Scan the Block · for buying a home

Know the block before it becomes your block.

You are about to make the largest purchase of your life on a street you have walked maybe six times. The city already holds a decade of records on that street — what was filed, cited, permitted and reported around this building — and this report reads all of it in a few seconds, compared with the city so you can tell a number from a normal.

The questions it answers

What did the parcels around it actually sell for?
What is standing on this parcel, and how tall is it?
What will my property tax actually be?
Is it in a fire hazard severity zone, and what is the ground under it?
When did it last change hands, and what did the county reset the value to?
What has been filed against this building?

The sections that earn their keep

What will come upOpen permits, retrofit obligations, disclosure triggers — the items that surface in escrow, surfaced before you are in it.

The ground under it, and the fire above itLiquefaction and landslide susceptibility, the state's fire hazard severity zone, the wildland urban interface, the NEHRP soil class and mapped serpentine — six of the city's own layers, read at the address. A layer that maps no zone here says so, and one that did not answer is marked unread rather than counted as clear.

The building's permitsWhat was legally built, what is still open, and the paperwork you would inherit at close.

Crime, by yearCounted within your radius and set against an average area the same size, so a busy corridor reads as what it is.

What changed hands nearbyThe priced transfers the county recorded on the parcels around it, with the middle price and the range. California discloses no sale price; the figure is the value the documentary transfer tax was computed on, and the window is closed at both ends because the county published a snapshot.

What is licensed to make noiseThe places nearby holding a live entertainment permit, and the class the city licensed each under. Six daytime walks past a building will not tell you what nine o'clock sounds like.

Work permitted in the street outsideWhat the city has already agreed can be dug up around the address, and until when — the thing buyers find out the week after they move in.

See it on a real address

Run any Oakland address and the report reads that city's portal live, at the moment you ask. Every report is free, and there is nothing to sign up for.

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Also written for: renting · owner or landlord · agent or broker · investor · developer or builder · lender or underwriter · insurance · hoa or property management · attorney or other professional · contractor or trade