Everyone from developers to government workers to homeowners tends to agree that the systems used for paying property taxes or completing the transfer of property titles make for a painful process. It’s outdated, cumbersome — oh, and vulnerable to hacker theft, too.
Balcony Technology Group – one of the first graduates of the NJ FAST program at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken — feels it has a product that can change that.
Dan Silverman, CEO and co-founder of the Hoboken-based firm, said his startup has a blockchain-based system of managing land record data that’s more efficient than the same software platforms that local governments have relied on the past several decades.
He and his 15-person team developed that solution as part of the NJ FAST program’s first graduating class. Gregg Lester, the startup’s president, said the experience was both amazing and crucial for their nascent business.
Balcony emerges from the incubator after experiencing 200% growth in 2024. Their leaders say they’ve gone a lot of the distance toward their goal of signing up New Jersey municipalities for a system that modernizes land records – with a focus on ownership transfers and compliance documents – while keeping it better protected from the ransomware attacks that have cost municipalities millions of dollars.
Cybersecurity firm Sophos published a recent report that showed 72% of ransom demands topped $1 million for state and local governments in 2024. The city of Hoboken, where the startup is based, reported that it was another victim of ransomware within the past two months.
Alexander McGee, the company’s other co-founder and head of governmental affairs, points to an example of the type of impact they can make with their work in Orange, one of the startup’s first city partners following its launch in May. There, most properties sold reportedly didn’t have required certificate of habitability documents on file, verifying basic requirements have been met for a property to be lived in.
The problem for them, and many other local governments, is a disconnect between sometimes antiquated technologies, McGee said. The Balcony team markets their technology as a layer that connects municipal records to provide better, more transparent notifications regarding documents such as these.
“Local governments don’t really have great technology as a whole, but they interact with people more than any other area of government,” McGee said. “So, we believe if we’re able to give people in government the proper tools, they can increase their margins, they can increase their overall compliance with different departments while also providing a better place to live, as citizens will be more aware of what’s going on.”
The startup has even grander ambitions than partnering with local governments to store and encrypt land data. McGee said they’ve been in conversation with the U.S. Department of the Treasury about helping solve some of their technology problems. McGee said their solution could help track the purchase of land next to military bases and critical infrastructure by potential foreign adversaries.
In short, they’re just at the tipping point of an idea they believe could put New Jersey tech startups on the map in a major way.
“No matter what your political affiliation is … the tailwinds are shifting: Government is taking more of a positive stance now on efficiency within governmental systems, cleaning up broken systems that are causing taxpayers a lot of money, and there’s more of a pro-blockchain stance,” Silverman said. “We couldn’t have known that this would be lining up timing-wise with what we’re out to accomplish, but it is.”
