VILLAGEx 2023 Founder Friday: JurisDeed

Founder Fridays is a series that spotlights VILLAGEx founders and their startups

In 2020, Stephen Morel founded JurisDeed, a SaaS startup that streamlines access to legal and property ownership intelligence to real estate across the United States. With a single, online platform that's easy and affordable to use, JurisDeed provides up-to-date information that's critical to real estate investment and development.

Before starting JurisDeed, Stephen had a career as a real estate title attorney in Louisiana for 15 years. He specialized in curing complex title defects, as well as quieting, clearing, and insuring delinquent tax sale titles. He also developed legal due diligence systems that ultimately de-risk and unlock opportunities with distressed real estate titles on behalf of local government, national title insurance companies and large investment groups. As far back as 2005, Stephen began envisioning the idea and need for JurisDeed after witnessing first-hand the devastating impacts that Hurricane Katrina had on people and properties across the Greater New Orleans region. Many property owners had to relocate to different states and cities during this time, leaving their properties abandoned and causing a greater burden for the city to rebuild with the loss in home tax revenue.

“Being a property owner, real estate investor and a title attorney in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, I saw first-hand the vulnerability of property ownership due to the fragile, analog and disconnected nature of the way its records are kept. For property to be transacted, all ownership interests have to be accounted for. After the storm,empty houses sat rotting as painful reminders of the storm while the city’s tax base took its own direct hit. Since real estate tax is a primary source of revenue for most jurisdictions, empty houses meant a loss of critically needed funding for schools, roads, parks, and programs when all owners couldn't easily be identified, located, and notified. I knew there had to be a better way.” said Stephen.

Stephen believes that property ownership is critical to individual wealth, community infrastructure, and societal stability. He is committed to providing accurate, affordable, and efficient access to the right information to help unlock opportunities for wealth creation and community redevelopment.

“There’s no question, the new platform enabling on-demand access to digitized property ownership and title intelligence data we are bringing to market creates significant value-add for investment and related professional industries. However, real estate has the power to shape the quality of life wherever it exists - for good or for bad - and, our vision is to empower prosperity across all communities through easier access to the most important data that enables ownership of properties that would otherwise remain trapped out of commerce and from creating individual wealth - usually in the communities and for the individuals that need it most,” said Stephen.

Today, Stephen works full-time as JurisDeed’s CEO, along with Lydia McEvoy as COO,who is also an attorney and is the former three-time elected tax collector for Clay County, Missouri, and a team of three part-time employees. Together, they're working to develop JurisDeed into an essential resource for the entire real estate industry - one that leverages dynamic, automated connections between real estate’s historical (public) records and its current legal interest-holders to reveal the current legal stakeholders of any property in the nation, on-demand - a novel data set never before available as a commercial resource. By providing the right information, to the right people, in the most efficient way possible, JurisDeed is making it easier and more feasible for investors, legal and title professionals and local government to return the $3T of existing distressed real estate across the country to productive use, and more efficiently and successfully deal with the annual pipeline of equal amount perpetually at risk of suffering the same fate without this exciting new resource.

Q & A 

(Responses have been edited for clarity)

What’s your best piece of startup advice for an entrepreneur in your industry?

Stephen: “Technology, big data, and digital transformation strategies have been game-changing catalysts for virtually every other industry - they can - and must be so for property ownership in the real estate industry as well.”

“Moreover, real estate is a really big industry with lots of businesses constantly offering new products and services - it's important to narrow your focus and value proposition as early as possible to convey uniqueness and differentiation from the crowd.”

Why startup in New Orleans?

Stephen: “This is home; it's also a really old city with properties that have ownership history older than most cities have existed. There's a lot of need here for the value-add with which that we're striving to provide through access to data that helps clearing titles to distressed properties and , enabling them to be returned to commerce and productive use, so these properties can stop draining our resources and start adding to them.”

Any recent venture accomplishments/achievements?

Stephen: “Honestly, being accepted into this year's competitive VILLAGEx program cohort, and into the most recent DAV Patriot Boot Camp incubator program - a Techstars affiliate program for veteran-founded startups - was extremely rewarding as validation of this early-stage business that is actually many years in the making.”