I live next to a State Park. It sounded really cool when I bought the house. No neighbors! Privacy! There is a trail accessible from my properly that goes into some woods, which you only want to be in during the Fall / Spring because the ticks and chiggers are intense.
The biggest issue with sharing a border with the state is the fence line. Technically it's on them to maintain. The woods are filled with mostly 200 foot trees. They exist right up to my property and fall every year during big storms. There goes the fence line. I have dogs so the fence is important. Otherwise they run out into the woods that have licensed bow-hunting during the Winter.
In practice its impossible to get the fence fixed. You are working through layers of bureaucracy and mismanagement. There is no vested interest from a parks service to work well with hundreds of neighbors individually. I'd build fence lines myself, and could easily pay for it, but it's the upkeep of those fences that would be difficult because so many trees (really, it's every year) fall down from their side.
My main point is that sharing a properly line with the government is more like sharing a properly line with nobody. You may as well own that land. Don't expect any upkeep and go in with eyes open.
>>The biggest issue with sharing a border with the state is the fence line
Is it the physical blockade that the fence provides or just "where is the boundary?" - my guess is that it's both. While physical fence is hard to sustain due to trees falling but could there be an electronic solution for keeping the boundary line intact by putting some sort of gadgets underground which you can always ping to see where is the boundary?
Hey, I mean this in as kind a way as possible, but I actually don’t think the government should pay for the fence line!
If you wouldn’t even pay for it yourself, as pretty much the sole beneficiary and someone who could afford it but would rather the money go elsewhere, why would it make sense for other taxpayers to pay for it?
Isn’t the premise of “you may as well own that land” the entire appeal of living next to public land anyway?
My family used to live next to state land. The state can be very pissy about its land. If the fence line is on the state land, which it almost certainly is barring a surveying error when it was put up, it is entirely possible that if he fixed it, he would actually get in trouble with the state. Hopefully not actual legal trouble... but only hopefully, certainly not a "oh they would never bother". Oh they most certainly do sometimes decide to bother about the most random things.
My default presumption, without checking with them directly, is not only that it would not be allowed, but that this is also very much not a "better to ask forgiveness than permission" situation either. Even just asking the question can draw attention from them you may not want.
The ready accessibility of the land is advantageous in some ways, but as neighbors the state can be quite nasty. Your other neighbors don't tend to have anywhere near the regulatory firepower to make sure you comply with what they want.
I think they’re suggesting building their own fence on their own property and eating the cost (as the sole beneficiary) of maintaining it through tree falls.
> If the fence line is on the state land, which it almost certainly is barring a surveying error when it was put up, it is entirely possible that if he fixed it, he would actually get in trouble with the state
Trying to maintain the state’s fence is not a good idea.
You would build your own fence on your side of the property set back by a couple feet.
I'd also assume the fence is on state land if its theirs to maintain. That doesn't stop someone from putting up their own fence on their side of the property line though.
You couldn't integrate it into theirs, so you'd be looking at having to fence in the entire space you want the dogs in because the gap you'd leave would have to be big enough for a dog.
Which is hardly the end of the world, but it can definitely grind the gears to be spending thousands when you could fix the problem for several hundreds, if not perhaps several tens, of dollars if they wouldn't be assholes about it. But I would absolutely advise anyone in that situation to spend the thousands and not bank on the state not being assholes about it.
I can also add that you can't even be sure that if you got away with it for years that you will continue to get away with it. The particular issue that my father got into a bit of hassle with the state about is that he accidentally put a pole barn across the state line. Didn't mean to, but he misread the survey markers. Fortunately, they let him remediate it at his expense without pursuing the matter any further legally... but it means they did, after several years of it being there, come through a with a survey team and verify that nobody on the border was crossing into their land, and anything they found they made the residents fix no matter how many years the deviation had been there. All the laws about such thing between two citizens mean nothing to the state.
> You couldn't integrate it into theirs, so you'd be looking at having to fence in the entire space you want the dogs in because the gap you'd leave would have to be big enough for a dog.
These properties only border public land on one side.
If someone is trying to fence their dogs into their property, it’s implied that they’re already fencing every other part of the property. They would be completing it with a back section.
Pretty much my exact thoughts as well. Heaven forbid a property owning pet owner be responsible for protecting their pets on their property. WTF has this world come to?
The government often claims exclusive authority and responsibility over the land but never acts on the responsibility they've asserted except to prevent anyone else from doing so. You can be required to pay a significant fee and file reams of paperwork to fix things for free that the government is expressly obligated to fix but never does.
It is common in parts of the US for government land to be illegally maintained by locals at their own expense because the government fails to do so. The impacted people aren't left with many other choices. There is little recourse when the government claims sole authority but also neglects its responsibilities under that authority.
This has been an issue in land management for as long as I've been alive. It sort of works to the extent the government is oddly incurious about someone else illegally doing their job for them. But every so often a bureaucrat with idle hands will decide to make an example of someone for illegal maintenance without addressing the underlying problem.
> Hey, I mean this in as kind a way as possible, but I actually don’t think the government should pay for the fence line!
Which is a fine option, but it should be something agreed to by both parties. You can't just hand over a cost like that, and if you buy property with some kind of agreement this choice is baked into the original price. It makes perfect sense for the government to uphold agreements it has made.
Secondly - if they did own the fence line, it'd be on the government to come and fix it when one of their trees breaks it, surely?
> It makes perfect sense for the government to uphold agreements it has made.
