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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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
Good one. Wetlands are a gap right now. The closest thing the site shows is the FEMA flood zone for each parcel, which catches some wet ground but not a hidden pond or swamp like yours. I believe US Fish & Wildlife Service publishes a National Wetlands Inventory for the whole country, so checking how much of each parcel is mapped wetland is very doable. Adding it to the list, thanks.
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.
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.
>>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?
Thanks, and this is a really useful perspective. The fence and dead-tree problem is exactly the kind of thing a map can't show.
My experience has been the opposite, though it's a different situation: I bought recreational land in Pennsylvania that borders state game lands, and I don't live there full time. What I wanted was the ability to step off my own ground into something wild and mostly untouched, and it's been a very positive experience.
I think you've put your finger on the real point: it's a trade-off, and it depends on what you want from the land. Living next to it full time with dogs is a very different thing from a weekend place you go to so you can disappear into the woods. "Go in with eyes open" is good advice either way.
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.
At 60 acres you can probably do a 3000 feet grass strip runway. Get a Cessna and fly yourself, being within flying distance of a tiny airport in this case is pretty awesome. 2.5 hour drive is ~ 1 hour flight time for your C172s.
It really depends on how flat the terrain is and what the weather conditions are like. If it's often rainy, windy, or snowy, you might not have many opportunities to use the plane.
At some point, I think electric VTOL aircraft will make economic sense. Companies like Vight Aero are working on two seaters with decent range and speed.[1] Then you'd just need an area the size of a tennis court to take off and land. You also wouldn't have to ship fuel in, as you could charge the aircraft with off-grid solar. If that happens, I could see a lot of people moving away from cities.
Washington is already extremely expensive and our area was even more so. Water was free (well) but electric was very expensive and often went out. I put in a 48kw generac with a thousand gallon propane tank for backup which was a big project but very nice to have. Food, plowing, driveway maintenance, property stuff were all also high. (wife wouldn't let me get a beater 80's f-250 plow truck) Getting trades to even return a call was hard and could be months out for any jobs so I learned to do a lot on my own. I lived in WA for 25 years so just got used to the costs but moving to Boise last year made me realize it was insane.
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.
Great list, and it's pretty much what serious land buyers end up checking by hand. A few are already there: elevation, whether a mapped road reaches the parcel, FEMA flood zone and wildfire hazard. Several more look doable from public data: slope (especially near the road) from the same USGS elevation model, days above 85F/below 30F from NOAA climate normals, and distance to hospitals, groceries, airports and shooting ranges from public facility datasets. Power availability is the hard one, since distribution lines mostly aren't public.
If you had to pick the three that rule a parcel in or out fastest, which would they be? That'd help me decide what to build next.
Entirely AI-generated websites are whatever at this point but I'll be damned if I lose the fight against AI-generated HN comments. Especially on a Show HN...
For temperature, I use Open-Meteo and only consider the last ten years 'cause, you know, global warming.
Another thing I didn't list was property shape. The point of having multiple acres is to provide isolation and a long narrow property doesn't do that. My 350' wide property is too narrow, but I think 600' is probably good.
Having a national forest as your back neighbor is pretty much the best possible thing I've experienced so far in real estate.
The biggest downside is trees will absolutely murder the local infrastructure if a serious windstorm blows through. It's one thing to lose power, but it's something else to lose roads. I keep a battery powered chainsaw in my truck for emergencies.
The only other issue is that maintaining a garden can be difficult without aggressive access control. Deer will eat anything you haven't put in a cage. I don't bother trying to keep them out anymore. I'm convinced they jump the chain link fences at night when no one is watching.
The fact that the land is public has had zero negative effect. The local grid operator is the most frequent visitor by a long shot. I made the intentional tradeoff to have an electrical easement between my property and the forest. The grid operator has to keep the tree line maintained. In practice, it's mostly self-clearing. The trees have a hard time overwhelming the lines when they are energized.
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.
That's exactly it, thanks for explaining it better than I did. I ran into this early with Vermont ski-resort condos: every unit "had" the acreage of the whole resort. The lot-size field just doesn't fit condos well. The site already hides acreage on listings typed as condos and flags units that resolve to an association's common parcel, but some condos come through typed as townhouses or single-family, and those slip past. Checking the claimed acreage against the actual parcel size is the fix I'm working on.
