What should we send you?
Your plan includes the daily filing lists, and you have not chosen any yet. San Francisco publishes these every weekday — pick the ones worth your morning. You can change this whenever you like under Notifications, and nothing is ever sent that you have not asked for.
Picks a sensible set to start from. Change anything below before you save.
San Francisco property intelligence
Know the block
before it becomes
your block.
The city already knows this building — its permits and violations, its retrofit obligations, the crime on its block, what it rents for, what is licensed to make noise nearby, what the EPA holds on record around it, and what is approved to rise next door. Forty-eight sections in seconds, every count compared with the city, as a PDF you can forward. 100% coverage of San Francisco, every address, today.
Matched to the right plan and price — or told honestly that the free check is all you need.
Read a full sample report → every section, a real address, the actual PDF
The corpus behind every report
One record, every reader
The two sides of a sale read it most closely — and four more read it their own way.
If you sell property
You get asked what the block is like
And answering it in your own words is the part of the job with the most downside. A report you forward is records with the caveats attached, so the characterization is the city's and not yours.
- Know what the 3R will say, before you order it. The Report of Residential Building Record is required in every San Francisco residential sale and takes the Department of Building Inspection a couple of weeks. It carries the permit history, the year built, the zoning and the legal use — and so does this, from the same block and lot, in seconds. It does not replace the 3R. It tells you what it is going to say while there is still time to act on it.
- Walk in already knowing the rest. Outstanding violations, the soft story retrofit obligation and what it costs, and what is approved to rise next door — before the listing appointment, not after the inspection.
- Hand it over instead of characterizing. Nothing is scored, no school is rated, and the census section describes buildings rather than the people in them. That is a deliberate design decision about your exposure, not an omission.
- One account for the desk. Plans carry seats and share an allowance, and the owner of the plan can see every report run against it, and by whom.
If you are buying
You get one look before you commit
An open house tells you about the kitchen. The expensive surprises are on the block and in the building's file, and most of them are a matter of public record if you know which record to ask for.
- The obligations that come with it. A mandatory soft story retrofit transfers with the building and is not cheap. If this one is on the program, and whether the work is finished, is in the report.
- What your tax bill will actually be. Under Proposition 13 a long-held property can be assessed far below what you are about to pay, and the assessment resets when it changes hands. The report shows how long it has been anchored.
- Ten years of the surrounding blocks. Police reports, 311, fire, evictions and permits, each set against what an average area of the same size in San Francisco records — so a number means something.
- The floods FEMA does not map. Most of San Francisco is Zone X, which reads as "does not flood". The report also checks the city's own storm flood map, the tsunami zone, and two sea level rise horizons — separately mapped, and separately disclosed.
And four more, reading the same record their own way
Renting a place
Whether rent control likely reaches the building, what the block actually rents for, the eviction record, and what inspectors found — before signing anything. The Basic plan fits one month of looking.
Owning or managing buildings
Your own building’s open permits, violations and retrofit status — and the reported rents on the blocks around it, which is what the vacancy will ask for.
Investing and developing
The pipeline of what is proposed, approved and under construction nearby, zoning and height limits, and the gap between assessed and market value.
Advising and arguing
The parcel’s full permit, violation and eviction record with the date each line was read — attorneys pull one report per matter and export the history.
Neither version is a valuation, an appraisal, or a statutory Natural Hazard Disclosure, and no version may be used to screen a tenant. What it is, in both cases, is the public record on one address, gathered in one place.
Not sure what it tells you?
Say what brings you here and the assistant will say what the report holds for it — then answer whatever you want to ask.
First — which of these is you?
The assistant answers about this product and what San Francisco's records can show. It has no property in front of it, so it will not look an address up, price anything, or say what an area is like — running a report is what does that.
What a report contains
Forty-eight sections. Zero opinions.
Every line beneath is real output for 820 Post St.
Every building, not the same report
What the records hold depends on what it is.
A house
The fullest version. The Assessor's file, the permit history, sale history with the board that recorded each event, an estimate with its range, comparable sales nearby, and whether rent control reaches it.
