Put in an address.
Everything the public record says about a property. Free.
Fifteen public records, read at once
The unglamorous half of buying a house is finding out what the ground is. Whether it sits in a flood zone. Whether it is inside a critical dune area, where the state has to issue a permit before anything is built. Whether the parcel touches a mapped wetland, what the township zoned it, what the master plan wants it to become, how deep the neighbours’ wells are, and whether anything on EGLE’s contamination inventory sits within a mile.
All of that is public and all of it is free, and almost nobody looks it up, because it means finding six agency map viewers and knowing what to type into each. This asks all of them at once and puts the answers on one page, including the ones that came back empty, and the ones that could not be reached at all.
Where it works
West Michigan is what this is built for and where the map layers are deepest: Kent, Ottawa, Muskegon and Allegan, the lakeshore from Muskegon down past Saugatuck and inland across Grand Rapids. The federal and state records (FEMA, EGLE, USDA, USGS) cover the whole of Michigan. The parcel and assessment record is the thing that runs out, county by county, and it currently reads 21 of them directly:
Ottawa · Muskegon · Allegan · Van Buren · Kent · Kalamazoo · Newaygo · Montcalm · Eaton · Oakland · Jackson · Emmet · Leelanau · Antrim · Charlevoix · Bay · Arenac · Lapeer · Gladwin · Ionia · Barry.
Zoning and future land use are published by individual municipalities rather than by the state, so their coverage is patchier still. Where a layer exists it is read and the publisher is named. Where one does not, the report says the record could not be reached, never that the parcel is unzoned. More layers are added as they are published.
What it cannot tell you
The boundary. Parcel polygons come from the assessor and are drawn from the legal description, not surveyed. Where a fence line or a frontage figure matters, that answer costs a few hundred dollars and comes from a licensed surveyor.
Easements and restrictions. Nothing recorded against the title appears on any map. A title search is the only thing that finds a shared driveway agreement, a utility easement or a deed restriction.
The building. Roof, foundation, furnace, septic field, and whether that fourth bedroom was ever permitted. That is an inspection, the municipal building department, and the county health department, and the report says so where it applies.