Thank you, that's exactly the kind of report I need. Acreage comes from the listing data, which is messy: lot sizes arrive in square feet, or as the whole condo association's land, and my checks catch a lot of it but clearly not all. Could you share the links (here or contact@unfenced.land)? I'll trace both and fix the rule that let them through, not just those two listings.
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.
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.
My land is adjacent to public land and yes we have people coming through all the time. There is a forest road that becomes a private road and cuts through our land and people use it. We could put up a fence if we wanted but we don't want to... we're high enough up the hill that as long as people are being cool it's nbd. There are signs and most people (not all) are respectful.
I've found that living next to public land is an insanely undervalued luxury. There's very little I would trade it for.
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.
Very true. Bordering a big block of public land doesn't mean you can walk through it easily, and the acreage number says nothing about brush or deadfall. That's part of why the site only reports what it can measure (the shared edge, the size, whether a mapped road reaches the parcel) and doesn't promise anything about getting around once you're out there. Trail data would be a nice addition someday.
It seems to not find quite a few properties that border public land. For example, if I scroll around Zillow to find stuff that borders the Gifford Pinchot national forest, I can find properties like this one.[1] But I don't see anything matching it on the Unfenced map.
I bought 20 acres bordering the national forest a couple years ago. The seller made sure I had some idea of what I was getting into. Due to the isolation and terrain, everything is more difficult. It's been a lot of work to build a road, level an area to build on, construct a shed, and set up off-grid solar power. But it's also very rewarding. The views are spectacular, and at night you can see the milky way. There's still a lot more work to do before it's worthy of being called a vacation spot, but I'm very happy with my decision.
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.
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.
> 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.
"Nobody builds up the road" is the reason I hear most often from buyers, and it's personal for me too. My aunt and uncle bought a home in rural Ohio 35 years ago, on about a few acres, in the middle of nowhere. Over the years they've watched the farmland around them get sold off and housing developments creep closer.
Land that borders public land doesn't have that problem on at least one side. That's also why the site shows which agency manages the land next door, since that affects how likely it is to stay as it is.
For some buyers, yes, and that's a fair point. The site doesn't claim bordering public land is better, it just measures it, because listings say "borders state land" constantly and it's hard to check.
The people who've been most enthusiastic so far are hunters, homesteaders, off-grid folks, and people who want somewhere to walk out the back door and keep going, where the public land is the whole point. Others will see the same boundary as trespass risk, hunting pressure or a fence the state won't fix (see the comment above about a state park). Same fact, different buyer.
On liability, rules vary by state, so that's worth checking with a local attorney before buying, whatever the map says.
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.
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?
Apologies if this is somewhere else, but "price per acre" as a sorting mechanism would be really helpful. In the Dallas area, there's a few like $350k/0.2 acres (eg: a typical house on a lot).
Price per acre could suss out whether it's developed or in demand vs more rural (less price per acre).
Other than that, bravo! Great idea, well implemented!
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.
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.
Thanks, and agreed, that's the main use case. The map view (unfenced.land/map) already has min/max price and acreage filters, plus property type, shared-boundary length, elevation and road access. The ZIP search and state lists can only sort by price and acreage right now, so adding the same filters there is a good call. It's going on the list.
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.
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
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.
Same here, I found my land bordering state game lands in the Poconos for exactly that reason. I'm sorry to hear about the watershed woods; that's the risk with land that isn't actually protected. Fracking leases and mineral rights are a great point too. They're hard to see from public data, but worth thinking about.
Very cool project. One of my favorite Show HN posts. It’s interesting to see how hard it is to line up the maps from different sources, but in most cases it is close enough to dig further. A really useful tool. Thank you
No, they're in. About 470 properties border or sit near NPS land (parks, monuments, recreation areas, lakeshores), e.g. a few along the edge of the Smokies. You're right that the headline copy only mentions national forest, BLM and state land, so that's misleading; I need to update the wording. The map's land-type filter has a "National Park Service" option if you want to see just those.
