Breezy, the proptech company co-founded by Million Dollar Listing agent James Harris and Afterpay co-founder Nick Molnar, recently launched a consumer version of its zoning-analysis tool, letting homeowners buy a build-potential report on any address covered by the platform.
Underbuilt Radar has lived inside the Breezy app for real estate agents since the company’s 2024 founding. The new standalone consumer product pulls the same data, such as buildable area, setbacks, height limits, slope analysis and a proprietary development-potential score, and packages it into a report homeowners can generate themselves, without an agent involved.
The timing isn’t incidental. With elevated mortgage rates keeping many homeowners in place, Harris said the tool is aimed at a market that’s renovating instead of moving.
Some recent survey data bears this out. More than two in five Americans (43 percent) renovated their home in the last year, and another 33 percent plan to in the next 12 months, according to a survey commissioned by Redfin, the real estate brokerage powered by Rocket.
Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of recent renovators chose to upgrade their current home rather than move.
“Too often, buyers are making decisions without knowing what can actually be built or what’s possible,” Harris said in a statement. “Underbuilt changes that by removing the guesswork and giving homeowners and buyers the inside track on the full potential of any property before they make one of the biggest investments of their lives.”
James Harris
Zoning and setback rules are public record, but Harris said the underlying municipal code is often poorly organized and difficult for a layperson or even a professional to parse quickly.
Breezy said homeowners who skip a feasibility check before hiring an architect can spend $5,000 to $30,000 on plans a city ultimately rejects. Underbuilt Radar is pitched as a way to run that check before paying for design work, not instead of it.
“By launching Underbuilt as a standalone report, we are democratizing access to property data and turning what used to be a weeks-long, confusing and expensive process into a seamless, instant experience that protects a homeowner’s wallet,” Molnar said in a statement.
In an interview at Inman Connect San Diego, Harris traced Underbuilt’s origins to a frustrated architect who built an early version covering six cities in Los Angeles County roughly a decade ago.
Harris said he used those early reports for years to court developers before eventually acquiring the company and folding it into Breezy, then expanding coverage from six U.S. cities to more than 9,000. Underbuilt Radar now covers 23,000+ ZIP codes across 49 states and is expanding daily.
“I used Underbuilt for years, and in the Los Angeles market, Underbuilt is gospel. Every big agent knows Underbuilt,” Harris told Inman. “So when I co-founded Breezy, I developed a really great relationship with the founder of Underbuilt, and long story short, I said to him, ‘I want to acquire your company.’ He became my product lead for Underbuilt within Breezy.”
Harris said that when Breezy acquired Underbuilt, the company already had 4,000 customers, split between roughly 3,000 agents and 1,000 architects, developers, appraisers and underwriters.
“So we already knew the product worked in Los Angeles County, and now it’s just a question of scaling it out further and wider,” Harris said.
Harris told Inman that Breezy is in “advanced conversations” with lending platforms, homebuying platforms and appraisal companies about licensing the underlying data directly, including API integrations that would let third parties white-label the reports into their own underwriting or due-diligence packages.
“Imagine [Underbuilt data] on a bank’s website as part of their underwriting to slip into their underwriting package,” Harris said. “Or imagine a direct API integration where we just provide the data directly to these companies. They can pull the data, get what they want, white-label it and slip it right into their presentation.”
For real estate agents on Breezy, the consumer launch doesn’t eliminate their edge. Harris said agents can still generate reports for clients at no extra cost as a Breezy perk, rather than sending clients to pay $89 on their own.
In 2023, roughly 26 million U.S. homeowners (29.7 percent of owners) undertook at least one home improvement or remodeling project, according to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. The U.S. home remodeling market surged past $600 billion during the pandemic and has stayed there, still running 50 percent above pre-pandemic levels.
Harris said there are also architects, general contractors, structural engineers, and civil engineers “who would definitely want this data,” or appraisers who would want this information and would go directly to Underbuilt.com.
“And then there are the larger banks, appraisal companies doing thousands of loans, or iBuyers, that will simply need this data to go into their packet of due diligence,” Harris said in between sips of coffee in the lobby of the Marriott Marquis San Diego Marina. “And this will just become the normal for what they include in their due diligence package.”
