This new app acts as your personal real estate detective

Ever walk by a building and wonder who owns it or what its story is?

Ash Zandieh did about two years ago. It was right before a blizzard and he was walking to get groceries in Greenpoint. He looked up at a building on the corner of Manhattan Avenue and India Street and saw a nice building with no activity on the bottom floor. It drove him nuts not knowing who the owner was.

“Why is it I can get a pizza or a cab on my phone but I can’t research property?” he asked himself.

And so, as enterprising people do, he started a company to solve that very problem. Falkon, the fruits of that work, launched out of beta today, though even in beta it spread by word of mouth to over 6,000 users in just a handful of months.

“We leverage mobile tech and we leverage GIS and it pulls every single property in your geographic area,” Zandieh explained in an interview. “You can just click on the building you want to research and it pops up. You see who the owner is, their phone number, email and then building vitals, zoning, floor area ratio.”

 Falkon indexes more than 200 publicly available APIs for data, as well as the doing old fashioned work of picking up the phone and asking for information. An algorithm sorts through the data, removing redundancies or dated data.

His first go with startups, Zandieh does not come across as a tech natural. He was enthusiastic about his product, but even he seemed surprised by the success its had without a proper launch.

“We didn’t expect that people would actually,” he trailed off. “We thought friends and family and people in my business network would use this, but to see it grow through word of mouth, it’s humbling and awesome that people like our product and even share our app with their friends and colleagues.”

Falkon has not taken any venture financing and operates out of a WeWork in Manhattan. Just Zandieh and a part-time developer friend of his to begin with, Falkon now has five full-time employees. The next test comes now. Up to now, Falkon has been free. Now he’s going to ask those 6,000 users to pay $54.99 a month for the service. Zandieh thinks it will be worth it for brokers.

“Brokers are a value-add service,” he explained. “Good brokers are not just information but also deal negotiators. Technology doesn’t make you a better broker, what it does is weed out the shitty ones.”