A flat or condominium
Adds the association: its name, the monthly fee, and a phone number. Sale-value estimates are often missing, because listing services index the building rather than the unit — the report says so instead of leaving a blank.
An apartment building
The two that cost money lead: the soft story retrofit obligation and what it runs, and rent control. Market estimates are thin here — these change hands rarely, so there is little for a listing service to have indexed.
A shop, office or warehouse
Every city record still applies: permits, violations, the hazard and flood zones, and ten years of the block around it. Rent control does not, and the report says that rather than running the date test and reporting a number that means nothing.
Coverage is uneven because the records are, and where a section is thin the report says which record is thin rather than showing an empty space. San Francisco addresses only, whatever the building is.
Built to be believed
Three rules the report keeps, and under each one the thing itself: real output for 820 Post St, unedited. A count, a refusal, and a number with the caveat that makes it safe to use.
Every number is compared
A count on its own is unreadable. Nobody can say whether 18,840 is a lot, so every figure is set against what an average area of the same size in San Francisco records.
7.8× the San Francisco average
An average area this size holds 2,411, and this works out at about 6 a day.
Nothing is scored
No safety grade, no risk number, no letter for the block. Those are opinions wearing a number's clothes, on a page that can move a price that matters — and for a brokerage they are a liability: area scores and school grades are the classic proxies for what the Fair Housing Act protects. A report with neither is one your agents can forward without a compliance read.
- Safety score
- Risk rating
- Neighborhood grade
- Investment outlook
You get the records and the comparison. Drawing the conclusion is your job, and saying so is what keeps it yours.
The caveats travel with the numbers
A complaint is not a finding. Police locations are anonymised to the block. An assessment is not a valuation — and that last one is worth real money, so it sits against the figure it qualifies rather than in a footer nobody reads.
An assessment is not a valuation. Under Proposition 13 this is the 2016 purchase price adjusted by at most about two per cent a year, and it has been anchored for 10 years — so it may sit far below what the property would fetch.
What San Francisco filed today
Trade's Notifications tab offers exactly nine of these. Office and up choose freely from all 33. Either way, 6:30am.
Every weekday the city records buildings being emptied, work being permitted, and inspectors finding things. Most of it is never read by anyone who would act on it. These are those filings, sorted into lists, delivered each morning — one filing type per list, in the order they were filed, never ranked and never an owner’s name.
33 lists, and you choose which arrive.
Buildings coming empty
The filings that precede a sale or a vacancy.
- Ellis Act withdrawalsThe owner is withdrawing the whole building from the rental market. The strongest published signal that a building is being emptied, and it usually precedes a sale.
- Owner move-in evictionsAn owner or a relative is taking a unit. Often a prelude to a sale, and always a unit coming out of the rental stock.
- Demolition evictionsThe building is coming down. Rare, and unambiguous when it happens.
- Tenant buyouts agreedA landlord paid a tenant to leave, by agreement. Filed with the Rent Board since 2015, and invisible in every eviction figure — a building emptied this way leaves that record untouched.
- Ellis intent petitionsA landlord petitioning the Rent Board of an intent to withdraw. Earlier than the notice itself.
- Substantial rehabilitation petitionsA landlord seeking to take a building out of rent control by rehabilitating it. A gut renovation, declared in advance.
- Capital-improvement evictionsTenants moved out so the building can be renovated. An owner spending on an occupied building is repositioning it — the classic precursor to a sale or a rent reset, and as rare a signal as Ellis.
What is being built
Demolition, new construction and serious money.
- Demolition permits filedA permit to take a building down, keyed to the parcel.
- New construction filedA permit for a new building. The pipeline at its earliest visible point.
- Major work filedPermits with a declared cost over $500,000. Somebody is spending seriously on a building.
- Electrical permits filedElectrical trade permits — rewiring, panel upgrades, new circuits — filed on their own, separate from the building-permit record.
- Plumbing permits filedPlumbing trade permits — repipes, water heaters, gas lines — filed on their own, separate from the building-permit record.
- Major work issuedPermits over $500,000 declared that were ISSUED — not merely filed. Filing is intent; issuance is money committed and work about to start, which is when financing, builder's-risk cover and the neighbors' conversations all become real.