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?
It's RentCast (rentcast.io) listings API and parcel boundaries come from state/county GIS services and Realie (realie.ai). Fair question on the rules: I'm not a broker or MLS member, so NAR/MLS rules don't bind me directly; I license the listings through RentCast's API under terms that allow displaying them, and how they source the data is on their side. I also left agent phone numbers and emails out of the downloads on purpose so the site can't be used to build contact lists. If anyone from an MLS sees a problem with a specific listing, I'd genuinely like to hear about it: contact@unfenced.land
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
The 69.7 million acre Montana figure made me laugh. I've hit the same kind of bug joining government datasets, where one weird record only shows up once you run every state.
How do you handle listings that go off-market between weekly rebuilds? Do those pages 404, redirect, or stay up as sold? I run a few sites built on weekly public data and still haven't settled on what works best with Google when pages disappear.
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.
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.
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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?
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> 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.
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I think the gist is more something like: you should expect the government to neglect their property.
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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 :/
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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
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Good one. Wetlands are a gap right now. The closest thing the site shows is the FEMA flood zone for each parcel, which catches some wet ground but not a hidden pond or swamp like yours. I believe US Fish & Wildlife Service publishes a National Wetlands Inventory for the whole country, so checking how much of each parcel is mapped wetland is very doable. Adding it to the list, thanks.
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.
> 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.
>>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?
I'd much rather do yearly fence maintenance than deal with neighbors.
I know this wasn't your point but you could get a buried wire fence for your dogs. Or outfit them in beautiful orange jackets in the winter
Do you have room to put up a fence away from the treeline?
wow, I kind of wonder...
tree falls over onto your property, you fix the fence.
tree falls over and you clear it, illegal logging you get in trouble.
Thanks, and this is a really useful perspective. The fence and dead-tree problem is exactly the kind of thing a map can't show.
My experience has been the opposite, though it's a different situation: I bought recreational land in Pennsylvania that borders state game lands, and I don't live there full time. What I wanted was the ability to step off my own ground into something wild and mostly untouched, and it's been a very positive experience.
I think you've put your finger on the real point: it's a trade-off, and it depends on what you want from the land. Living next to it full time with dogs is a very different thing from a weekend place you go to so you can disappear into the woods. "Go in with eyes open" is good advice either way.
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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.
At 60 acres you can probably do a 3000 feet grass strip runway. Get a Cessna and fly yourself, being within flying distance of a tiny airport in this case is pretty awesome. 2.5 hour drive is ~ 1 hour flight time for your C172s.
It really depends on how flat the terrain is and what the weather conditions are like. If it's often rainy, windy, or snowy, you might not have many opportunities to use the plane.
At some point, I think electric VTOL aircraft will make economic sense. Companies like Vight Aero are working on two seaters with decent range and speed.[1] Then you'd just need an area the size of a tennis court to take off and land. You also wouldn't have to ship fuel in, as you could charge the aircraft with off-grid solar. If that happens, I could see a lot of people moving away from cities.
1. https://vightaero.com/
What would realistically be a ballpark expense for basic living (I assume you mean food water and power)
Washington is already extremely expensive and our area was even more so. Water was free (well) but electric was very expensive and often went out. I put in a 48kw generac with a thousand gallon propane tank for backup which was a big project but very nice to have. Food, plowing, driveway maintenance, property stuff were all also high. (wife wouldn't let me get a beater 80's f-250 plow truck) Getting trades to even return a call was hard and could be months out for any jobs so I learned to do a lot on my own. I lived in WA for 25 years so just got used to the costs but moving to Boise last year made me realize it was insane.
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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.
Great list, and it's pretty much what serious land buyers end up checking by hand. A few are already there: elevation, whether a mapped road reaches the parcel, FEMA flood zone and wildfire hazard. Several more look doable from public data: slope (especially near the road) from the same USGS elevation model, days above 85F/below 30F from NOAA climate normals, and distance to hospitals, groceries, airports and shooting ranges from public facility datasets. Power availability is the hard one, since distribution lines mostly aren't public.