The key question is what is actually in the agreement. 'The state will maintain the fence' doesn't indicate the level of maintenance or the timeliness of said maintenance, it just means the neighbor isn't allowed to do it.
> Secondly - if they did own the fence line, it'd be on the government to come and fix it when one of their trees breaks it, surely?
From discussions I've seen, generally there's no legal responsibility for tree falls, unless there's neglegence like ignoring a clearly failing tree. But leaving a forest to do whatever the forest wants doesn't feel like neglegence.
Your position is that if the government builds a fence it is de facto obligated to maintain it to any abutting property owner's standards in perpetuity?
There is no agreement whatsoever, that's the point. No agreement was made or mentioned. The mere existence of a fence on government property does not constitute an agreement to maintain said fence.
I'm not stipulating anything about abutting property. I'm saying that if the government builds something on their land it is theirs to do with and is on them to maintain it. If they decide to no longer maintain it, that is also their decision. To clarify my point, if someone bought property when the government's fence was intact believing it will always remain so they did not have to build a fence, it is a bad decision on the neighbor's part and not the government's. If you require a fence, the only way to ensure you have a fence is to build and maintain your own fence. There are plenty of examples of the government building something on their land and then walking away and abandoning it when it is no longer needed.
>The mere existence of a fence on government property does not constitute an agreement to maintain said fence.
Can you imagine the sneering and hand wringing that would ensue in the comments if you tried to make such an argument about private property?
If a private landowner failed to maintain anything that was created by man (as opposed to nature) they'd say things like "public nuisance", "blighted", "antisocial" and all the other buzzword people of that bent love to use.
I don't really care what the standard is. If some standard is good enough to be worth legislating enforcing then it ought to apply equally to all land owners regardless of public or private.
It seems like everyone here is literally conjuring up first an agreement, and now laws out of thin air. What law is the state exempting itself?
Anyway tree law is super, super well-established and it works the same way for private parties. Your neighbor's trees are none of your business until they are on your property, and then they're exclusively your business (except you can't structurally damage or kill the tree e.g. by cutting roots that cross onto your property).
You clearly have some strange bone to pick. You should pick it elsewhere.
> Isn’t the premise of “you may as well own that land” the entire appeal of living next to public land anyway?
If you start actively managing it (removing invasive species, dead trees etc.) the state can take a more active interest at any time and sue/fine you into oblivion.
It sounds like your expectations on your neighbour are way too high. Especially since them doing "their" part on par with your expectations benefits mostly just you.
When your neighbour isn't as invested as you in maintaining the border or has other annoyances you are better off leaving some buffer zone that allows to isolate yourself from the border and whatever road, river, canal, forest or loud or busy place is at the other side.
At that point he may be able to sue the state to fix it (or have insurance do it).
And if it’s your fence you can build one of the ones that’s cheap and easy to replace. I wouldn’t be shocked if you could put chain link back up after some straightening. You could use the downed tree to fix the fence if it was split log (not so good at keeping dogs in though)
Just to mention something people might not have ever considered, but basic home owner's insurance does not cover fences as they are not part of the house. I'm sure someone would be more than happy to provide additional coverage for additional fees that would cover a fence, but it's something to keep in mind. I know multiple people that were oblivious to this until their fence was damaged from trees falling on them during a storm.
So move your fence 50 feet away from the property line. Obviously, this means you need to find a big property if it's adjacent to state land with large trees.
That's a good point. What about wetlands? My property has a terrible mosquito problem and I just found out there is a pond/swamp hidden in the brush. Since it's my property, I'll take steps to reduce the mosquito problem next year but if it was public land, that'd probably wouldn't be acceptable.
If you throw some mosquito dunks with BT into any given water body small enough it doesn't have a name, nobody is going to come after you. I think it's probably a pretty prosocial thing to do, unless I'm missing something
My internal dialog can imagine my biologist wife yelling at you already.
Honestly i do not know the full scope of this one, but if there's one thing I've learnt from observing her work over the last decade...it's humans need to stop adding chemicals to water bodies with the goal of thinking they're helping something.
Note it's not a chemical agent; its bacterial spores that infect and kill mosquito larvae! I'm pretty sure they're not harmful to anything that isn't a mosquito, blackfly, gnat, or midge. Though midges are important to pond ecosystems as a source of food for fish and dragonflies and stuff? Idunno, ask this guy's wife.
I can imagine her having some long explanation about the unknown risks of man spreading this substance, even if its not a chemical agent. I lean on the edge of listening to Grandpa Simpson on these kind of things: https://i.imgur.com/MdjduDH.png
It might well be safe, but the question is what are the downstream affects of reducing the population of mosquitos (or other bugs in the water that this substance impacts). Maybe they've exclusively positive, but I assure you determining that is no walk in the park.
It depends. In North America our worst mosquitos (the disease carrying ones) aren't native, they are from the old world. I think everybody would be fine if they were no more.
>I think it's probably a pretty prosocial thing to do, unless I'm missing something
Also massively illegal if you live anywhere that has a state level wetlands protection type law and the enforcement authority decides to exercise their discretion to make your life hell.
Wetlands laws and rules (non-criminal code generally, but wetlands are some of the worst) are written in a way to make RICO look like a meticulously scoped out piece of technical legislation.
In what state? Last I knew, the State Parks in most US states were miserably underfunded - so quick fixes (for pretty much anything, not just fences) just ain't gonna happen.
And what's the legal status of the fallen trees? In a fair number of places a 200' tree, already down, might be kinda valuable.
