What should we send you?
Your plan includes the daily filing lists, and you have not chosen any yet. Cincinnati 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.
Cincinnati property intelligence
Know the block
before it becomes
your block.
The city already knows this building — the county auditor's market value and the price it last sold for, what the city has permitted and cited on it, whether it has been boarded up, the police record on its block, and what the EPA holds on record around it. Twenty-seven sections in seconds, every count compared with the city, as a PDF you can forward. 100% coverage of Cincinnati, 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 city and the county already hold on the building, before you write an offer.Ohio discloses sale prices, and Hamilton County publishes them on the parcel — so this report answers what a building last sold for and when, from the record rather than from an estimate. Beside it sit the city's open code-enforcement cases and any order to barricade the building, which is the city's own record that somebody was sent to board it up.
- Walk in already knowing the rest.What the city has filed on these streets — permits, code enforcement and barricading orders, by year
- 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.An open case transfers with the building. Cincinnati files code enforcement against buildings with residences and against commercial buildings under separate names, and files barricading orders separately again — 17,787 of them — so a building that has been boarded is a documented fact here rather than an inference.
- What your tax bill will actually be.Hamilton County's market value for the parcel, split into land and improvement, with the date it last changed hands and the price where one was recorded. Where the value is being formally contested the report says so, because the figure shown is what the roll holds today rather than what it will hold once that is settled.
- Ten years of the surrounding blocks. Police reports across both reporting systems, 311, fire and EMS call-outs, permits and code enforcement, each set against what an average area of the same size in Cincinnati records — so a number means something.
- The flood map a lender uses. The federal zone and the panel it came off, quoted as FEMA publishes it. Hamilton County also maps the Ohio River by flood stage in feet, which is a different question from the federal zone and is not blended into it.
And four more, reading the same record their own way
Renting a place
Ohio has no rent control, so the report does not pretend to test for it. What it does have is the city's own record of these streets — code enforcement, permits, police, fire and 311 — against the citywide rate, so you can see what the building and its block have actually been like.
Owning or managing buildings
Your own building's open code-enforcement cases, the permits filed on it across five separately recorded trades, and the county's market value with the price it last changed hands 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 Cincinnati'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
Twenty-seven sections. Zero opinions.
Every line beneath is real output for 801 PLUM ST.
Every building, not the same report
What the records hold depends on what it is.
A house
The county's record of the parcel — market value, class, acreage, the last transfer and the price where one was recorded — beside the city's permits and code enforcement, and years of police, fire and 311 on the streets around it. The county publishes no year built, no unit count and no floor area, and the report shows those as gaps.
A flat or condominium
The same area record as a house, and the same county parcel record. The association's own file — its name, the fee, who runs it — is not a public record this report reads, and neither is a sale-value estimate, so it says so rather than leaving a blank.
An apartment building
Code enforcement filed against buildings with residences is its own category here and leads. Beside it sit the permits filed on the building across five separately recorded trades, and any order to barricade it.
A shop, office or warehouse
Every area record still applies: permits, code enforcement, police, fire and 311 by year, the flood zone, and years of the block around it.
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. Cincinnati 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 801 PLUM 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 707 is a lot, so every figure is set against what an average area of the same size in Cincinnati records.
8.5× the Cincinnati average
An average area this size holds 84, and this works out at about 6 a week.
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 311 request is not a finding. Crime before June 2024 comes from a different reporting system and is never added to the current one. A market value is the county's figure for tax purposes, not a valuation — and that last one is worth real money, so it sits against the figure it qualifies.
What Cincinnati filed today
Trade's Notifications tab offers exactly five of these. Office and up choose freely from all thirteen. 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.
13 lists, and you choose which arrive.
Buildings coming empty
The filings that precede a sale or a vacancy.
- Buildings being barricadedThe city has boarded a building up. Not a complaint about a building — the moment somebody was sent to close it, with the date it happened.
- Wrecking permits issuedDemolition, permitted. What comes down before anything goes up, and the clearest early signal on a block that is about to change.
What is being built
Demolition, new construction and serious money.
