Built by someone who had to find the work

Fadescope is a map-first property search tool for local trades. You draw an area on a map, filter to the kind of property you actually service, and see who owns it — before you spend a cent on the records.

What the app does

Most lead tools sell you a list someone else has already sold twice. Fadescope works the other way round: you start from a map of real property records and narrow down until what is left is worth a knock or a letter. Zoom to a neighbourhood, draw a circle or a polygon around the streets you cover, then filter on the things that decide whether a job exists — how old the house is, how big it is, how many storeys and bathrooms, when it last changed hands, whether the owner lives there or rents it out, whether it is sitting vacant.

Every one of those filters maps to a field in a national property dataset, and the app tells you what a search will cost before it runs. It quotes the price of the click, loads ten records at a time, and never pulls data in the background. You can select individual houses off the map and export just those. Nothing is charged until you press a button that says what it will charge.

Who it is for

Painters, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, roofers — the small local businesses that live or die on a steady flow of work and cannot afford a marketing department. The app ships with a trade selector: choose Electrical and it starts you on homes built before 1980, where aluminium branch wiring and undersized panels cluster. Choose Plumbing and it targets pre-1990 stock with ageing supply lines. Choose Carpentry and it looks for houses sold in the last two years, because remodelling clusters right after a purchase. Each preset is a starting point with the reasoning written down, and every filter stays editable.

Who builds it

Fadescope is built by Peter Budai, an independent developer who used to own a painting business. That is the whole origin of the thing. Finding work was the hardest part of running that company — harder than the painting, harder than the scheduling, harder than the invoicing. Lead sellers charged real money for contacts that three other crews had already called. Ad spend disappeared into clicks from people two states away. The jobs that did come in mostly came from driving a neighbourhood and noticing which houses needed the work.

Fadescope is that last approach, made systematic. It is one person building a tool they wish they had had, which means it is opinionated about the things that mattered then: knowing the cost before you commit, not paying twice for the same record, and starting from the property rather than from a list.

Get in touch

Feedback from people doing the work is what shapes what gets built next. If something is missing or wrong, say so — write to support@fadescope.com or use the contact page. The blog covers what the research actually says about winning and keeping this kind of work.