lester said.
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