Mostly it doesn't pay to process individual lumber. If it's near a property it may have metal in it, and it's likely wood you can already find at a nearby lumber yard. If it's a particularly beautiful large tree, you have a use for slabs, can rent a skidsteer/forklift, and don't mind waiting a few years for it to season, it can be worth it. Or if you have a hankering for very large boards of unusual wood.
This is super unreliable. I clicked through a few of the listings and none of them were what this site seemed to think they were. In one case it said a unit had 50 acres of land, and when I clicked through it was a two-bedroom condo with no land. Another said it had 1400 acres of land and when I clicked through it was 0.14.
The issue is how the MLS (multiple listing service) allows listing of condos/apartments/etc. Since each unit has no actual land to itself, they're allowed to list the total land that the complex sits on for each unit. There's also basically no oversight or correction on what gets listed, so listing agents have no reason to be accurate or perspicacious.
Everyone then scrapes or subscribes to the MLS data. It's why you have a dozen identical realty sites: Zillow, Realtor, Redfin, Trulia, etc.
This is interesting though not really for me. I know that without trails, I won't be walking past the end of my property onto other property. I've probably spent a year of my life building trails on my own property.
When I look for a parcel of land, I'm also interested in proximity to healthcare, groceries, airports (bad!), motor sports, shooting ranges; general steepness of the property particularly at the roadway (too steep makes the property unusable), topography in general (any flat spots to build a house?); availability of power; water features; bikability (checked by looking at Strava's heatmap); average number of days temperature > 85F; average number of days temperature < 30F. There's more but this list is long enough already.
I owned a house on 60 acres in Washington State that was bordered on 2 sides by state land (WA DNR). It was generally great and the only time I closed my gate was actually these two weeks of every year for regular rifle deer season. I never had issues with hunters coming on my property (I did give some friends permission to bow hunt). My driveway was about a mile long and had to cross DNR land to reach my property, but I had an easement. The easements typically have a 35 year expiration and it would take extreme circumstances for the state not to renew an existing easement. Complete and total privacy is really nice, but it's certainly a lot of effort and money to maintain a remote property of that size with a large house. I had to travel to SF a lot for work and that was certainly not ideal: 2.5 hour drive minimum to a tiny airport that only served Seattle, then on to SF.
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.
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.
One big issue: not having a price and acreage range selectors means you see a lot of 0.2acre lots and $8mm parcels which I'm assuming most of us wouldn't be looking for
I know some folks to have a cabin that they use seasonally that borders national forest land. First of all, it's gorgeous and being able to open their back gate and walk out into unspoiled wilderness is awesome. But it does have some drawbacks; their biggest "neighbors" are cattle ranchers who let their cows graze in the forest. The cows will often wander onto their property, and the cowboys are not shy about breaking fences or cutting wire to get their cattle back out. Since they're only there for part of the year, they've also had issues with hunters breaking the locks and using their cabin as a place to hang out while they're not there.
Surprisingly easy to manage, though. You'd think that things like propane delivery and septic system service would be hard to hire when you're miles out of town, up a steep logging trail, and across a home-made bridge, but the local businesses are used to it. I genuinely don't know how they find the place most of the time.
If you have public land do you just have people walking over the property boundary onto your parcel all the time? Especially in the more populous states like NJ some of them I'd expect that to be pretty common, interesting idea as a thing that people search out specifically for though.
Regardless, neat site. Couple things, first maybe a disclaimer on why you would want this on the home page? And on the state page itself I can't tell how bordering is different than adjacent. IMO just calling it "within 75m" would be better, and since this is for the US consider making it based on feet :p. Also, I would recommend that at least for user facing strings though you give it a little TLC and remove the really really obvious Claudisms
> official boundary maps, not listing descriptions.
> An analysis of publicly available boundary data — not a survey, and not a listing service
plus everything on the How It Works page is extremely obviously LLM.
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.
It's weird how people think navigating through undeveloped land is like walking across a parking lot. Brush, branches, thorns, downed trees, uneven ground, etc can make walking through undeveloped land difficult to impossible.
Really depends on the land in question. Some forests have thick underbrush, some are almost completely clear. A lot of undeveloped land isn't even forest - swamp, desert, rocky mountains. Sometimes it's far easier to navigate than a parking lot, IME.
This is cool, but isn't owning property bordering public land undesirable?
Sure, there's the ability to hike directly from your home, but I imagine you'll regularly have people wander on to your property. And if something illegal happens on your property by a different party, you might be liable.
Seems like the cons outweigh the pros. Or is there something I'm missing?
I think for an individual owner there are some downsides, but if you're a big developer buying a large piece of land it can become a selling point. There's a private residential development in my state where they completely enveloped the entrance to an existing state park trail/boardwalk. So to access it, you actually have to go through this gated community. Supposedly anyone can go in if they say they're going to the state park, but I'm not sure that's true in practice and you have to interact with the private guard gate and show ID. I was able to go in with my family, but we look like a typical suburban family, so that doesn't mean others wouldn't have more trouble. It's a pretty gross case of effectively privatizing a public resource.
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.
It means a group of people unlikely to be stopped and turned away at that gate. My assumption is white, middle class, dressed boring but clean, decent car without damage, with young kid(s), no/light tattoos, no motorcyckes in the back and no drug/booze/gun stickers or visible stuff. Basically someone the Karen's won't call to complain about.
Other people deserve access to public land too but might not pass the vibe check of the private guards, which is what op was lamenting as well.