- New construction completedA new building finished and signed off. The one moment a building has no incumbent anything — no manager, no leasing agent, no insurer of record — and every one of those contracts is about to be won by somebody.
- Unit legalizations and ADUs filedPermits to legalize existing units or add accessory dwellings. An owner adding lawful units is adding value mid-stream: a construction-loan lead, a changed unit count for cover, and future inventory.
- Development applications filedProject applications opened with the Planning Department — the earliest public signal a site is in play, months before any building permit exists. What land brokers and competing developers most want to know first.
Condition and compliance
What inspectors found, and what tenants say is wrong.
- Notices of violation issuedThe building inspectors found something. An inspector issued this, unlike a complaint, which anyone may file.
- Fire violations issuedThe fire department cited a building — alarms, sprinklers, exits. A different agency from the building inspectors, and never added to them.
- Sprinkler & standpipe violationsFire-suppression-system violations only — sprinklers and standpipes — split out from the fire department's full violation feed so it names only the work a suppression contractor actually does.
- Rodent, roach & bedbug violationsNotices of violation for rodent, cockroach and bedbug infestations specifically — not general sanitation citations, which a pest-control company can't do anything about.
- Fire orders to abateA fire violation escalated. The department has ordered the condition fixed.
- Plumbing & electrical violationsOpen notices the building inspectors filed under plumbing and electrical — a fault an inspector has already written up and the owner has not yet closed.
- Structural & building violationsOpen notices filed under the building section — framing, foundations, stairs, decks and the rest of what holds a building up. The largest category the inspectors write, and the one that becomes a general contractor's bid.
- Interior surface violationsOpen notices filed under interior surfaces — walls, ceilings and floors an inspector has called deficient. Drywall, plaster and paint work, usually in a tenanted unit.
- Fire alarm violationsFire-alarm violations only, split out from the fire department's full feed so it names the work an alarm contractor does. The largest single thing the department writes up.
- Extinguisher & exit violationsPortable extinguishers and the exits they sit beside — the servicing work a fire-protection contractor sells on an annual contract rather than a call-out.
- Tenant habitability petitionsTenants petitioning over a failure to repair, or services that stopped. A filing, not a finding.
Buildings with work outstanding
Standing obligations somebody has to organize and pay for.
- Condo buildings with open violationsActive notices of violation on parcels the Assessor classes as condominium — deferred maintenance an owners' association is carrying and has not closed. The city files the violation and the roll says what the building is; neither dataset knows about the other.
- Soft-story retrofits outstandingMulti-unit buildings still non-compliant with the mandatory soft-story program. A structural retrofit is a six-figure capital project with permits, assessments and a board to carry — and of 4,945 buildings on the program only a few hundred have not finished.
Rent and income
Petitions that change what a building can charge.
- Capital improvement passthroughsA landlord petitioning to charge building work through to the rent — the lawful route above the annual cap, and a sign of real money going into a building.
- Costa-Hawkins exemption petitionsA landlord asking the Board to rule a unit outside local rent control. Changes what a building is worth.
Storefronts and leases
Business locations opening and closing on the commercial corridors.
- Storefronts openedNew business locations registered on the commercial corridors — a signed lease made visible. Corridor momentum for a leasing agent, and every new storefront needs cover it does not have yet.
- Storefronts closedBusiness locations ending on the commercial corridors — a vacancy before it is listed. The leasing conversation with that landlord has not happened yet, and a weakening income line is how an acquisition conversation starts.
The city publishes on a lag — two days for permits and violations, nearer a fortnight for buyouts — and every row shows the date it was filed rather than the day it reached us. This is nothing on my patch gets past me, not first to the door, and we would rather say so than let you find out.
What the 6:30 email looks like
Not a mock-up — the actual template, filled with a real run against these lists. Generated 2026-08-25; addresses and counts will read as that one morning within a week or two, the way any dated news does.
