Type an address or drop a pin on a vacant lot and you get six answers in about ten seconds, pulled live from the same public records a title company, an engineer and a lender will pull later. This page is the full list of where every number comes from and how old it might be.
Read this first. This is a screening tool, not a determination. It tells you which lots are worth an hour of your time and which ones to walk away from. It does not replace a survey, a wetland delineation or a call to the county, and nothing here should be the last check you do before you send money.
From the US Fish and Wildlife Service National Wetlands Inventory. We ask two questions: is wetland mapped inside the parcel boundary, and is any mapped within 500 feet. The second one matters because wetland next door still drives setbacks, drainage and permitting even when your lot reads clean.
The inventory is aerial interpretation, not a field survey. Plenty of Florida lots carry wetland that was never mapped, and some mapped polygons have been legally released. A delineation is the only thing that settles it.
From FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer, the same source your lender's flood certificate comes from. You get the zone letter, the base flood elevation where FEMA publishes one, and whether the lot sits inside a special flood hazard area. Zone X means no mandatory flood insurance. Zone AE or VE means you are building to an elevation, and the cost of fill is real money.
Coverage is nationwide. Some rural counties have no digital panel at all, and we say so rather than reporting a blank as a pass.
From county parcel and utility service layers. Whether water and sewer are mapped to the property, who the franchise holder is, the zoning code and the lot size. Where no service is mapped we say to plan on a well and a septic system, because that is the honest reading, and it is a number you have to put in your offer.
From Florida county property appraiser records and the Florida Department of Revenue statewide roll. Current owner, mailing address, last sale price and date, prior sales, and the county's assessed value.
One detail most tools get wrong: when a deed covered several parcels at once, the sale price is for all of them, not the lot you are looking at. We detect that and say so, because a $17,000 sale that was really five lots will wreck your comps.
Florida scrub jay is a listed species, and habitat on a lot can mean a survey, a permit and a long wait. We read county habitat layers where a county publishes one, and fall back to the USFWS consultation area where it does not. Where no layer covers the point we call it unknown, not clear.
Soil from the USDA soil survey, elevation and slope from USGS 3DEP. Drainage class, depth to water table, whether the soil is on the hydric list, plus the elevation and how much fall there is across the lot.
Most platted Florida lots come back poorly drained. That is normal, it is what Florida flatwoods are, and builders price fill for it every day. What you are watching for is the step past that: ponded, depressional, or frequently flooded.
| Answer | Source | Coverage | How current |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flood zone | FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer | Nationwide | Updated as FEMA revises maps |
| Wetlands | USFWS National Wetlands Inventory | Nationwide | Varies by region, often years old |
| Soil | USDA Soil Data Access | Nationwide | Soil survey, stable |
| Elevation and slope | USGS 3DEP | Nationwide | Lidar, updated by state |
| Parcel, owner, sales | County appraisers, Florida DOR roll | All 67 Florida counties | Live from the county, or the yearly state roll |
| Zoning | County parcel layers | Charlotte, Lee, Marion | As the county publishes |
| Utilities | County franchise and service layers | Lee County | As the county publishes |
| Scrub jay | County layers, else USFWS | Florida | As published |
| Imagery | Esri World Imagery | Nationwide | Varies by area |
Flood zone, wetlands, soil and elevation work anywhere in the United States. Owner, mailing address, value and sales history come from the Florida Department of Revenue parcel roll, which covers all 67 counties.
Zoning and utilities are a different matter. The state does not collect them, so they come from whichever county publishes a layer we can read. Today that means zoning in Charlotte, Lee and Marion, and utilities in Lee. We add counties one system at a time, because every one of them publishes differently and there is no shortcut. Where a county has no layer, the app tells you it is unknown rather than showing a blank you might read as an absence.
County GIS servers go down, usually overnight while they reload their data. When that happens we say the county system is not answering rather than showing you an empty card. A blank that looks like an answer is worse than no answer, and on a vacant lot the difference can cost you a deal.
When a county is down we fall back to the Florida Department of Revenue statewide roll, which carries owner, value and lot size but not zoning or utilities, and we label it with the year so you know what you are reading.
No. Only FEMA and your local floodplain administrator can determine a flood zone for a specific structure. We show you what FEMA's published map says about the point, which is how you decide whether to keep looking at the lot.
Not on its own, and anything that claims to is selling you something. It tells you the five or six things that most often make a lot unbuildable, quickly enough that you can check thirty lots in the time it used to take to check one.
They come from county GIS and they are approximate. They routinely differ from a surveyed boundary by several feet, sometimes much more. Use them to see where the lot roughly sits, never to site a building.
Because most of them do not. Addresses are assigned when something is built. That is why you can search by parcel number or drop a pin on the map, and why a tool built for houses usually cannot find raw land at all.
Flood, wetlands, soil and elevation do, everywhere in the country. The county level data does not yet. We are adding states one at a time rather than claiming coverage we do not have.
Check a lot Address, parcel number, or drop a pin. About ten seconds.