otherwatersflow

Thanks for the example, and congratulations on the land. That sounds like exactly the kind of place this is for. That listing isn't in my data at all, so it's a coverage gap rather than a measurement miss: either it wasn't in this week's listings feed or it was listed after Monday's update. I'll trace it this weekend.

Thank you, that's great to hear. Honestly, the number of properties next to BLM was one of the things that surprised me most when I started building this, there's ~2,700 right now. On the map you can set the land type to BLM to see just those. And since you're always looking: any search can send you a weekly email when new matches turn up (starts Monday). Curious what else you check for on BLM-adjacent land?

Good one, thanks. I think OpenStreetMap has decent bike-trail coverage, so "distance to the nearest trail" is quite doable. It's on the list.

Not yet. The public-land source (USGS PAD-US) does include county/city land, but most of it is small parks, and I set a 50-acre minimum. County forests and large preserves are a good idea though, I'll look at adding those.

Not that one. Parcels come from about 20 states' own statewide GIS services, and from Realie (licensed) for the rest. I'd want to check the license on that Kaggle dataset before using it, since county parcel data comes with all sorts of terms.

That matches my experience next to state game lands in PA. There's a few hunters in season who know where the lines, especially with OnX, Mostly quiet the rest of the year.

That's the flip side of this: private land controlling the way into public land. It's a real problem in a lot of places, and an interesting thing to map someday.

American Prairie in Montana is an example going the other way: a nonprofit buying private land that surround public land and opening them to the public. It's somewhat contentious locally, but it shows how much the private parcels around public land shape who can actually use it.

Thanks, this is useful feedback.

On people crossing over: it depends a great deal on the land. Next to state game lands you'll see hunters in season; next to a big national forest you may rarely see anyone. It's very dependent on individual perspective and location.

Bordering vs adjacent: bordering means the parcel lines actually touch and there's a measured shared edge; adjacent means no shared edge but within about 250 ft (usually a road or a strip of other land in between). You're right that the state pages don't make that clear, and feet is the better unit for a US site. Tho most US geospatial data is published in metric lol.

And fair point on the copy. I run a small design studio and built this in my free time, I leaned on AI for a lot of the site text. The "Why this exists" section on How it works is my own story, but the rest deserves a pass in my own voice.

Mostly Claude Code. I have a background in 3D Design and Geospatial Mapping, the data sources and the decisions about what counts as "bordering" were mine

Thanks, that's really nice to hear. Happy to share:

- Listings: RentCast's API (licensed), pulled weekly.

- Parcel boundaries: state and county GIS services where they publish statewide parcels (about 20 states), and Realie (licensed) for the rest.

- Public land: USGS PAD-US 4.1, filtered to fee-owned, open-access land of 50+ acres.

- Elevation: USGS 3DEP point queries. Roads: Census TIGER. Flood: FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. Wildfire: Forest Service Wildfire Hazard Potential (2023). ZIP search: Census ZCTA centroids.

The free state parcel services were the biggest hunt: every state publishes differently, and a couple that looked open turned out to be test or internal-use-only endpoints.

Hi HN, I built this. Listings that say "borders state land" can't easily be checked: you open the county's GIS viewer and line up parcel lines against public-land maps by hand. I did that a lot while looking for land of my own, then automated it.

How it works, once a week:

1. About 700,000 active U.S. listings come in from a licensed listings API.

2. Each listing near public land gets its county parcel boundary, from state and county GIS services where they publish them and from a licensed parcel provider elsewhere. With no boundary, the page says so and measures from the listing point, but never claims a shared edge.

3. Public land is USGS PAD-US 4.1, narrowed to land an agency actually owns (Category = Fee, so no conservation easements), that's open to the public, and that's at least 50 acres.

4. Parcel and public land are compared in a local metric projection (shapely/geopandas): within (an inholding), bordering (the boundaries touch, and the shared edge is measured in feet), or adjacent (within 75 m, about a road's width).

Each property also gets the size of the connected public land behind it, its elevation (USGS 3DEP), road access (Census TIGER roads), FEMA flood zone and Forest Service wildfire hazard. The output is about 16,000 static pages with Leaflet maps on Cloudflare Pages, rebuilt every Monday on a Mac mini. ZIP search looks the ZIP up in your browser from Census centroids, so nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Things that were harder than expected:

- Lot sizes sometimes arrive in square feet in the acres field. A Birmingham, AL listing came through at 7,000 acres. Sizes are now checked against price, property type and the parcel itself, and corrected or withheld with a note.

- Condo and subdivision listings often resolve to the association's common tract, so a single town lot can appear to share miles of boundary. Those are flagged as shared parcels.

- PAD-US stores some units as one multipart polygon. My first "connected public land" figure for one Montana property was 69.7 million acres, about three-quarters of the state. Units are now split into pieces and joined only where they actually touch.

- Road centerlines and lot lines come from different agencies and are often tens of meters apart, so "does a road touch this parcel" needs a tolerance, and frontage only counts where the boundary runs along the road.

It's free, with no account and no cookies. There are free weekly email alerts for any search, starting Monday. I'd especially like to hear from anyone who has bought rural land: what should it measure that it doesn't?