That would be a typical f150 family. A typical suburban family travels in a convoy of chevy suburbans. A luxury suburban family travels in a convoy of escalades.
> but I imagine you'll regularly have people wander on to your property
Well, that depends on how large and obvious your property is.
Assuming you have a typical suburban 1/2 acre or 1 acre property, the simplest thing to do is put up a fence, or otherwise make sure that there are no trails that go over the property you use.
Otherwise, you need some kind of bounds marking and obvious "no trespassing" signs.
FWIW: The site identified public lands near my house that have a lot of trails on it. There are trails that go right behind peoples' yards, and most of them either have fences or sheds that make it obvious where the bounds are.
That is going to depend on location. Most public land is way way out. There are often only a handful of visitors per month, and most of them won't get close to your land. Most of them are locals who know where the bounds are (and probably know you)
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.
It means that nobody can build more houses "up the road" from you. That's the primary benefit. Unless the government sells the land, which this government has been trying to do in various places. This one issue is responsible for much of the reduction in republican support in Montana, for example
If you want similar benefits in more urban environments, consider property next to a cemetery. The neighbors are quiet and the lot is very unlikely to be turned into a strip mall.
I had a browse around a few states like Indiana and North Carolina, and was able to find plenty of low cost lots, even large ones, but the general problem is that they are miles away from civilization and on tiny local roads that may become an issue in winter.
It'd be useful to filter by proximity to a larger city, or airport.
Very cool idea though - some amazing large lots with beautiful views if you don't mind being pretty isolated.
This is super cool. I love this use of public data to do something cool. The page seems like it's biggest value is to help potential property buyers find property they wouldn't easily be able to otherwise (that's what I like about it). Given that, seems like being able to filter on cost and size of lot would be useful filters on top.
Yes! As another Pennsylvanian, this is a hard requirement for my forever home. The idea that I’d go all-in on a large property in an undeveloped area, only for the surrounding land to get developed or demolished is scary. State game lands is a way to protect against that outcome.
Also a concern is proximity to fracking and now data centers. Not sure how to see if neighbors sold their underground…
As an anecdote, my parent’s home, where I grew up, is a small plot along my town’s watershed property. When the price of lumber went up recently, the town council conveniently remembered that the watershed property was once a massive “tree farm,” and since has leveled all of the surrounding woods. We never expected this. It has been emotionally crushing.
Gonna have the same "issue" with private lands. Over the 20+ years I owned a tree farm in rural Oregon, numerous of the nearby parcels were clearcut. This has benefits too. One day I was up on my ridge and was surprised to see a mountain I had never seen before because the ridge to the north was just clearcut.
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.
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?
> You and We acknowledge and agree that, in the event of a third-party claim arising out of or relating to your access to or use of the RentCast API, or your possession, use, disclosure, display, resale, or distribution of the API Data, including any claim that such activities infringe any third-party’s intellectual property rights or do not comply with applicable laws and/or regulations, you, and not Us, will be responsible for the investigation, defense, settlement, and discharge of any such claim. You will promptly notify Us in writing of any such claim.
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
I'd love to chat to you about this. I have been solo building in the real estate space for about 5 years now. I've finally got to a point where I make a roughly market salary from it, and I'm starting to venture wider into providing a listing service for everyone from FSBO's to large brokerages. Theres a huge opportunity to displace the position Zillow et al have, but it's riddled with legal challenges and risk (They've done a great job of making it hard to break in).
If you're up for a chat, please ping me! This is pretty cool and I'm wondering if theres a collaboration, or if I can straight up use some of what you've made.
First, this is cool! Well done.
I live next to a State Park. It sounded really cool when I bought the house. No neighbors! Privacy! There is a trail accessible from my properly that goes into some woods, which you only want to be in during the Fall / Spring because the ticks and chiggers are intense.
The biggest issue with sharing a border with the state is the fence line. Technically it's on them to maintain. The woods are filled with mostly 200 foot trees. They exist right up to my property and fall every year during big storms. There goes the fence line. I have dogs so the fence is important. Otherwise they run out into the woods that have licensed bow-hunting during the Winter.
In practice its impossible to get the fence fixed. You are working through layers of bureaucracy and mismanagement. There is no vested interest from a parks service to work well with hundreds of neighbors individually. I'd build fence lines myself, and could easily pay for it, but it's the upkeep of those fences that would be difficult because so many trees (really, it's every year) fall down from their side.
My main point is that sharing a properly line with the government is more like sharing a properly line with nobody. You may as well own that land. Don't expect any upkeep and go in with eyes open.
>>The biggest issue with sharing a border with the state is the fence line
Is it the physical blockade that the fence provides or just "where is the boundary?" - my guess is that it's both. While physical fence is hard to sustain due to trees falling but could there be an electronic solution for keeping the boundary line intact by putting some sort of gadgets underground which you can always ping to see where is the boundary?
Hey, I mean this in as kind a way as possible, but I actually don’t think the government should pay for the fence line!
If you wouldn’t even pay for it yourself, as pretty much the sole beneficiary and someone who could afford it but would rather the money go elsewhere, why would it make sense for other taxpayers to pay for it?
Isn’t the premise of “you may as well own that land” the entire appeal of living next to public land anyway?
My family used to live next to state land. The state can be very pissy about its land. If the fence line is on the state land, which it almost certainly is barring a surveying error when it was put up, it is entirely possible that if he fixed it, he would actually get in trouble with the state. Hopefully not actual legal trouble... but only hopefully, certainly not a "oh they would never bother". Oh they most certainly do sometimes decide to bother about the most random things.