Scan the Block <hello@scantheblock.com> · 6:30 AM
413 new filings, 2 on more than one list
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This is the whole Trade plan — four lists on the card, nothing added and nothing to pick. Office and up choose from all 28, the four tabs beside this one included.
Scan the Block <hello@scantheblock.com> · 6:30 AM
234 new filings on your lists, 16 in this email
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Scan the Block <hello@scantheblock.com> · 6:30 AM
266 new filings on your lists, 16 in this email
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A quiet morning on your lists sends nothing at all.
Scan the Block <hello@scantheblock.com> · 6:30 AM
123 new filings on your lists, 16 in this email
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The Rent Board publishes on a lag near a fortnight; every row shows its filing date.
Scan the Block <hello@scantheblock.com> · 6:30 AM
203 new filings on your lists, 11 in this email
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The escrow watch, the same week
Every plan from Basic up can put a building into escrow mode — a daily check of the parcel itself between offer and close. This is a real sweep of a real parcel, 2026-08-26. A quiet day sends nothing.
Scan the Block <hello@scantheblock.com> · 6:35 AM
Filed on a building you have in escrow: 230 12TH AVE
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Real filings on this parcel, swept 2026-08-26 — a housing complaint and ten notices of violation inside one week, mid-transaction. The buyer who watched this building knew the same morning; the one who didn’t found out at close.
What comes with it
Every plan, unless marked.
Plans
Every plan is billed monthly or annually — your choice — and can be canceled at any time — canceling stops the next renewal and keeps your access to the end of the period you have paid for; we do not pro-rate or refund part of a month. An allowance is a ceiling rather than a balance: it resets at the turn of the day or month, and unused reports do not carry over. A report counts against it only when it is newly run — re-reading one you already ran is free, always.
The guides are free to read whether or not you have an account — how to read a property record, what the city’s rules actually turn on, and what the records will not tell you, written separately for buying, renting, owning, agency and investment.
Open 24/7 Start the week of Pro yourself at the sign-in form — sixty seconds, no card. Pricing bids, not buying? Trade is $19/mo, no trial needed — see the card below. Teams and multi-seat plans: email hello@scantheblock.com and we set you up by hand. Email us →Plans with more than one account use the company’s own email domain — personal addresses (gmail and the like) fit the single-account plans.
Office and above include machine access over MCP, so Claude can run the account’s reports: switched on per seat, off by default, under the same allowance as the buttons. Claude is a product of Anthropic, PBC; Scan the Block is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic.
How this compares — against the city’s own free tool, NeighborhoodScout and PropertyShark, feature by feature, from each product’s own materials — including where they win.
See the comparisonThe data, seams and all
Where the city changed how it records something, the report says so next to the number rather than in a footnote. Three examples: the two crime datasets overlap rather than abut, so the seam is explicit; 311 renamed its entire taxonomy in June 2024, so a trend crossing that date says it compares two vocabularies; and nearly half of all plumbing permits carry no recorded outcome at all, so those are counted as neither open nor closed rather than quietly assumed finished.
The spine is public records — the City and County of San Francisco, its Planning GIS, the U.S. Census, the FCC’s broadband filings, and the federal, state and regional sources listed opposite — the flood map a lender uses, the earthquake record and the air. Each is named on the section it feeds — read at the moment you ask. Alongside them sit a few third-party estimates: a property’s market value, a unit’s likely rent. Each is shown with its own range, named for the service that made it, and never presented as ours or turned into a score. We keep no copy of the city’s data — only your own receipt, which you can see and export.
Asked of the city just now, not stored here. Each dataset is published on its own rhythm, so a gap is the city's publishing lag rather than a gap in the report — and the report says so where it matters.
