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▲ otherwatersflow 3 hours ago

Hi HN, I built this. Listings that say "borders state land" can't easily be checked: you open the county's GIS viewer and line up parcel lines against public-land maps by hand. I did that a lot while looking for land of my own, then automated it.

How it works, once a week:

1. About 700,000 active U.S. listings come in from a licensed listings API.

2. Each listing near public land gets its county parcel boundary, from state and county GIS services where they publish them and from a licensed parcel provider elsewhere. With no boundary, the page says so and measures from the listing point, but never claims a shared edge.

3. Public land is USGS PAD-US 4.1, narrowed to land an agency actually owns (Category = Fee, so no conservation easements), that's open to the public, and that's at least 50 acres.

4. Parcel and public land are compared in a local metric projection (shapely/geopandas): within (an inholding), bordering (the boundaries touch, and the shared edge is measured in feet), or adjacent (within 75 m, about a road's width).

Each property also gets the size of the connected public land behind it, its elevation (USGS 3DEP), road access (Census TIGER roads), FEMA flood zone and Forest Service wildfire hazard. The output is about 16,000 static pages with Leaflet maps on Cloudflare Pages, rebuilt every Monday on a Mac mini. ZIP search looks the ZIP up in your browser from Census centroids, so nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Things that were harder than expected:

- Lot sizes sometimes arrive in square feet in the acres field. A Birmingham, AL listing came through at 7,000 acres. Sizes are now checked against price, property type and the parcel itself, and corrected or withheld with a note.

- Condo and subdivision listings often resolve to the association's common tract, so a single town lot can appear to share miles of boundary. Those are flagged as shared parcels.

- PAD-US stores some units as one multipart polygon. My first "connected public land" figure for one Montana property was 69.7 million acres, about three-quarters of the state. Units are now split into pieces and joined only where they actually touch.

- Road centerlines and lot lines come from different agencies and are often tens of meters apart, so "does a road touch this parcel" needs a tolerance, and frontage only counts where the boundary runs along the road.

It's free, with no account and no cookies. There are free weekly email alerts for any search, starting Monday. I'd especially like to hear from anyone who has bought rural land: what should it measure that it doesn't?

▲someothherguyy 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 1. About 700,000 active U.S. listings come in from a licensed listings API.

What API is that? It looks like you or the data broker are violating some NAR / MLS / State Compliance rules to me. You might want to look into those.

▲qzw 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not sure if you meant it that way, but this comes across as a bit hostile. Do you care to share some specific rules you think are being violated?

▲someothherguyy an hour ago | parent [-]

There are gazillion compliance laws, etc, but basic copyright laws commonly cover these things.

https://www.rentcast.io/terms-api

> You and We acknowledge and agree that, in the event of a third-party claim arising out of or relating to your access to or use of the RentCast API, or your possession, use, disclosure, display, resale, or distribution of the API Data, including any claim that such activities infringe any third-party’s intellectual property rights or do not comply with applicable laws and/or regulations, you, and not Us, will be responsible for the investigation, defense, settlement, and discharge of any such claim. You will promptly notify Us in writing of any such claim.

▲rafram an hour ago | parent [-]

Database copyright isn't really a thing in the US.

▲otherwatersflow 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

▲orphea 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Which LLM did you use?

▲otherwatersflow an hour ago | parent [-]

Mostly Claude Code. I have a background in 3D Design and Geospatial Mapping, the data sources and the decisions about what counts as "bordering" were mine

▲derekhong an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]