About

Zonability instantly answers a question constantly asked every day by real estate investors and home buyers: "At first glance, does this property have potential?"

Founded by Leigh Budlong, Zonability is a revolutionary and sophisticated real estate web app, which does something that’s never been done before. It combines spatial data, property data sets, and hand-curated local municipal codes like zoning, environmental, and building. The resulting report is a robust snapshot of what the potential of a given piece of property could be, and it is packaged as the first step of what could be many more.

With a Zonability property intelligence report, one can clearly see if — based on a variety of data sets and modeling — a property looks like it’s built out or if there is room to expand. It also includes a list of possible uses for the property meant to work for that location.

Zonability represents a new breed of public-private partnership that leverages technology to enhance city services, save money, and create economic opportunity. Its patent pending technology is designed to make local development related ordinance information accessible and useful across the country.

Finding out a property’s potential is just a click away with Zonability.

Our Mission

To create innovative ways to communicate property potential.

Our Vision

To create a platform that supports instant access to streamlined information spanning multiple cities.
To elevate awareness of Zonability as a trusted “first step” when evaluating a property for purchase or remodel.
To bridge gaps in knowledge through design and information about how the built environment actually gets built using analytics and visuals.

Why Austin?

Making Austin, Texas our flagship is simply a stroke of luck. In 2011, our advisor, who also taught part-time at UT, posted a “help wanted” ad on our behalf. At the time, the company was based in Sausalito, California. The response was tremendous. The talent jumped off the submitted resumes, and that began our interest in Austin. What initially started as a trial to test our methodology for data collection has completely changed the company’s path to success. We now live and work here in Austin, our co-founder is one of the UT grads who applied that fateful day. The city continues to attract talent and develops, which works very well for our product.

Our Coverage

Our current coverage is Austin, Texas, and Round Rock, Texas.

Things We’ve Learned

Remodeling property is very different today than in the past due to increasing emphasis on sustainability and preservation.
People don’t like to read complicated legalese documents. As a result, they often miss out on knowing something special about their own property, block, or even neighborhood.
We can provide more value to customers thanks to government agencies making public data available. It still requires work to structure the data, test and combine it.

About our Founder

Leigh Budlong is the president and founder of Zonability. Before becoming a software developer, Leigh worked in real estate for 18 years as an appraiser, broker and remodeler. Her real estate appraisal work included valuing institutional investment properties, such as historic landmarks like the ‘21 Club’ in New York City. As Budlong built her career in commercial real estate appraisal, she found municipal zoning to be frequently confusing and arcane. She wondered, why can’t accessible data be used to gauge a property’s investment potential? She soon became determined to harness the power of open data and the Web to make zoning faster to research and easier to understand for real estate buyers, developers and average citizens. Her vision became Zonability. Today, Zonability is based in Austin, Texas. Leigh Budlong is a graduate of The University of Southern California. She and her husband, Andrew, are business partners and live in Austin.

The White House recognized Budlong’s work on Zonability in 2011 for its useful and creative use of open data, now being made more widely available by all levels of government. At the ceremony for the 17 recipients of the prestigious “technology award,” Leigh was one of three speakers selected to address the audience.

Leigh has been recognized with the following accolades:

Champion of Change, Tech Award from The White House 2011
Apps for California, Award 2010
Certified Commercial Investment Member (CCIM) 2000 to 2010
Member Appraisal Institute (MAI) 1996-2006
Notable appraisal assignments: “21 Club” in NYC, Jack London Square in Oakland, LA Garment live/work conversions

About our Co-Founder

Andrew Joseph is a UT Austin graduate who excelled in spatial geographical information systems (GIS) data. He also has a penchant for architecture and community service. Andrew is developing inspiring new techniques to work with the complexities inherent in the data as well as database modeling and coding. Zonability is a showcase of his talents.

Who Uses Zonability?

Our audience is a mix of novices and pros. Zonability is designed for anyone curious to know more, including:

Property-hunters
Property owners
Real estate agents
Aspiring remodelers
Small-scale developers
Land-use and community enthusiasts
Service providers that cater to homeowners and/or buyers

How we help local government

Zonability represents a new breed of public-private partnership that leverages technology to enhance city services, save money, and create economic opportunity.

Hundreds of people contact Austin’s community development department every month in search of answers to questions. From our years of research in cities throughout the US, we see something consistently appear: the vast majority, 75% or more, are for residential-based questions. The result is a highly-strained department whose role generally covers 4 areas: administrative, current planning, long-range planning and environmental analysis.

We envision Zonability being able to break the bottleneck.