My default presumption, without checking with them directly, is not only that it would not be allowed, but that this is also very much not a "better to ask forgiveness than permission" situation either. Even just asking the question can draw attention from them you may not want.
The ready accessibility of the land is advantageous in some ways, but as neighbors the state can be quite nasty. Your other neighbors don't tend to have anywhere near the regulatory firepower to make sure you comply with what they want.
I think they’re suggesting building their own fence on their own property and eating the cost (as the sole beneficiary) of maintaining it through tree falls.
When a 200 ft tree at the fence line falls into your property that can take away much of your usable land.
Cleaning up fallen trees is part of owning a property in these areas. Doesn’t matter where the fence is.
> If the fence line is on the state land, which it almost certainly is barring a surveying error when it was put up, it is entirely possible that if he fixed it, he would actually get in trouble with the state
Trying to maintain the state’s fence is not a good idea.
You would build your own fence on your side of the property set back by a couple feet.
I'd also assume the fence is on state land if its theirs to maintain. That doesn't stop someone from putting up their own fence on their side of the property line though.
You couldn't integrate it into theirs, so you'd be looking at having to fence in the entire space you want the dogs in because the gap you'd leave would have to be big enough for a dog.
Which is hardly the end of the world, but it can definitely grind the gears to be spending thousands when you could fix the problem for several hundreds, if not perhaps several tens, of dollars if they wouldn't be assholes about it. But I would absolutely advise anyone in that situation to spend the thousands and not bank on the state not being assholes about it.
I can also add that you can't even be sure that if you got away with it for years that you will continue to get away with it. The particular issue that my father got into a bit of hassle with the state about is that he accidentally put a pole barn across the state line. Didn't mean to, but he misread the survey markers. Fortunately, they let him remediate it at his expense without pursuing the matter any further legally... but it means they did, after several years of it being there, come through a with a survey team and verify that nobody on the border was crossing into their land, and anything they found they made the residents fix no matter how many years the deviation had been there. All the laws about such thing between two citizens mean nothing to the state.
> You couldn't integrate it into theirs, so you'd be looking at having to fence in the entire space you want the dogs in because the gap you'd leave would have to be big enough for a dog.
These properties only border public land on one side.
If someone is trying to fence their dogs into their property, it’s implied that they’re already fencing every other part of the property. They would be completing it with a back section.
> You couldn't integrate it into theirs, so you'd be looking at having to fence in the entire space
Oh no. Tbe preposterous idea of putting a fence around your own property.
If you're planning on posting snark it's generally a good idea to make sure you read the rest of the post first.
Pretty much my exact thoughts as well. Heaven forbid a property owning pet owner be responsible for protecting their pets on their property. WTF has this world come to?
Will the state pay when their trees fall onto a private property and break the fence?
The government often claims exclusive authority and responsibility over the land but never acts on the responsibility they've asserted except to prevent anyone else from doing so. You can be required to pay a significant fee and file reams of paperwork to fix things for free that the government is expressly obligated to fix but never does.
It is common in parts of the US for government land to be illegally maintained by locals at their own expense because the government fails to do so. The impacted people aren't left with many other choices. There is little recourse when the government claims sole authority but also neglects its responsibilities under that authority.
This has been an issue in land management for as long as I've been alive. It sort of works to the extent the government is oddly incurious about someone else illegally doing their job for them. But every so often a bureaucrat with idle hands will decide to make an example of someone for illegal maintenance without addressing the underlying problem.
> Hey, I mean this in as kind a way as possible, but I actually don’t think the government should pay for the fence line!
Which is a fine option, but it should be something agreed to by both parties. You can't just hand over a cost like that, and if you buy property with some kind of agreement this choice is baked into the original price. It makes perfect sense for the government to uphold agreements it has made.
Secondly - if they did own the fence line, it'd be on the government to come and fix it when one of their trees breaks it, surely?
> It makes perfect sense for the government to uphold agreements it has made.
The key question is what is actually in the agreement. 'The state will maintain the fence' doesn't indicate the level of maintenance or the timeliness of said maintenance, it just means the neighbor isn't allowed to do it.
> Secondly - if they did own the fence line, it'd be on the government to come and fix it when one of their trees breaks it, surely?
From discussions I've seen, generally there's no legal responsibility for tree falls, unless there's neglegence like ignoring a clearly failing tree. But leaving a forest to do whatever the forest wants doesn't feel like neglegence.
Did the government agree to maintain a fence…?
If the government built a fence on their property, the burden is on them to maintain it. What other agreement is there?
Your position is that if the government builds a fence it is de facto obligated to maintain it to any abutting property owner's standards in perpetuity?
There is no agreement whatsoever, that's the point. No agreement was made or mentioned. The mere existence of a fence on government property does not constitute an agreement to maintain said fence.
I'm not stipulating anything about abutting property. I'm saying that if the government builds something on their land it is theirs to do with and is on them to maintain it. If they decide to no longer maintain it, that is also their decision. To clarify my point, if someone bought property when the government's fence was intact believing it will always remain so they did not have to build a fence, it is a bad decision on the neighbor's part and not the government's. If you require a fence, the only way to ensure you have a fence is to build and maintain your own fence. There are plenty of examples of the government building something on their land and then walking away and abandoning it when it is no longer needed.
Okay so I don't know why you're responding as if you're disagreeing with me.
