What a free property lookup can and cannot tell you

This site runs every check it can run against published government records, and then names the ones it could not reach. That second half is the part most tools skip, and it is the more useful half: a gap you know about is a phone call, and a gap you do not know about is a surprise at closing.

• Parcel identity, ownership as recorded, acreage, property class, legal description, and the assessed and taxable values with the uncapping gap between them.
• FEMA flood zone, the special-flood-hazard-area flag that drives the insurance requirement, base flood elevation where published, and the FIRM panel behind it.
• Critical dune area and high-risk erosion designations, with the projected recession distances where the state publishes them.
• Wetlands, from both Michigan's Part 303 inventory and the federal National Wetlands Inventory.
• Michigan's coastal zone management boundary.
• Zoning and future land use, where the municipality publishes a layer.
• USDA soil series, drainage class, septic and basement suitability ratings, and depth to the seasonal water table.
• EGLE Wellogic well records within half a mile, and Part 201 contamination sites and storage tanks within a mile.
• Public school district, FEMA's community hazard ratings, ground elevation, traffic counts on the nearest counted road, and the current Lake Michigan level near the shore.

These records exist and are public, but they are not published as machine-readable services in most West Michigan counties. Each of them is one call:

• Septic and well permit history, and whether an evaluation is required at transfer. Ask the county health department.
• Open permits, closed permits and code violations. Ask the municipal building department.
• Whether a specific use is permitted, whether a nonconforming structure may be rebuilt, and what a setback actually is on this lot. Ask the zoning administrator.
• How many land divisions the parent parcel has left. Ask the assessor and the township.
• Whether a project inside a dune, wetland or erosion area would be permitted. Ask EGLE's district office.
• Special assessments, drain assessments, and whether the road is public or private. Ask the township and the county drain commissioner.

• Easements, deed restrictions, covenants and liens. These come from a title search at the Register of Deeds, and they are the single most common source of genuinely nasty surprises.
• The actual boundary. That comes from a licensed surveyor, and no parcel layer anywhere is a substitute.
• The condition of the roof, the foundation, the furnace, the electrical service and everything else physical. That is an inspection.
• What the property is worth. That is an appraisal, or somebody who has walked comparable houses in that market this year.

The lookup is meant to be the first hour of due diligence, done before you have spent anything, so that the remaining questions are the right ones and the inspection period is long enough to answer them.

In practice that means running it before the showing rather than after the offer. If it comes back showing a critical dune designation and a wetland on the back half, that changes what the lot is worth and what contingencies belong in the agreement. If it comes back clear on every hazard, that is worth knowing too, and it is a finding, not an absence of one.

Government services go down. County servers time out, FEMA's layer returns an error inside a successful HTTP response about twice in every ten requests, and a municipality's ArcGIS instance can be offline for a day.

When that happens, the report says which check could not be completed and which agency was not answering. It does not drop the row, and it does not present the run as complete. Fourteen of fifteen with the missing one named is an honest report. Fourteen findings presented as the whole picture is not, and on a flood zone or an erosion setback the difference is somebody's house.

Everything here is screening information published by the agency named beside it. None of it is a determination, and none of it replaces a survey, a title search, an inspection or an appraisal. It is free, there is no account to make, and nothing about the address you type is stored.