Early-stage Miami company digitizes liens, saving cities, residents time and money

Mac Alabre learned the ins and outs of property liens, while working as a financial analyst for the City of North Miami. He was surprised to find out that lien reports were generated manually, slowing down sales for homebuyers and sellers, rather than easily accessible online.

He thought, “I can make this happen.” Enter his startup Lien Library.

“We are the first online platform that makes it easy for local governments to provide lien information to the public, whether someone is interested in buying or selling a property,” said Alabre, the firm’s founder and CEO.

All the hard work is starting to pay off for Lien Library. The startup was selected on March 24 the top winner of the community track of the annual Miami Herald Pitch Competition, the oldest entrepreneurship challenge in South Florida.

For cash-strapped cities, liens — the debts property owners owe municipalities — add up quickly. Together those debts represent millions of dollars that could be used to pay for parks or provide better city services for residents or small businesses. Alabre said in Miami-Dade County, outstanding liens add up to an average of $12 million per city.

That’s a sizable chunk of change left on the table.

For every property sold, someone must obtain a lien report but the manual process can take five to 10 business days, delaying real estate closings. Lien Library wants to make those lien reports available nearly instantaneously or at least in the same day.

With Lien Library’s software, the public also can pay off an outstanding lien and receive a lien release instantly. If a lien needs to be negotiated with the government, the startup provides a portal for that negotiation to happen.

After a pilot with the City of Miami Gardens, Lien Library signed its first municipal contract with that city in November.

Smart city effort in Miami Gardens

“As an advocate for small businesses, working with Lien Library was an opportunity to give an up-and-coming startup an opportunity for a need that we had at the city to become more efficient when it comes to lien search,” said Miami Gardens councilwoman Linda Julien, who introduced Lien Library to the city.

Last year, Julien sponsored a resolution with the goal being the City of Miami Gardens would become a smart city by 2028.

“This is part of our Smart City initiative, where people don’t have to come in and go through all this paperwork. They can actually do lease searches online and the beautiful thing about it is that it’s at no cost to the City of Miami Gardens,” she said.

Julien is also a real estate agent.

“I know from experience how painstaking it can be going through a lien search and having to wait for days, waiting for someone to answer the phone over at the city, waiting for the staff to come back because this person’s at lunch, that person’s gone for a week or two,” she said.

“So when clients can have this at the tip of their fingers using technology, we’re being smart about the process. It saves time and you cut out the middleman. It removes the burden from employees having to do this manual work and it removes the frustration from the client.”

Lien Library is striving to raise a $750,000 seed round to help finance a second version of its software that will allow the startup to scale.

“We are currently in talks with 37 cities throughout the tri-county area. Once we have our second version of the software, we will be able to close the contracts with all the other cities,” Alabre said. “Our plan is to eventually go national because there is a need for Lien Library in every single city that provides a lien report to the public.”

Alabre has three core team members: Rohansen Joseph, the team’s chief operating officer; Sondley Northecide, chief technology officer; and Eduardo Mejia, chief information officer. Lien Library licenses the software to the cities for free, but adds a convenience fee of $50 on top of the city fee that title companies pay.

“By 2024, we want to close at least 50% of the cities that we currently have in our sales pipeline,” Alabre said. “And after closing these cities, we are hoping that we can bring in enough revenue so that we can finish building our map.”

That map will enable easy identification of properties that have liens, providing key data cities and residents can use. Some residents may not even realize they have liens on their properties.

Entrepreneurial journey

Alabre has lived in South Florida since leaving his home country of Haiti in 2015. He is currently enrolled in a doctorate program in industrial-organizational psychology at Florida International University, where he also earned a master’s in business administration and a bachelor’s degree.

He has been working with the Venture Mentoring Team, a Miami nonprofit, for the past two years.

“Lien Library already had ... a solid grasp of the problem they were solving. We put together a team of five mentors that included mentors experienced in the title business, software development and government sales,” said Bob Nelson, co-founder and CEO of the mentoring team.

“Over the last two years, Mac has developed his sales strategy, built a sales funnel, and acquired his first municipal customer. It is this transition from technical development to sales development where we have seen the most improvement,” said Nelson, Alabre’s mentor. “Securing government contracts can be challenging. Mac and his team learned a lot as they navigated this process.”

As a bootstrapped founder seeking to automate the manual lien process, Alabre initially funded his startup by first providing a manual runner service and in the process gained important relationships with title companies and municipalities, Nelson said.

Johanna Mikkola, a community track judge in the Herald’s startup pitch contest and vice president of computer tech training school BrainStation, said that Alabre delivered an engaging and compelling pitch, while also addressing an important pain point Lien Library encountered.

MAC ALABRE’S ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS: “It’s very easy to have an idea, but to push an idea forward, you need others. You need to have mentors. Community accelerators can also help you move forward. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m totally grateful to the Venture Mentoring Team and Endeavor Miami so that I could actually move Lien Library forward.”

This story was originally published April 2, 2023 at 5:30 AM.