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 is the fire hazard zone, and what is the ground under it?
What work was permitted, and what was not?
What will my property tax actually be?
Is it in a flood or liquefaction zone?
When was the assessment last anchored, and to what?
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 itThe state's fire hazard severity zone and whose responsibility area it falls in, the region's copy of the federal floodplain with its panel, mapped steep slope, any mapped active fault, whether a recorded wildfire has reached the point, and the evacuation zone an order would name. A layer that maps no zone here says so; 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 nearbyEvery parcel within the radius whose most recent recorded document falls in the window, with its assessed value. California discloses no sale price, so the figure is the assessment, which resets to the price on transfer.

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

What a San Diego assessment actually isAnchored to the last sale, capped at about two per cent a year, and published as one roll rather than a run of years. Why a seller's bill says nothing about a buyer's.Two registers San Diego keeps that most cities do notWho is trading on the block, and how much of the street is let by the night.How to read a San Diego reportWhat the city publishes, what the region publishes, and why this city's counts carry a date the others do not.Why this city's numbers say when they were takenSan Diego publishes its whole transactional record as files with no way to query them. So this report holds a copy, and tells you how old it is.

See it on a real address

Run any San Diego 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