PropertyShark Founder Matthew Haines Recalls the Origins of PropertyShark

By Matthew Haines
December 12, 2008

"I am happy to be back as a member of the Harlem Home Yahoo Group. I sold my brownstone on West 123rd Street in 2007, but I still have my co-op apartment unit on 131st, where I live when I'm in New York.

Currently I spend about 45% of my time in Romania, where I run PropertyShark. We do programming, system administration, cartography, marketing analytics, and customer service from Romania, where we have 35 employees. I'm headed back to New York and Harlem on Sunday to work on the year end issue of the Corcoran Report.

PropertyShark got its start in Harlem. In the late 1990s and up to 2001, most of the brownstones on my block of West 123rd (between 7th and 8th) were vacant, abandoned, lived in by squatters, empty lots, or some combination thereof. I had done pretty well buying and renovating my own brownstone and was looking to buy another.

It was hard work. Brokers would send you a description (a "setup") for a 20"x50" brownstone with a 3 family C-of-O, and with a little digging you'd find out it was an 18x45 SRO and that the "caretaker" on the parlor floor was actually a resident they hadn't been able to get rid of.

Then you would find out that the conversion to SRO had not been done with permits, and that the HPD was issuing violations left and right that would probably prevent you from ever getting the Certificate of No Harrassment.

So in December 2002 I wrote a little computer program to aggregate data from a variety of New York City agencies. I had always wanted to learn a little about programming the web, so I wrote it as a web site instead of creating a Windows-based user interface.

I let a few friend use it, and they let other friends use it, and pretty soon I was spending all of my time adding features, fixing bugs, and trying to keep the site from crashing. At that point the site was running on a $9.95/month shared hosting account at Aplus.net (a company that stopped charging my credit card only after the repeated intervention of American Express).

It was probably only in March or April 2003 that I added the ability to create an account on PropertyShark.

In order, the first six members were:
1) Charlie Marcus (who still lists his profession as "slumlord to the stars")
2) Michael Fordham
3) Matthew Haines (me!!!)
4) Mike Vinocur
5) Tony Oakley
6) Vladimir Akilov

Charlie Marcus had the idea to add foreclosures to the site, and we did that together until around July 2003, when I bought him out. Michael Fordham became immortal when his building, 104 West 113th Street, became the example property underneath the address lookup boxes."

Matthew Haines
Founder of PropertyShark
www.propertyshark.com