What should we send you?
Your plan includes the daily filing lists, and you have not chosen any yet. San Diego 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.
San Diego property intelligence
Know the block
before it becomes
your block.
The city already knows this building — the county's assessed value and the day it was anchored, what changed hands on the block, how it is zoned and which community plan governs it, the hazard layers under it, the traffic on the nearest counted street, the police, 311 and permit record, 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 San Diego, 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 county and the city already have on the building, before you write an offer.San Diego has no point-of-sale disclosure this report can read. What it does carry is the county's record of the parcel — the assessed land and improvement value and the date of the last recorded document — the zoning and the community plan that govern what may be built, and the hazard layers that decide what it costs to insure.
- Walk in already knowing the rest.What was reported and approved on these streets — police incidents, 311 requests and development approvals, 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.California requires a seismic retrofit programme of some cities and San Diego is not one of them, so there is no retrofit list here and this report does not imply one. The hazard layers it can read — fire severity, floodplain, steep slope, mapped faults, recorded burn history and the evacuation zone — are in the report, read at the point of the address.
- What your tax bill will actually be.The county's assessed land and improvement value for the parcel, and the date of the last recorded document that anchored it. One roll rather than a run of years, so the report gives the anchoring date rather than drawing the staircase.
- Ten years of the surrounding blocks. Police incident reports, 311 requests and development approvals issued, each set against what an average area of the same size in San Diego records — so a number means something. — 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, and the region's own copy of the same map beside it with its panel id.
And four more, reading the same record their own way
Renting a place
San Diego has no rent control, so the report does not pretend to test for it. What it does have is what was reported on these streets — police incidents, 311 requests and approvals issued — against the citywide rate, so you can see what kind of block it is before you sign.
Owning or managing buildings
Your own building's assessed land and improvement value with the date of the last recorded document, the base zone and the community plan that governs what may be built, and the six hazard layers read at your address.
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 San Diego'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 600 B 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 — assessed land and improvement, the date it was last recorded, the unit count and the lot acreage — the base zone and community plan, six hazard layers read at the address, and what was reported and approved on the blocks around it.
A flat or condominium
The same area record as a house, and the same county roll: a condominium is its own parcel here, with its own assessed value and its own recorded document. The association's own file is not a public record this report reads, and it says so rather than leaving a blank.
An apartment building
The county roll treats the building as one parcel, so the assessed value and the recorded document are the building's rather than a unit's, and the unit count is the county's. San Diego publishes no readable code-enforcement register, so what a landlord has been cited for is not in this report and is named as absent.
A shop, office or warehouse
Every area record still applies: police, 311 and approvals by year, the hazard and flood zones, the zoning and community plan, and what changed hands on the blocks 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. San Diego 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 600 B 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 6,078 is a lot, so every figure is set against what an average area of the same size in San Diego records.
33× the San Diego average
An average area this size holds 184, and this works out at about 2 a day.
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 complaint is not a finding. About three per cent of incident rows carry no coordinate and are absent rather than placed. An assessment is not a valuation — and that last one is worth real money, so it sits against the figure it qualifies rather than in a footer nobody reads.
An assessment is not a valuation. Under Proposition 13 this is the 2024 purchase price adjusted by at most about two per cent a year, and it has been anchored for 2 years — a short anchoring, and the report says the length rather than implying a gap. This county publishes one roll rather than a value per year, so the staircase that makes the anchoring visible is not available here.
What San Diego filed today
Office and up choose freely from all five. 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.
5 lists, and you choose which arrive.
What is being built
Demolition, new construction and serious money.
- Building permits issuedCombination and building permits issued — the approvals that precede real construction rather than a swap of like for like.
- Solar approvals issuedPhotovoltaic approvals under SB 379, which the state requires the city to issue over the counter. Fifteen thousand on the record in under three years, and a roof crew behind each one.
- Electrical, plumbing and mechanicalPermits issued on their own rather than as part of a building permit — the small jobs, by trade, in the order the city issued them.
Condition and compliance
What inspectors found, and what tenants say is wrong.
- Construction noise permitsA permit to make noise outside ordinary hours, which is the earliest published sign that work near a building is about to get loud.
- Traffic control permitsA permit to close or narrow a lane or a footway. Twenty-six thousand of them: the most reliable published signal that a street is about to be dug up.
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
24 new filings, 2 on more than one list
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Scan the Block <hello@scantheblock.com> · 6:30 AM
24 new filings on your lists
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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: this city publishes its whole transactional record as files rather than as a queryable feed, so every count on the block carries the day its copy was downloaded rather than claiming it was read at the moment you asked; the police department moved to the NIBRS standard in 2020 and the report counts from there rather than stitching two vocabularies together; and the county publishes one assessment roll rather than a table per year, so the staircase Proposition 13 builds cannot be drawn and the date the value was anchored on is given instead.
The spine is public records — the City of San Diego's own published files for police incidents, 311 requests and development approvals, SANDAG's regional services for the address register, the parcel roll, zoning, community plans and the hazard layers, the U.S. Census, the FCC's broadband filings, and the federal sources listed opposite. The city half is downloaded and held, and every count says the day its copy was taken. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Police incident reports (NIBRS) | 2020 | 531,461 |
| 311 service requests | 2016 | 2,577,900 |
| Development approvals issued | 2024 | 140,798 |
| Address points (city of San Diego) | — | 461,400 |
| Parcels (county roll) | — | 1,089,758 |
| Zoning polygons (base zones) | — | 3,706 |
| Community plan areas | — | 61 |
| Historic districts | — | 30 |
| Code enforcement violations | — | published, 8 years stale |
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 San Diego, and most of what makes a report useful here does not exist anywhere else.
The things that only exist here
A region that publishes its address register with the assessor's parcel number already in it, so nothing has to be bridged. Fifty-odd community plans that govern land use more tightly than the base zone does. And a whole transactional record published as files rather than as a feed, which is why every count here carries a date. None of it is in a national aggregator's schema.
Read from the city's own registers
The address comes from the region's own register and the parcel record from the county roll as SANDAG publishes it — live, at the moment you ask. The block counts come from the city's own files, refreshed twice a day, and each says when. 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.
No San Diego address can be looked up here yet. If you want to know when it 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.not measured as a completeness ramp, because these are files rather than feeds: the city publishes on its own cadence and this report refreshes its copy twice a day, so every count says the day its copy was taken instead of estimating a lag it cannot seefiled, 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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