From solar to finance, insurance to e-commerce, companies across sectors are waking up to the value of property data.
But for decades, that data has been difficult to access—fragmented, expensive, and controlled by a handful of legacy providers. RealEstateAPI is working to change that.
Founded by Vince Harris and Justin Winthers, RealEstateAPI began as a tool for real estate investors and has evolved into a full-scale data infrastructure platform powering applications far beyond the real estate industry. Harris is CEO and leads business development, while Winthers, the company’s CTO, drives technical architecture and platform development.
Harris entered real estate full-time only to discover that the tools for sourcing and underwriting deals were outdated and inefficient.
“The software was clunky—built by industry veterans who didn’t speak software,” Harris says. “We started solving our own problems.”
The team’s first product was a national disposition platform that helped investors close deals faster. It was eventually white-labeled by a major investor and scaled to hundreds of transactions a month. But they didn’t stop there. Harris and his team moved upstream—into the acquisitions and marketing layer—where access to real-time property data can make or break a deal.
One of their early breakthroughs was a tool that surfaced live property data the moment a prospect called—what Harris describes as “caller ID on steroids.” It gave acquisition teams instant intelligence and sharply improved conversion rates.
“That forced us to build serious infrastructure—data pipelines, licensing systems, real-time delivery. Once we had that, we realized something bigger: we were rebuilding what every other team needed, too.”
That realization led to what Harris calls their “AWS moment.” “Just like Amazon saved developers from rebuilding infrastructure by offering it as a service, we saw a chance to do the same with property data.”
That insight laid the foundation for RealEstateAPI: a developer-first platform that removes the need for restrictive licenses, messy flat files, or dedicated data engineers.
The company now offers a plug-and-play suite of APIs that give product teams instant access to clean, scalable, and reliable property information.
And its use extends far beyond real estate.
Today, RealEstateAPI powers software and operations across fintech, insurtech, solar, logistics, and AI. Lenders use it to verify ownership and assess property-level risk. Insurance carriers pull structural data to underwrite more accurately. Solar providers evaluate roof size, zoning, and parcel boundaries to qualify leads. E-commerce companies integrate the API to auto-fill property data at checkout, reducing friction and abandoned forms.
“Property data isn’t just for real estate anymore,” says Harris. “If your business touches an address—whether you’re lending, insuring, installing, or marketing—you should be enriching that address with intelligence.”
RealEstateAPI delivers structured access to over 157 million U.S. properties, including building footprints, parcel boundaries, ownership records, comps history, and verified contact data. Developers can access this information through real-time APIs or structured exports that support qualified internal use cases, enabling everything from lead scoring to risk modeling and market analysis.
The platform offers sub-second response times and 99.9% uptime, with flexible endpoints designed for both real-time applications and large-scale workflows. Clients range from fast-growing SaaS startups to internal teams at investment firms and home services companies building proprietary analytics tools.
But RealEstateAPI isn’t just solving technical problems—it’s challenging the entrenched systems that control access to property data. “There are 3.5 companies that control the majority of U.S. property data,” Harris explains. “The fourth came out of a legal judgment that forced the others to create competition for themselves.”
These firms, he says, are part of a data cartel—collecting property data through their title insurance and mortgage businesses, selling it to each other, and reselling it to the market at high prices. “Bulk licenses often start at $250,000 a year. There’s no incentive to make it cheaper or easier to access. That’s classic cartel behavior.”
By contrast, RealEstateAPI offers transparent pricing, a self-service developer portal, and onboarding support for teams without in-house data engineers. It’s a model designed to remove barriers, not reinforce them.
The company is also seeing creative and unexpected use cases. One client uses RealEstateAPI to train large language models for generating property-specific content. Others use it to streamline onboarding workflows, automate internal dashboards, or validate data at scale without manual entry.
Looking ahead, Harris believes artificial intelligence will drive the next evolution of the industry.
“We’re building RealEstateAPI for a future where you don’t need to know how to code to work with data,” he says. “AI tools can already interact with APIs like ours. Soon, anyone—from a marketer to a loan officer—will be able to ask questions in plain English and get back real property intelligence.”
The company is also keeping a close eye on Web3 and the emerging market for tokenized real-world assets. While that space hasn’t moved as quickly as expected, Harris sees clear potential.
“You can’t fractionalize a property or tie it to a smart contract if you haven’t defined it with clean, verifiable data. That’s where we come in.”
Still, the company’s mission remains focused on usability and accessibility. Whether clients are building consumer-facing platforms or internal analytics tools, RealEstateAPI is positioning itself as the infrastructure layer behind it all.
“Our job is to make property data usable by both people and the AI tools they rely on,” Harris says. “We aim to be the invisible engine behind smarter decisions—made by humans, AI, or both.”
