About the name
Buyer Be Aware is the brand. Caveat emptor, or “buyer beware,” is the older legal phrase it riffs on.
The phrase puts the burden on the buyer to inspect a house before buying it. We thought the burden was unfair without tools to actually meet it, so we built one. Reports pull flood maps, permits, code violations, ownership and sale history, environmental risk, schools, and insurability into a single page on a specific address.
More on how the data gets pulled is in our methodology page.
Who's behind this
Buyer Be Aware is one person: John, a software developer. No staff, no investors, no data-broker parent company.
I built it because the records that decide a purchase (flood maps, permits, ownership history) are public, but pulling them means a dozen separate .gov sites, and nobody in the transaction is paid to do it for you. So I wrote software that does.
If a report looks wrong, or you want to know whether the data covers your county, email support@buyerbeaware.io. It lands in my inbox, not a ticket queue.
Buyer-paid
No agent referral fees. The buyer pays once and the report is theirs. No upsells, no monthly subscription.
Public records first
FEMA, EPA, USGS, Census, state regulators, FBI UCR. Authoritative sources, with citations. Where a record is uncertain, we say so.
One address, one report
Address-specific, not generic. Each report is generated on demand for a single US residential address.
Try it for free
The free check returns the FEMA flood zone and assigned school district for any US address, no signup. The paid report adds 25+ more sources.