The problem it solves
The information a home buyer needs is public, but it is scattered across a dozen government systems that were never designed to talk to each other. FEMA holds the flood maps. The county holds the permit history. The state education agency holds school performance. The police department holds incident data. Insurance pricing depends on all of it.
In practice almost nobody checks all of that before making the largest purchase of their life — the inspection happens after the offer, and it only covers what a human can see in two hours. BeforeYouBuy Homes closes that gap by assembling the paper trail into one report, at the point in the process where it can still change the decision.
What is in a report
- Flood risk — FEMA flood zone, elevation context and historical claim exposure for the parcel.
- Permit history — pulled from live municipal permitting systems where the jurisdiction publishes them, so unpermitted work and past structural repairs surface.
- School ratings — assigned schools with performance scoring, nationwide.
- Crime data — neighborhood-level incident context.
- Insurance cost signals — what the risk profile implies for premiums.
Every number carries its source. When a jurisdiction does not publish a usable feed, the report says so rather than filling the gap with an estimate — a design decision that costs coverage and buys trust.
How we built it
BeforeYouBuy Homes is a web platform sitting on top of our own property data infrastructure. The hard engineering is upstream: hundreds of county and municipal endpoints, each with its own format, rate limits, authentication quirks and outages, normalized into one parcel-keyed model.
The platform is built as a modern server-rendered web application with an AI assistant layered on top, so a buyer can ask questions about their report in plain language and get answers grounded strictly in the report's own data rather than in the model's imagination.
It is powered by Ammasa, the property data API we operate — the same infrastructure is available to other companies directly.