If you had to pick the three that rule a parcel in or out fastest, which would they be? That'd help me decide what to build next.
:/
Entirely AI-generated websites are whatever at this point but I'll be damned if I lose the fight against AI-generated HN comments. Especially on a Show HN...
Slope at road (which indicates how difficult/costly a driveway will be), no flattish spots, and noise level are total dealbreakers for me.
There is https://maps.dot.gov/BTS/NationalTransportationNoiseMap/ and https://howloud.com/ but I just looked up my house ~2 miles away from an airport and neither provide an accurate read of the noise-level.
For temperature, I use Open-Meteo and only consider the last ten years 'cause, you know, global warming.
Another thing I didn't list was property shape. The point of having multiple acres is to provide isolation and a long narrow property doesn't do that. My 350' wide property is too narrow, but I think 600' is probably good.
Having a national forest as your back neighbor is pretty much the best possible thing I've experienced so far in real estate.
The biggest downside is trees will absolutely murder the local infrastructure if a serious windstorm blows through. It's one thing to lose power, but it's something else to lose roads. I keep a battery powered chainsaw in my truck for emergencies.
The only other issue is that maintaining a garden can be difficult without aggressive access control. Deer will eat anything you haven't put in a cage. I don't bother trying to keep them out anymore. I'm convinced they jump the chain link fences at night when no one is watching.
The fact that the land is public has had zero negative effect. The local grid operator is the most frequent visitor by a long shot. I made the intentional tradeoff to have an electrical easement between my property and the forest. The grid operator has to keep the tree line maintained. In practice, it's mostly self-clearing. The trees have a hard time overwhelming the lines when they are energized.
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.
That's exactly it, thanks for explaining it better than I did. I ran into this early with Vermont ski-resort condos: every unit "had" the acreage of the whole resort. The lot-size field just doesn't fit condos well. The site already hides acreage on listings typed as condos and flags units that resolve to an association's common parcel, but some condos come through typed as townhouses or single-family, and those slip past. Checking the claimed acreage against the actual parcel size is the fix I'm working on.
Thank you, that's exactly the kind of report I need. Acreage comes from the listing data, which is messy: lot sizes arrive in square feet, or as the whole condo association's land, and my checks catch a lot of it but clearly not all. Could you share the links (here or contact@unfenced.land)? I'll trace both and fix the rule that let them through, not just those two listings.
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?
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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.
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My land is adjacent to public land and yes we have people coming through all the time. There is a forest road that becomes a private road and cuts through our land and people use it. We could put up a fence if we wanted but we don't want to... we're high enough up the hill that as long as people are being cool it's nbd. There are signs and most people (not all) are respectful.
I've found that living next to public land is an insanely undervalued luxury. There's very little I would trade it for.
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.
Very true. Bordering a big block of public land doesn't mean you can walk through it easily, and the acreage number says nothing about brush or deadfall. That's part of why the site only reports what it can measure (the shared edge, the size, whether a mapped road reaches the parcel) and doesn't promise anything about getting around once you're out there. Trail data would be a nice addition someday.
It seems to not find quite a few properties that border public land. For example, if I scroll around Zillow to find stuff that borders the Gifford Pinchot national forest, I can find properties like this one.[1] But I don't see anything matching it on the Unfenced map.
I bought 20 acres bordering the national forest a couple years ago. The seller made sure I had some idea of what I was getting into. Due to the isolation and terrain, everything is more difficult. It's been a lot of work to build a road, level an area to build on, construct a shed, and set up off-grid solar power. But it's also very rewarding. The views are spectacular, and at night you can see the milky way. There's still a lot more work to do before it's worthy of being called a vacation spot, but I'm very happy with my decision.
1. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/Snag-Mountain-Rd-110-Wash...
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.
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?
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> 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.
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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.
"Nobody builds up the road" is the reason I hear most often from buyers, and it's personal for me too. My aunt and uncle bought a home in rural Ohio 35 years ago, on about a few acres, in the middle of nowhere. Over the years they've watched the farmland around them get sold off and housing developments creep closer.
Land that borders public land doesn't have that problem on at least one side. That's also why the site shows which agency manages the land next door, since that affects how likely it is to stay as it is.
