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SCANTHEBLOCK

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

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.

Written for you

Why there are no permits in an Oakland reportThe city runs its permits through a portal that answers one typed address at a time and publishes no dataset. Where to look instead, and what the report gives you in place of it.What seven roll years show that one does notAlameda County publishes its secured roll one fiscal year at a time, back to 2019-20. Read together they are the staircase Proposition 13 builds, and the step where the building sold.How to see a price in a state that discloses noneCalifornia publishes no sale prices. Alameda County publishes the value its documentary transfer tax was computed on, which is the consideration on the deed.How to read an Oakland reportWhat the city publishes, what the county publishes instead, and the one section every other city has that this one cannot.

See it on a real address

Run any Oakland address and the report reads that city's portal live, at the moment you ask. Plans start at $49 a month, billed monthly or annually, and re-reading a report you have run is always free.

See the plans Try an address

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