Know a building before you sign, buy or invest
Motomo started as a verified marketplace for furnished, month to month rentals. Prototyping and testing pushed it toward something simpler and wider: a lookup that shows what public records say about any building in New York City. Type an address and get one plain-language page on who owns it, open violations, complaints, fines, liens, taxes, rent stabilization, flood risk and more. The early access alpha is now live at usemotomo.com.
Release one
One page per building, built only from public records
New York City publishes a huge amount about every building, spread across agencies that each have their own site, search and vocabulary. Motomo pulls those records into one page and explains them in plain language.
In the alpha, every address gets a free report pulled from public records, with a count for every section, open items included, and each record listed item by item. The data is free on purpose. I want to learn how people use it before deciding what to charge for.
Who it's for
Anyone with a stake in a building
The marketplace served renters and landlords. Building records are useful to far more people, so release one is designed for the widest audience the data supports.
Renters
Check repairs, heat complaints, hazards and rent stabilization before signing a lease or paying a deposit.
Buyers and investors
See sales history, liens, foreclosure filings, taxes and open violations before making an offer.
Agents and brokers
Answer client questions with the city's own records and send one clean report.
Owners
See what the city has on file for their buildings today. Next, owners will be able to add their own maintenance and upgrade history and get notified when anything about their property changes.
What's covered
If it's a public record about the building, it's on the page
Records are grouped the way most people read them, starting with the building itself and ending with the area around it.
The building
- Building facts
- Owner
- Owner's other buildings
- Managing agent
Condition and safety
- Violations
- Complaints
- Stop-work orders
- Hazards
- Inspections
- 311
Money and legal
- Fines
- Sales
- Liens
- Foreclosure filings
- Taxes
- Rent stabilization
Rules and environment
- Flood risk
- Energy limits
- Zoning
- Landmarks
- Short-term rental records
The area
- Transit
- Parks
- School zones
- Reported crime
Load order
What matters to the most people shows up first
The product strategy comes down to what gets shown, in what order, as the page loads. Records are fetched only when someone searches, so storage grows with the number of users rather than the size of the city, and the approach can scale to other cities later.
- The buildingBuilding facts, the owner and the owner's other buildings, in about a second.
- Condition and safetyViolations, complaints, stop-work orders, hazards, inspections and 311.
- Money and legalFines, sales, liens, foreclosure filings, taxes and rent stabilization.
- Rules and environmentFlood risk, energy limits, zoning, landmarks and short-term rental records.
- The areaTransit, parks, school zones and reported crime, last and in its own section.
Each section loads on its own. If a city service is slow, that section says it's still coming in and offers to email when it's ready, and the rest of the page keeps working.
Records, not ratings
The free view never makes a building look cleaner than it is
A free summary that hides problems behind a paywall would mislead the people who need it most, so honesty rules are part of the design rather than copy added later.
- Every count is visible. Each section shows its total, including what's still open, even when the details are part of the full report.
- Every section names its source agency, and every page says city records can run a few weeks behind.
- Area data is shown with care. Official counts by type, for a set distance and time, with no safety labels, no comparisons between neighborhoods and no shaded maps.
- Fair housing first. No demographics, and housing court data covers only cases about the building, never cases against renters.
The pivot
From a verified marketplace to a building lookup
Motomo began from my own hosting. I've been an Airbnb Superhost for more than 12 years. Today that's a small, part-time rental business that runs mostly on automation and a solid support team, and over the years I kept seeing the same problems: landlords distrust month to month renters, renters pay to apply again and again, and listing sites verify no one. I designed and tested a four-sided marketplace around a verified renter report and verified listings.
Where it started
A verified rental marketplace
- Two sides at onceRenters and landlords both had to arrive before either got value.
- Manual verificationIdentity, income and rental history checks I would run by hand until AI screening could be funded.
- Two marketsNew York City and Philadelphia, each with its own screening law.
Where it is now
A building records lookup
- Useful to one person on day oneAnyone with an address gets value without a marketplace to fill.
- Public records onlyNo personal data to verify, and records fetched on demand.
- One market firstNew York City, where the records are deepest.
The seed was already in the marketplace. To stop rental scams, every listing was checked against public records, matching owners to the deed. Those records turned out to be valuable on their own, to far more people than renters.
The marketplace was also much harder to get out the door. It needed both sides, plus manual verification, before anyone got value. A property data platform is simpler to launch and has a much wider use case. It can also become the shell that other services plug into later, including the verified rental listings and the verified rental report from the marketplace work. Release one makes the data the product.
The marketplace work carried straight over: the fair housing rules and the honest presentation of what's checked and what isn't.
How it's built
Design, product and technical strategy, run by one person
Motomo is built the lean UX way. Instead of polishing static mockups, I build prototypes that behave like the real product. Renters, owners and brokers try them through Userbrain and live sessions, and what they do decides the next change. Findings go straight into the PRD and backlog.
The workflow
- Design in Claude DesignEvery screen starts on a Claude design canvas. I critique the UI through comments on the parts that aren't working and compare alternates side by side until the design holds up.
- Lock down components in the style guideAs components settle, they get written into the style guide, a Markdown file that grows with the product. Anything locked down there is reused, not redesigned.
- Push to stagingOnce a design is in a good place, the code goes to a staging environment where I test and review it on real data.
- Merge to productionOnly reviewed work gets merged and goes live at usemotomo.com.
The stack
Netlify
Hosting and serverless functions, with a staging environment for review before anything reaches production.
GitHub
Version control for the code, so every change can be reviewed, merged or rolled back.
Supabase
The database that stores the buildings people have searched.
Resend
Email, for things like letting someone know when a slow city source has finished loading.
Motomo doesn't copy every record in New York City. It pulls from public NYC data sources when someone looks up an address, and only saves information for buildings that have already been searched. Storage and cost grow with real use rather than the size of the city, which keeps an early product cheap to run and makes it practical to add other cities later.
Claude is connected to my tool stack through MCP. Mobbin for patterns from real apps, Userbrain for recorded user tests, and Figma when a design needs it. The PRD, backlog and style guide each live as a single Markdown file, so the whole product stays readable by people and AI alike.
Motomo's early access alpha is live at usemotomo.com
What's next
Free public data first, then the layers owners add
The early access alpha is live at usemotomo.com. Right now I'm gathering feedback on one question: how useful is the experience of public data, pulled together and given away for free? That answer comes before monetization, so pricing is built on what people actually value.
Once the free experience holds up, the next layers build on it.
- Maintenance and upgrades. Property owners add the work done to their property that never shows up in public records, like a new roof, boiler or renovation, backed by photos or invoices.
- Change alerts. Owners get notified when information related to their property changes, such as a new violation, complaint, lien or filing.