Scan the Block · compared

How this compares, honestly

Four ways to look up a San Francisco address, including the city's own free tool — each described from its own public materials as of August 22, 2026, with the places the others win stated as plainly as the places we do.

* Not listed among that product's published features when we read its public pages on August 22, 2026. Products change — verify with the vendor.

Where the others win

The Property Information Map is free and official. It is the Planning Department's own tool, and for a quick zoning or permit look-up on one parcel it is the right first stop. What it does not do is read the eviction, rent, crime, fire or 311 record, compare anything to the city, or produce a document you can forward — it describes itself as general information requiring professional advice for specific uses.

PropertyShark reaches records we refuse or cannot reach. Title documents, liens and foreclosure research are real needs in a transaction, San Francisco publishes none of that as open data, and ownership research is their business and deliberately not ours — this product names no person, which is a design decision with a cost, and this is the cost.

NeighborhoodScout covers the whole country. If you need Cleveland tomorrow, we are not your tool yet. Its analytics are also a different product philosophy: ratings and predictive forecasts, which some readers want and this product refuses on principle — a report that scores a neighborhood is scoring the people in it.

Not a mirror of the portal

The city's data is free, and anyone can read it — the table above says so. What a report buys is the work between the portal and the page, and it is worth naming, because none of it is visible until you try to do without it.

Cleaned. The rent inventory publishes rents as text bands the portal itself cannot average — read naively, “$1751–$2000” parses as seventeen million. Nearly half of all plumbing permits carry no recorded outcome, which is neither open nor closed, and counting them as either is wrong. The police record changed systems in 2018 and the two datasets overlap for five months; added together they double-count. Every one of these is handled, and the handling is stated on the page where it matters.

Organized. Forty-two sections in the order a decision asks for them, not sixty datasets in the order a portal lists them. Eviction notices split by their stated ground, because a dispute inside a tenancy and a building leaving the rental market are different facts wearing one count. Reported rents split by when each tenancy began, which is the difference between an anchored figure and a market one. And joins the city never publishes — the condominium roll against the violations register, every parcel record merged into one timeline.

Enriched. The city's record sits beside what the city cannot know: FEMA's flood layer with its panel and effective date, USGS earthquakes that actually happened, the state's fault zones, census housing figures, the FCC's address-level broadband filings, NREL's solar model, national historic listings, and a market estimate labeled as its provider's. And every area count is compared with an average San Francisco area of the same size — the arithmetic that turns a number into information — with the source and the caveat traveling beside it onto the PDF.

Where this one does

Depth, in one city, without opinions. Notices, stated reasons, buyouts, petitions, reported rents — that appears in none of the others. Every area count is set against an average San Francisco area of the same size, so a number arrives with its context. Every figure names its source and carries its caveat into the PDF. And nothing is scored, graded or predicted — which is both a principle and, for a brokerage forwarding reports to clients, a compliance property none of the alternatives offers.