For some buyers, yes, and that's a fair point. The site doesn't claim bordering public land is better, it just measures it, because listings say "borders state land" constantly and it's hard to check.
The people who've been most enthusiastic so far are hunters, homesteaders, off-grid folks, and people who want somewhere to walk out the back door and keep going, where the public land is the whole point. Others will see the same boundary as trespass risk, hunting pressure or a fence the state won't fix (see the comment above about a state park). Same fact, different buyer.
On liability, rules vary by state, so that's worth checking with a local attorney before buying, whatever the map says.
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.
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?
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?
I can only speak for myself but I’m specifically looking for: forested with a natural spring that is close to a hundred mile+ trail
Apologies if this is somewhere else, but "price per acre" as a sorting mechanism would be really helpful. In the Dallas area, there's a few like $350k/0.2 acres (eg: a typical house on a lot).
Price per acre could suss out whether it's developed or in demand vs more rural (less price per acre).
Other than that, bravo! Great idea, well implemented!
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.
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.
Thanks, and agreed, that's the main use case. The map view (unfenced.land/map) already has min/max price and acreage filters, plus property type, shared-boundary length, elevation and road access. The ZIP search and state lists can only sort by price and acreage right now, so adding the same filters there is a good call. It's going on the list.
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.
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
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.
Same here, I found my land bordering state game lands in the Poconos for exactly that reason. I'm sorry to hear about the watershed woods; that's the risk with land that isn't actually protected. Fracking leases and mineral rights are a great point too. They're hard to see from public data, but worth thinking about.
Neat idea, but literally every property I looked at, a half dozen of them, was:
a. Not for sale.
b. Wildly incorrectly priced, according to the Zestimate and most recent sold price, when sold recently. I mean, like, $59k vs $470k.
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Very cool project. One of my favorite Show HN posts. It’s interesting to see how hard it is to line up the maps from different sources, but in most cases it is close enough to dig further. A really useful tool. Thank you
Very well executed and built ! Great example for what agentic coding can enable for projects run by someone with good 'taste' !
Thanks for sharing
Some of this isn't exactly "land" - this is a condo in Jersey City that allegedly has a water view.
But this is still very cool.
It would be nice to already see parts of the entire map coloured so you can see (extremely approximately) what's available.
Very cool! I would love the ability to search for land with or without a house, or at least to be able to sort by $ per acre.
*in the US only.
Very cool thought about something similar. How are you getting the data if you dont mind me asking?
Feature request: near bike trail.
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.
It's showing me 3,200 acre "public land" near houses and it's just a real long trail ha!
we're house hunting right now--actually going to use this!
this reminds me of old school internet. just tiny little purposeful pages and that's it.
Whoa, one of these is right up the road from a cannibal murder.
Small world.
Did you exclude NPS units intentionally?
No, they're in. About 470 properties border or sit near NPS land (parks, monuments, recreation areas, lakeshores), e.g. a few along the edge of the Smokies. You're right that the headline copy only mentions national forest, BLM and state land, so that's misleading; I need to update the wording. The map's land-type filter has a "National Park Service" option if you want to see just those.
I don't see a single national park in California or Utah on those states' maps.
Came here to procrastinate, now I need land
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neat :)
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?
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It's RentCast (rentcast.io) listings API and parcel boundaries come from state/county GIS services and Realie (realie.ai). Fair question on the rules: I'm not a broker or MLS member, so NAR/MLS rules don't bind me directly; I license the listings through RentCast's API under terms that allow displaying them, and how they source the data is on their side. I also left agent phone numbers and emails out of the downloads on purpose so the site can't be used to build contact lists. If anyone from an MLS sees a problem with a specific listing, I'd genuinely like to hear about it: contact@unfenced.land
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
The 69.7 million acre Montana figure made me laugh. I've hit the same kind of bug joining government datasets, where one weird record only shows up once you run every state.
How do you handle listings that go off-market between weekly rebuilds? Do those pages 404, redirect, or stay up as sold? I run a few sites built on weekly public data and still haven't settled on what works best with Google when pages disappear.
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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.
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