HouseKnow answers one question: what does the public record say about this address,
before you spend more time or money on it?
Why it exists
Almost everything a listing tells you is about the building. Bedrooms, bathrooms, square
footage, photographs, asking price. Very little of it is about where the building is, and
the things that are about location tend to be the expensive ones to discover late.
That information is public. FEMA maps flood hazard. The EPA keeps a registry of regulated
facilities and a map of radon potential. The USGS models seismic hazard. The Forest Service
models wildfire hazard. The Fish and Wildlife Service maps wetlands. It is all free, and it
is all published in the vocabulary of the agency that collected it, across a dozen systems
that do not talk to each other.
HouseKnow does the looking up and the translating. That is the whole product.
How it works
You give an address. We resolve it with the U.S. Census Bureau's geocoder, then query each
federal source directly for that location. Every answer is normalised into the same shape,
given a plain-English explanation, and labelled with what area it actually covers. Then it
is written into a report with a permanent private link.
Nothing is cached and served as though it were fresh. Every finding carries the date we
retrieved it, and several carry the vintage of the underlying data as well.
Three rules we hold ourselves to
Unavailable is never low risk. When a source cannot answer, the report says
so and says why. FEMA has not mapped every county in the country, and "no flood map exists
here" is a completely different fact from "this location is outside the floodplain". A
product that quietly turns the first into the second is worse than no product.
Area data is labelled as area data. A FEMA flood zone is read at the
address. An EPA radon zone rates an entire county. A FEMA hazard rating describes a census
tract. Presenting those at the same apparent precision would make the report look sharper
than the data behind it, so every finding says what it covers.
There is no overall score. No number out of a hundred, no letter grade, no
rating. A single severe finding matters even when everything else is quiet, and an aggregate
would average away exactly the thing worth seeing.
What HouseKnow is not
It is not a home inspection, an appraisal, a title search, a survey, environmental testing,
an insurance determination or legal advice. It does not visit the property and it cannot
tell you what is wrong with a particular building. It is meant to be read before you book
the people who can.
It also does not promise nationwide access to deeds, liens, mortgages, ownership history,
building permits or code violations. Those records are held county by county, in thousands
of different systems, and no honest product can offer them everywhere.
Who runs it
HouseKnow is operated by Rocketlabs Software LLC. It is independent, and it is not affiliated
with or endorsed by any government agency.
See every data source