| Dataset | From | Rows |
|---|---|---|
| Police incidents | 2003 | 3,128,767 |
| 311 cases | 2008 | 8,852,067 |
| Building permits | 1901 | 1,294,112 |
| Registered businesses | 1849 | 365,607 |
| Eviction notices | 1997 | 48,879 |
| Fire incidents | 2003 | 732,985 |
| Injury traffic collisions | 2005 | 65,804 |
| Plumbing permits | 1903 | 521,465 |
| Fire inspections | 2004 | 441,969 |
| Electrical permits | 2002 | 352,354 |
| Street trees | 1955 | 198,436 |
| Fire safety complaints | 2005 | 78,185 |
| Rent Board petitions | 1997 | 59,697 |
| Fire violations | 2005 | 53,500 |
| Energy benchmarking | 2010 | 30,558 |
| Taxable commercial spaces | 2022 | 21,867 |
| Buyout agreements | 2015 | 8,478 |
And ten from outside the city, each named where it appears:
| Source | From | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| California Geological Survey | CGS | Alquist-Priolo fault zones |
| U.S. Census Bureau | ACS | The tract and its housing figures |
| FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer | FEMA | The flood zone a lender uses |
| USGS earthquake catalog | 1900 | Quakes that actually happened |
| National Register of Historic Places | NPS | Federal historic listings |
| OpenStreetMap | volunteer | The nearest chemist or food shop |
| 511.org | MTC | BART, Caltrain and the ferries |
| EPA AirNow and PurpleAir | EPA | Air quality, official and community |
| NREL PVWatts | NREL | What a roof here could generate |
| FCC broadband filings | FCC | Internet available at the address |
Read up first
Free, no account. A different three each day.
One city, on purpose
A national property site knows a little about everywhere. This knows San Francisco, and most of what makes a report useful here does not exist anywhere else.
The things that only exist here
A mandatory soft story retrofit program with tiers and a compliance list. A rent ordinance that turns on a certificate of occupancy issued before 13 June 1979. A 3R report, an energy and water certificate, a Maher ordinance area, an Article 10 district. None of that generalises, and all of it decides what a building is worth.
Read from the city's own registers
The address comes from San Francisco's address register, the parcel from the Assessor, the zones from the Planning department's own map service, and the counts from the city's open data — live, at the moment you ask. Not a national aggregator's copy of a copy, which is where the errors get in.
Then the next city
The method is the product: find the registers a city actually keeps, learn where they disagree with each other, and say so beside the numbers. That travels. The particular datasets do not, so the next city gets the same treatment from scratch rather than this one stretched to fit it.
San Francisco addresses only, today. If you want to know when somewhere else opens, write to hello@scantheblock.com and we will tell you rather than guess at a date here.
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Compiling your report
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A fresh address takes a few seconds. Re-opening one you have run is instant.
Lists
Public filings, gathered daily. Each list is one filing type, newest first.
A different kind of list — screened live, not a subscription
Signals
Long-anchored multi-family parcels in one neighborhood, with open notices of violation joined in. Three public facts side by side; what they mean together is your judgment, and nothing here is ranked for you.
Notifications
Choose what arrives in your inbox. Nothing is sent that you have not asked for.
Picks a sensible set to start from. Change anything you like below — nothing is sent until you press Save.
When these arrive. 6:30am Pacific, weekdays only — these are city filings, so nothing is recorded at weekends. You are sent an email only when one of your lists has something new in it; an empty message every morning is how people learn to stop opening them.
How current they are. San Francisco reloads these datasets each evening, Pacific, so new rows appear overnight and reach you the next morning. The city also publishes on a lag that differs by record: permits and violations run about two days behind, Rent Board petitions three, eviction notices about eight, and buyouts nearer twelve. Every row shows the date it was filed, which is not the day it reached us — so treat these as “nothing on my patch gets past me” rather than “first to the door”.
Leads
The working prospect list — statuses and notes save as you go. Several of us work this same list.
Loading the leads…
Team
Sources
Live state of every upstream, measured from real report traffic rather than synthetic checks.
A source shown idle has no recent traffic to judge by — that is not a fault.
Companies
A plan is sold to a company. Seats are how many people it covers; the monthly reports are a single pool they share. Billing happens outside this service. A Claude mark on an account means that person has switched on machine access for it — Scan the Block is independent of Anthropic, and the mark records their choice, not an affiliation.
Usage & cost
What the report's paid sources actually cost this month, counted from calls that really went out — a cache hit costs nothing and is not counted. The city's own data is free and is shown for context only. Estimates use current list rates; billing is settled with each provider.
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