What should we send you?
Your plan includes the daily filing lists, and you have not chosen any yet. Washington, D.C. 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.
Washington, D.C. property intelligence
Know the block
before it becomes
your block.
The city already knows this building — the Office of Tax and Revenue's assessment and the prior year's beside it, what the Department of Buildings has permitted on the lot and the zoning district it sat in, the offences and 311 requests reported on the surrounding blocks, the schools within reach, and every site the EPA holds on record nearby. Nineteen sections in seconds, every count compared with the city, as a PDF you can forward. 100% coverage of Washington, D.C., 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 District already holds on the building, before you write an offer.The report reads the public record: every permit issued against the tax lot and the zoning district each one carries, the assessment beside the prior year's, and what the surrounding blocks have reported. It is a record of filings, not a statutory disclosure, and it is not a substitute for one.
- Walk in already knowing the rest.What the District has filed on these streets — permits, offences and 311, 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.Permits are filed against the tax lot, and the District writes a lot as a square, a suffix and a lot number. A lot can carry more than one building, so a permit count is a count for the lot rather than for a single structure, and the report says which it is.
- What your tax bill will actually be.The Office of Tax and Revenue's assessed value for the tax lot, split into land and the improvement above it, with the prior year's assessment beside it, the year built, the use class and the land area.
- Ten years of the surrounding blocks. Offences and 311 requests by year, every permit on the lot itself, the schools within reach, the flood zone a lender uses, and the EPA's record for every regulated site on the surrounding blocks. — 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. The District sits at the confluence of two rivers and the zone is the first thing an insurance application asks about.
And four more, reading the same record their own way
Renting a place
The District regulates rents under the Rental Housing Act, and buildings are registered with the Rental Accommodations Division. That register is not published as data anyone can read, so the report makes no finding about whether a unit is covered and never guesses from the year built. Read the silence as silence, not as an exemption.
Owning or managing buildings
Every permit the Department of Buildings has issued against your lot, with the zoning district each one carries, the assessment beside last year's so you can see the direction it moved, and what the blocks around you reported to the police and to 311.
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 Washington, D.C.'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
Nineteen sections. Zero opinions.
Every line beneath is real output for 1350 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE NW.
Every building, not the same report
What the records hold depends on what it is.
A house
The whole record: the lot, its permits, its assessment across two years, and the blocks around it.
A flat or condominium
The same block record as any other building, and the same lot record. A condominium in the District is usually its own lot within the square, so the roll figure is that unit's rather than the whole building's.
An apartment building
The lot's permit history is the part to read: additions, alterations and the shoring permits that say something large is happening next door. Rent regulation is not in the data and the report does not guess at it.
A shop, office or warehouse
An address outside the District is declined with the reason rather than answered with partial data. Arlington, Alexandria and the Maryland counties keep their own records.
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. Washington, D.C. 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 1350 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE NW, 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 776 is a lot, so every figure is set against what an average area of the same size in Washington, D.C. records.
1.3× the Washington, D.C. average
An average area this size holds 599, and this works out at about 1 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. Offences are published to the hundred-block rather than the address. Each feed is split one file per year, and any year that did not answer is named.What Washington, D.C. filed today
Office and up choose freely from all seven. Every weekday at 6:30am, on this city's own clock.
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.
7 lists, and you choose which arrive.
Buildings coming empty
The filings that precede a sale or a vacancy.
- Vacant and derelict building reportsSomebody told 311 a building is vacant or derelict. A report is what was said, not a finding: the city records it before anyone has been to look.
What is being built
Demolition, new construction and serious money.
- New construction issuedA new building is going up. The clearest signal in the District that a lot is changing use.
- Demolition issuedThe building is coming down. Rare, and unambiguous when it happens.
- Additions and alterations issuedWork that changes the building rather than services it: an addition, or an alteration and repair.
- Excavation issuedGround is being opened. It usually precedes a foundation, and it is the earliest permit on a new build.
Condition and compliance
What inspectors found, and what tenants say is wrong.
- Shoring, scaffolding and tower cranesSheeting and shoring, scaffolding, or a tower crane: the permits that say something large is happening next to a standing building.
- Illegal construction reportsA report that work is happening without a permit. The District takes these through 311, and they are what a neighbour saw rather than what an inspector found.
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
512 new filings on your lists, 28 in this email
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Scan the Block <hello@scantheblock.com> · 6:30 AM
415 new filings on your lists, 28 in this email
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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. Two examples: this city publishes crime, permits and 311 as one file PER YEAR rather than as one file with a date column, so a ten-year question is a fan-out across thirty endpoints and a year the portal will not answer is named rather than quietly left out of the total. And its permit type column does not say what a permit is for — it reads CONSTRUCTION, SUPPLEMENTAL, SHOP DRAWING — while the work itself is in the subtype, so a search on the obvious column finds nothing and reads as nothing happening.
The spine is public records — the District's own open data for permits, offences and 311, the Office of Tax and Revenue's assessment roll for the building itself, the Master Address Repository for the address, and the federal sources listed opposite. Each is named on the line it produces. 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 | 2009 | 5,211,512 |
| Building permits (DOB) | 2009 | 790,092 |
| Crime incidents (MPD) | 2008 | 601,529 |
| Address to Square-Suffix-Lot cross-reference | — | 240,874 |
| Tax lots, with value, prior value, use and land area (ITSPE) | — | 221,486 |
| Address register (Master Address Repository) | — | 144,422 |
| Certificates of occupancy issued | — | 81,793 |
| Vacant and blighted building addresses | — | 2,331 |
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 Washington, D.C., and most of what makes a report useful here does not exist anywhere else.
The things that only exist here
A quadrant that has to be named, because 1st Street runs in all four of them. A parcel id written as a square, a suffix and a lot, fixed width with the spaces kept. An assessment published beside last year's on the same row, so a direction costs one read. And every record feed split one file per year.
Read from the city's own registers
The address comes from the District's own Master Address Repository, the lot from the Office of Tax and Revenue's assessment roll, and the counts from the District's own open data — 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.
Washington, D.C. addresses only, today. If you want to know when somewhere else opens, write to hello@scantheblock.com and we will tell you.
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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
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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.the portal refreshes on each agency's own cadence, and these lags are that 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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