One address in, one honest answer out
Property Red Flags is built by TimeAI, the team behind data products that turn scattered official records into decisions. The premise is simple: everything in this report is public — FEMA, EPA, USGS and USFWS publish it all — but it lives in a dozen map viewers with different scales, vintages and vocabularies. A buyer two days before an offer deadline doesn’t have time to become a GIS analyst. We do the sweep in one pass and show our work.
How a report is built
- The address is verified, not assumed. We standardize it against US Census Bureau records and you confirm the match. No verified match — no sale.
- Coverage is checked before payment. Each of the ten categories is probed for this location. Gaps are shown up front; insufficient coverage blocks the purchase entirely.
- Ten checks run against primary sources. No resellers, no scraped mirrors where an official service exists. Every query hits the same endpoints the agencies themselves publish.
- Statuses are assigned by fixed rules. Red means a factor that can reasonably change your decision or trigger a professional check. Yellow means present-but-unconfirmed impact. Green means not found in the checked sources — never “safe”. Gray means we don’t know, and says so.
- The verdict is arithmetic, not vibes. It derives purely from category statuses. There is no proprietary composite score anywhere in the product, by design.
What confidence means
Every card carries a confidence level with a reason: high when the source supports property-level conclusions (a point-in-polygon flood zone match), medium when scale or vintage adds uncertainty (community-level wildfire ratings, county-to-utility water mapping), low when we’re reporting a data gap. County-level context is always labeled as such and never silently upgraded to a property-level claim.
The sources
| Source | What it answers |
|---|---|
| FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer | Official flood zones, Special Flood Hazard Areas, map panels |
| USDA Forest Service — Wildfire Risk to Communities | Wildfire hazard potential and community risk ratings |
| USGS Seismic Design Services & Earthquake Catalog | Ground-shaking hazard values and historical earthquakes |
| USGS U.S. Landslide Inventory | Recorded landslide events and mapped landslide areas |
| US Fish & Wildlife — National Wetlands Inventory | Mapped wetlands and deepwater features |
| EPA Facility Registry (Superfund, Brownfields, RCRA) | Cleanup sites, hazardous-waste facilities near the address |
| EPA Toxics Release Inventory & UST Finder | Toxic-release reporters, underground tanks and leak cases |
| EPA Map of Radon Zones | County radon potential designations |
| EPA SDWIS / ECHO drinking water data | Public water systems and their violation history |
| FEMA Disaster Declarations (OpenFEMA) | Federal disaster history by county since 1953 |
| US Census Bureau Geocoder | Address standardization and county/tract identification |
| USGS 3DEP & National Hydrography Dataset | Ground elevation and distance to mapped water |
What this product is not
Not a home inspection, environmental site assessment, title search, appraisal, survey, legal opinion or insurance underwriting decision. It doesn’t sample soil, water or air. Its job is narrower and earlier: tell you which of those professional checks this particular address deserves, with the evidence to justify each one — before you’re contractually committed.
Corrections and versions
Reports are versioned. A purchased report never changes silently: the one free 30-day refresh and any confirmed correction produce a new version with its own date, and the change is logged. Found something off? Every report has a “Report an issue” form reviewed by a person, or write to info@timeai.ai.
The sample report shows every card, source link and limitation exactly as you’d receive them.
Open the sample report