Every red flag, before you buy
The listing shows granite countertops. We show the flood zone, fire risk, crime level, tax reset, flips, and title red flags — every fact pulled from government and county records, sourced and dated.
Three minutes from address to answers
Zillow tells you what a house costs. We tell you what it might cost you later.
1 · Enter any US address
We lock the parcel against the Census Bureau's own geocoder — coordinates, county, and census tract, the keys every record system needs.
2 · We sweep the records
FEMA flood maps, USGS earthquakes, fire hazard zones, wetlands, historic registers, tract crime data, and licensed county assessor & recorder files — checked in parallel.
3 · You get the honest report
Every signal marked Clear, Caution, or Flag — with its source and date. Can't be sourced? We link the official record. Can't be public? It goes on your ask-in-escrow checklist.
One search. Sixteen kinds of answers.
LIVE checks a government source in real time. RECORDS comes from licensed county-data compilations. CA is live statewide in California. LINK routes you to the official portal — deep-linked to your county where we've verified it.
Cheaper than one hour of regret
A home inspection runs $400–600 and happens after you're under contract. This happens before you even offer.
Free check
- Location, county & tract match
- Parcel map
- FEMA flood zone at the parcel
- USGS earthquake history
- Wildfire, wetlands & historic checks
- Official county portal links
- Caution Index number & breakdown
- Assessor record, sales, taxes, value
- Crime level & flip detection
Full report
- Everything in the free check
- Caution Index with full component math
- Assessor record, APN, sale & tax history
- Flip-pattern detection
- Value estimate + comps, rent estimate
- Crime level for the tract
- Property-tax reset calculator, prefilled
- Print-ready PDF for your agent or lender
Hunter plan
- Unlimited full reports
- Compare your shortlist side by side
- Alerts: new permits, price cuts, filings
- Not yet available
Know your real number before you fall in love
The listing price is the start of the math, not the end. These run entirely in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere. Run a report and we prefill them with the parcel's own records.
This is the comfortable number — 28% of your income on housing, 36% on total debt. It uses the property-tax rate that applies to you after purchase, not the seller's lower grandfathered bill — the quiet shortcut most calculators take to make you feel richer. Below 20% down, PMI is folded in. Not a mortgage pre-approval.
PMI is added automatically below 20% down (est. 0.6%/yr of the loan, dropped here at 20% equity is not modeled — ask your lender). Tax rate defaults to a ~1.10% national ballpark; a report prefills your state's regime.
Assumptions (deliberately conservative): home appreciation 3%/yr and rent growth 3%/yr; maintenance 1% of value/yr; insurance $2,000/yr; buying closing costs 2.5%; selling costs 6%; PMI 0.6%/yr under 20% down; renter earns 4%/yr on the down payment they didn't spend. Ignores tax deductions (most buyers now take the standard deduction). This is a framing tool, not financial advice.
Assumes a fixed-rate loan and that every extra dollar goes straight to principal — confirm your servicer applies it that way and that there's no prepayment penalty. Not financial advice.
How the Caution Index works — and what we refuse to do
The Caution Index is a 0–100 summary of physical and records-based risk only — flood zone, earthquake history, fire hazard zone, tract crime level, wetlands, and flip patterns — normalized to the inputs that actually resolved for your parcel. If fewer than 40% of applicable inputs resolve, we withhold the number entirely rather than print false precision.
Never an input: race, ethnicity, income, or any demographic variable. Demographics appear as labeled Census context — they never move the score, by design.
Deliberately excluded: owner names and contact info (public in many counties, but we audit properties, not people), and sex-offender registry data (state-law limits on housing-related use — check your state's official registry directly).
What no website can show — insurance claim history (CLUE), HOA reserves and litigation, sewer condition, unrecorded agreements — your report ends with an ask-in-escrow checklist so you get those from the only people who can legally hand them over.
Terms of use (including FCRA notice)
Informational use only. HonestLot reports compile public records and licensed public-records data with dated source attribution, for personal due-diligence use in evaluating real property.
Not a consumer report. FCRA prohibition. HonestLot is not a consumer reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and its reports are not consumer reports. You may not use HonestLot, in whole or part, to determine any person's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, housing/tenancy, or any other FCRA-covered purpose. Screening tenants, employees, or any individual is expressly prohibited.
No professional advice. Nothing here is legal, tax, insurance, engineering, or appraisal advice. Value estimates are automated model outputs, not appraisals, and must not be represented as appraisals.
Accuracy. Public records contain errors and lag. Every fact is attributed and dated; verify critical facts against the primary source before relying on them in a transaction. Where a source returns nothing, we say so rather than guessing.
Acceptable use. No harassment, stalking, doxxing, or contacting occupants; no automated scraping; no resale of report data.
Privacy
No accounts required. Stripe processes payments; we never see your card. To honor an unlock we store a random device ID paired with a one-way hash of the purchased address — not the address itself — for 30 days. Free-check rate limiting uses your IP for one hour. No data sales, no ads, no owner contact data of any kind. The parcel map is rendered from OpenStreetMap data via CARTO basemap tiles (© OpenStreetMap contributors, © CARTO). The buyer tools (monthly cost, rent vs. buy) compute entirely in your browser — nothing you type in them is transmitted.
Disclaimer
HonestLot aggregates third-party and government data "as is," without warranty of completeness or fitness for a particular purpose. The Caution Index is a summary of sourced signals — not a prediction, a safety guarantee, or a statement about any person. Real-property decisions should rest on primary-source verification and licensed professionals.
Fair questions
Why isn't this on Zillow already?
Portals are paid by the transaction — agent leads and mortgage referrals. Their structural incentive is to make homes look buyable. Our only job is the opposite: surface what might make you walk. We take no listing-industry money.
Where does the data come from?
Live federal and state sources (FEMA, USGS, Census, USFWS, NPS, CAL FIRE) plus licensed nationwide compilations of county assessor and recorder records. Every card names its source and as-of date. No listing-site scraping, no MLS data.
What if a source has nothing for my address?
The card says so, plainly, and routes you to the official viewer. An honest "no data" beats a confident guess — that's the founding rule of this tool.
Is the Caution Index a safety score?
No. It's a bounded, transparent summary of sourced physical and records risk, shown with its coverage percentage and full component math. It never uses demographics, and below 40% input coverage it refuses to print a number.
Can I use this to screen a tenant or applicant?
No — prohibited. HonestLot is not a consumer reporting agency and its reports may not be used for FCRA-covered decisions about people. It audits properties, period.
What does the unlock cover?
One address, 30 days, on the device you bought it from. Re-run it as often as you like in that window — data refreshes on our cache schedule.