We're on the same page.
>The mere existence of a fence on government property does not constitute an agreement to maintain said fence.
Can you imagine the sneering and hand wringing that would ensue in the comments if you tried to make such an argument about private property?
If a private landowner failed to maintain anything that was created by man (as opposed to nature) they'd say things like "public nuisance", "blighted", "antisocial" and all the other buzzword people of that bent love to use.
I don't really care what the standard is. If some standard is good enough to be worth legislating enforcing then it ought to apply equally to all land owners regardless of public or private.
It seems like everyone here is literally conjuring up first an agreement, and now laws out of thin air. What law is the state exempting itself?
Anyway tree law is super, super well-established and it works the same way for private parties. Your neighbor's trees are none of your business until they are on your property, and then they're exclusively your business (except you can't structurally damage or kill the tree e.g. by cutting roots that cross onto your property).
You clearly have some strange bone to pick. You should pick it elsewhere.
Are you going to call the HOA on the government to enforce them to maintain their fence?
> Isn’t the premise of “you may as well own that land” the entire appeal of living next to public land anyway?
If you start actively managing it (removing invasive species, dead trees etc.) the state can take a more active interest at any time and sue/fine you into oblivion.
I think the gist is more something like: you should expect the government to neglect their property.
It sounds like your expectations on your neighbour are way too high. Especially since them doing "their" part on par with your expectations benefits mostly just you.
When your neighbour isn't as invested as you in maintaining the border or has other annoyances you are better off leaving some buffer zone that allows to isolate yourself from the border and whatever road, river, canal, forest or loud or busy place is at the other side.
Put up your own fence inside of your property line that you can keep up to your needs and standards.
Sounds like trees would fall onto it every year :/
That’s what happens when you have lots of trees on or adjacent to your property.
If that bothers you, don’t buy property adjacent to 200ft tall trees. They will fall. That’s what trees do. They grow, then die and fall over.
At that point he may be able to sue the state to fix it (or have insurance do it).
And if it’s your fence you can build one of the ones that’s cheap and easy to replace. I wouldn’t be shocked if you could put chain link back up after some straightening. You could use the downed tree to fix the fence if it was split log (not so good at keeping dogs in though)
Just to mention something people might not have ever considered, but basic home owner's insurance does not cover fences as they are not part of the house. I'm sure someone would be more than happy to provide additional coverage for additional fees that would cover a fence, but it's something to keep in mind. I know multiple people that were oblivious to this until their fence was damaged from trees falling on them during a storm.
Yes it’s because fences break constantly. So it would be less “insurance” and more like a forced savings plan.
I assume this kind of property is large enough that OP can afford to build the second fence one tree height away from the property line.
So move your fence 50 feet away from the property line. Obviously, this means you need to find a big property if it's adjacent to state land with large trees.
That's a good point. What about wetlands? My property has a terrible mosquito problem and I just found out there is a pond/swamp hidden in the brush. Since it's my property, I'll take steps to reduce the mosquito problem next year but if it was public land, that'd probably wouldn't be acceptable.
If you throw some mosquito dunks with BT into any given water body small enough it doesn't have a name, nobody is going to come after you. I think it's probably a pretty prosocial thing to do, unless I'm missing something
Doing that on public land is a risk. The USFS absolutely has restrictions on chemical usage. For example, pressure treated lumber is not allowed.
My internal dialog can imagine my biologist wife yelling at you already.
Honestly i do not know the full scope of this one, but if there's one thing I've learnt from observing her work over the last decade...it's humans need to stop adding chemicals to water bodies with the goal of thinking they're helping something.
Note it's not a chemical agent; its bacterial spores that infect and kill mosquito larvae! I'm pretty sure they're not harmful to anything that isn't a mosquito, blackfly, gnat, or midge. Though midges are important to pond ecosystems as a source of food for fish and dragonflies and stuff? Idunno, ask this guy's wife.
I will ask her and report back...
I can imagine her having some long explanation about the unknown risks of man spreading this substance, even if its not a chemical agent. I lean on the edge of listening to Grandpa Simpson on these kind of things: https://i.imgur.com/MdjduDH.png
Mosquito dunk is some kind of microbial culture that’s supposed to be safe.
The path to hell is paved with good intentions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia
It might well be safe, but the question is what are the downstream affects of reducing the population of mosquitos (or other bugs in the water that this substance impacts). Maybe they've exclusively positive, but I assure you determining that is no walk in the park.
I can see the headline now:
"Mosquito dunks linked to declining bear population - farmers struggling with deer populations"
ha yeah, that's exactly where my brain goes too.
meh, they'll just reintroduce wolves. man is much too smart to be outdone by mother nature /s
The mosquitoes don't exist in isolation though. Isn't this exactly how food chains / ecosystems work? You can't remove a tier without consequences.
It depends. In North America our worst mosquitos (the disease carrying ones) aren't native, they are from the old world. I think everybody would be fine if they were no more.
>I think it's probably a pretty prosocial thing to do, unless I'm missing something
Also massively illegal if you live anywhere that has a state level wetlands protection type law and the enforcement authority decides to exercise their discretion to make your life hell.
Wetlands laws and rules (non-criminal code generally, but wetlands are some of the worst) are written in a way to make RICO look like a meticulously scoped out piece of technical legislation.
I'd much rather do yearly fence maintenance than deal with neighbors.
Do you have room to put up a fence away from the treeline?
> I live next to a State Park.