- Building permits issuedThe main building permit, issued rather than merely applied for — the work may legally start on the day this list carries.
- New construction permitsPermits the department classes as new rather than work on something existing. The pipeline, one address at a time.
- HVAC permits issuedHeating and air-conditioning permits — the largest single permit type this city files. The replacement season, one address at a time.
- Plumbing permits issuedEvery plumbing permit the city issued: re-pipes, water heaters, sewer lines, gas.
- Fire protection permits issuedSprinklers, standpipes and alarm systems — the work the fire code demands before a building opens.
- Elevator permits issuedElevator work, permitted. A small list and a specific trade, which is the point of it.
- Excavation and fill permits issuedGround being opened. The machine arrives before the building does.
Condition and compliance
What inspectors found, and what tenants say is wrong.
- Code enforcement, buildings with residencesThe city's largest building-condition category: cases opened against buildings people live in.
- Code enforcement, commercial buildingsThe same work on the commercial side, filed under its own name so a shopfront is not counted as a home.
Buildings with work outstanding
Standing obligations somebody has to organize and pay for.
- Zoning enforcement, residential usesA building being used for something its zoning does not allow, cited by name.
Storefronts and leases
Business locations opening and closing on the commercial corridors.
- Sign permits issuedA sign permit is a tenant. The cheapest early signal that a storefront has changed hands.
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.
Scan the Block <hello@scantheblock.com> · 6:30 AM
600 new filings on your lists, 24 in this email
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Scan the Block <hello@scantheblock.com> · 6:30 AM
547 new filings, 1 on more than one list
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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: Cincinnati changed how it reports crime on 3 June 2024, so the report counts the two systems separately and never adds them — their categories are different vocabularies; the archive publishes its latitude and longitude columns transposed, which this report reads the way the data behaves rather than the way it is labelled; and the fire feed is the dispatch record including EMS, whose largest group is medical emergencies rather than fires, so it is labelled call-outs.
The spine is public records — the City of Cincinnati's own open-data portal for police, permits, code enforcement, fire and 311, Hamilton County's auditor record through CAGIS, the U.S. Census, the FCC's broadband filings, and the federal sources listed opposite — the flood map a lender uses, the earthquake record and the air. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| 311 service requests | 2000 | 2,263,604 |
| Fire and EMS call-outs (dispatch, includes medical) | 2015 | 1,047,486 |
| Code enforcement cases | 1999 | 768,370 |
| County parcel record (Hamilton County Auditor) | — | 418,935 |
| Building permits issued | 2010 | 179,887 |
| Address register (CAGIS, city of Cincinnati) | — | 144,688 |
| Reported crime, before the June 2024 change | 2020 | 110,665 |
| Inspections and certificates | 1990 | 83,643 |
| Licences and use permits | 1993 | 77,986 |
| Reported crime, current system | 2024 | 57,806 |
| Vacant and foreclosed registrations | 2012 | 7,193 |
| Tax abatement and increment-financing parcels | — | 5,664 |
| Zoning designations (Cincinnati) | — | 2,473 |
| Lead abatement cases | — | 1,742 |
| Buildings declared hazardous | — | 707 |
| Vacated Building Maintenance Licences | — | 67 |
And eight from outside the city, each named where it appears:
| Source | From | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| 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 |
| 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 Cincinnati, and most of what makes a report useful here does not exist anywhere else.
The things that only exist here
Five trades filed as their own permit types, which no other city here does. Barricading recorded as its own category, which is the city's record that a building has been boarded rather than a complaint about it. A disclosed sale price, which Ohio publishes and California does not. None of it is portable to another city.
Read from the city's own registers
The address comes from Hamilton County's own CAGIS register and the counts from the city's open-data portal — live, at the moment you ask. Not a national aggregator's copy of a copy.
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.
Cincinnati 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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Is Scan the Block for you?
Keyboard shortcuts
Shortcuts stay out of the way while you are typing in any field.
Compiling your report
—
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.the portal refreshes daily, and these lags are its own cadence rather than a measured completeness rampfiled, 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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