In what state? Last I knew, the State Parks in most US states were miserably underfunded - so quick fixes (for pretty much anything, not just fences) just ain't gonna happen.
And what's the legal status of the fallen trees? In a fair number of places a 200' tree, already down, might be kinda valuable.
Mostly it doesn't pay to process individual lumber. If it's near a property it may have metal in it, and it's likely wood you can already find at a nearby lumber yard. If it's a particularly beautiful large tree, you have a use for slabs, can rent a skidsteer/forklift, and don't mind waiting a few years for it to season, it can be worth it. Or if you have a hankering for very large boards of unusual wood.
This is super unreliable. I clicked through a few of the listings and none of them were what this site seemed to think they were. In one case it said a unit had 50 acres of land, and when I clicked through it was a two-bedroom condo with no land. Another said it had 1400 acres of land and when I clicked through it was 0.14.
The issue is how the MLS (multiple listing service) allows listing of condos/apartments/etc. Since each unit has no actual land to itself, they're allowed to list the total land that the complex sits on for each unit. There's also basically no oversight or correction on what gets listed, so listing agents have no reason to be accurate or perspicacious.
Everyone then scrapes or subscribes to the MLS data. It's why you have a dozen identical realty sites: Zillow, Realtor, Redfin, Trulia, etc.
This is interesting though not really for me. I know that without trails, I won't be walking past the end of my property onto other property. I've probably spent a year of my life building trails on my own property.
When I look for a parcel of land, I'm also interested in proximity to healthcare, groceries, airports (bad!), motor sports, shooting ranges; general steepness of the property particularly at the roadway (too steep makes the property unusable), topography in general (any flat spots to build a house?); availability of power; water features; bikability (checked by looking at Strava's heatmap); average number of days temperature > 85F; average number of days temperature < 30F. There's more but this list is long enough already.
I owned a house on 60 acres in Washington State that was bordered on 2 sides by state land (WA DNR). It was generally great and the only time I closed my gate was actually these two weeks of every year for regular rifle deer season. I never had issues with hunters coming on my property (I did give some friends permission to bow hunt). My driveway was about a mile long and had to cross DNR land to reach my property, but I had an easement. The easements typically have a 35 year expiration and it would take extreme circumstances for the state not to renew an existing easement. Complete and total privacy is really nice, but it's certainly a lot of effort and money to maintain a remote property of that size with a large house. I had to travel to SF a lot for work and that was certainly not ideal: 2.5 hour drive minimum to a tiny airport that only served Seattle, then on to SF.
What would realistically be a ballpark expense for basic living (I assume you mean food water and power)
It's blowing mind a bit that you made this and released it because I was on the verge of doing it myself. Very nice work.
Really curious about your data sources. Where are you getting all this stuff?
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.
Any possibility to include city or county-owned land too?
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.
Cool concept!
One big issue: not having a price and acreage range selectors means you see a lot of 0.2acre lots and $8mm parcels which I'm assuming most of us wouldn't be looking for
I know some folks to have a cabin that they use seasonally that borders national forest land. First of all, it's gorgeous and being able to open their back gate and walk out into unspoiled wilderness is awesome. But it does have some drawbacks; their biggest "neighbors" are cattle ranchers who let their cows graze in the forest. The cows will often wander onto their property, and the cowboys are not shy about breaking fences or cutting wire to get their cattle back out. Since they're only there for part of the year, they've also had issues with hunters breaking the locks and using their cabin as a place to hang out while they're not there.
Surprisingly easy to manage, though. You'd think that things like propane delivery and septic system service would be hard to hire when you're miles out of town, up a steep logging trail, and across a home-made bridge, but the local businesses are used to it. I genuinely don't know how they find the place most of the time.
If you have public land do you just have people walking over the property boundary onto your parcel all the time? Especially in the more populous states like NJ some of them I'd expect that to be pretty common, interesting idea as a thing that people search out specifically for though.
Regardless, neat site. Couple things, first maybe a disclaimer on why you would want this on the home page? And on the state page itself I can't tell how bordering is different than adjacent. IMO just calling it "within 75m" would be better, and since this is for the US consider making it based on feet :p. Also, I would recommend that at least for user facing strings though you give it a little TLC and remove the really really obvious Claudisms
> official boundary maps, not listing descriptions.
> An analysis of publicly available boundary data — not a survey, and not a listing service
plus everything on the How It Works page is extremely obviously LLM.
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.
> I leaned on AI for a lot of the site text.
So that's why the site text reads as AI slop.
For real. Just write it yourself.
I demand a refund!
It's weird how people think navigating through undeveloped land is like walking across a parking lot. Brush, branches, thorns, downed trees, uneven ground, etc can make walking through undeveloped land difficult to impossible.
Really depends on the land in question. Some forests have thick underbrush, some are almost completely clear. A lot of undeveloped land isn't even forest - swamp, desert, rocky mountains. Sometimes it's far easier to navigate than a parking lot, IME.
This is cool, but isn't owning property bordering public land undesirable?
Sure, there's the ability to hike directly from your home, but I imagine you'll regularly have people wander on to your property. And if something illegal happens on your property by a different party, you might be liable.
Seems like the cons outweigh the pros. Or is there something I'm missing?
I think for an individual owner there are some downsides, but if you're a big developer buying a large piece of land it can become a selling point. There's a private residential development in my state where they completely enveloped the entrance to an existing state park trail/boardwalk. So to access it, you actually have to go through this gated community. Supposedly anyone can go in if they say they're going to the state park, but I'm not sure that's true in practice and you have to interact with the private guard gate and show ID. I was able to go in with my family, but we look like a typical suburban family, so that doesn't mean others wouldn't have more trouble. It's a pretty gross case of effectively privatizing a public resource.
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.
> I was able to go in with my family, but we look like a typical suburban family.
How does the typical suburban family look like? Did all 3-4-5 of you drive F150s there?
It means a group of people unlikely to be stopped and turned away at that gate. My assumption is white, middle class, dressed boring but clean, decent car without damage, with young kid(s), no/light tattoos, no motorcyckes in the back and no drug/booze/gun stickers or visible stuff. Basically someone the Karen's won't call to complain about.
Other people deserve access to public land too but might not pass the vibe check of the private guards, which is what op was lamenting as well.
That would be a typical f150 family. A typical suburban family travels in a convoy of chevy suburbans. A luxury suburban family travels in a convoy of escalades.
[delayed]
> but I imagine you'll regularly have people wander on to your property
Well, that depends on how large and obvious your property is.
Assuming you have a typical suburban 1/2 acre or 1 acre property, the simplest thing to do is put up a fence, or otherwise make sure that there are no trails that go over the property you use.
Otherwise, you need some kind of bounds marking and obvious "no trespassing" signs.
FWIW: The site identified public lands near my house that have a lot of trails on it. There are trails that go right behind peoples' yards, and most of them either have fences or sheds that make it obvious where the bounds are.
That is going to depend on location. Most public land is way way out. There are often only a handful of visitors per month, and most of them won't get close to your land. Most of them are locals who know where the bounds are (and probably know you)
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.
It means that nobody can build more houses "up the road" from you. That's the primary benefit. Unless the government sells the land, which this government has been trying to do in various places. This one issue is responsible for much of the reduction in republican support in Montana, for example
If you want similar benefits in more urban environments, consider property next to a cemetery. The neighbors are quiet and the lot is very unlikely to be turned into a strip mall.
A price filter would be useful.
Most of the listings near me are for tens of acres and >$5 million
Agreed that some more filters would be useful.
I had a browse around a few states like Indiana and North Carolina, and was able to find plenty of low cost lots, even large ones, but the general problem is that they are miles away from civilization and on tiny local roads that may become an issue in winter.
It'd be useful to filter by proximity to a larger city, or airport.
Very cool idea though - some amazing large lots with beautiful views if you don't mind being pretty isolated.
This is super cool. I love this use of public data to do something cool. The page seems like it's biggest value is to help potential property buyers find property they wouldn't easily be able to otherwise (that's what I like about it). Given that, seems like being able to filter on cost and size of lot would be useful filters on top.
Yes! As another Pennsylvanian, this is a hard requirement for my forever home. The idea that I’d go all-in on a large property in an undeveloped area, only for the surrounding land to get developed or demolished is scary. State game lands is a way to protect against that outcome.
Also a concern is proximity to fracking and now data centers. Not sure how to see if neighbors sold their underground…
As an anecdote, my parent’s home, where I grew up, is a small plot along my town’s watershed property. When the price of lumber went up recently, the town council conveniently remembered that the watershed property was once a massive “tree farm,” and since has leveled all of the surrounding woods. We never expected this. It has been emotionally crushing.
Gonna have the same "issue" with private lands. Over the 20+ years I owned a tree farm in rural Oregon, numerous of the nearby parcels were clearcut. This has benefits too. One day I was up on my ridge and was surprised to see a mountain I had never seen before because the ridge to the north was just clearcut.
I appreciate this OP
As somebody who is constantly looking for property adjacent to BLM this is a really good resource.
Edit: as of 1200ET the OP responding to me nicely is flagged/dead which is crazy. What is happening?
Feature request: near bike trail.
It's showing me 3,200 acre "public land" near houses and it's just a real long trail ha!
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.
*in the US only.
Did you exclude NPS units intentionally?
Are you using this for parcel data? Or are you sourcing them directly from every county
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/landrecordsus/us-parcel-laye...
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.
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?
> 1. About 700,000 active U.S. listings come in from a licensed listings API.
What API is that? It looks like you or the data broker are violating some NAR / MLS / State Compliance rules to me. You might want to look into those.
Not sure if you meant it that way, but this comes across as a bit hostile. Do you care to share some specific rules you think are being violated?
There are gazillion compliance laws, etc, but basic copyright laws commonly cover these things.
https://www.rentcast.io/terms-api
> You and We acknowledge and agree that, in the event of a third-party claim arising out of or relating to your access to or use of the RentCast API, or your possession, use, disclosure, display, resale, or distribution of the API Data, including any claim that such activities infringe any third-party’s intellectual property rights or do not comply with applicable laws and/or regulations, you, and not Us, will be responsible for the investigation, defense, settlement, and discharge of any such claim. You will promptly notify Us in writing of any such claim.
Database copyright isn't really a thing in the US.
Which LLM did you use?
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
I'd love to chat to you about this. I have been solo building in the real estate space for about 5 years now. I've finally got to a point where I make a roughly market salary from it, and I'm starting to venture wider into providing a listing service for everyone from FSBO's to large brokerages. Theres a huge opportunity to displace the position Zillow et al have, but it's riddled with legal challenges and risk (They've done a great job of making it hard to break in).
If you're up for a chat, please ping me! This is pretty cool and I'm wondering if theres a collaboration, or if I can straight up use some of what you've made.