The Proof
We ran three real addresses through the listing sites, the free data-dump reports, and a CurbFacts Report. Same houses, same public records — three very different answers. Here is what each one actually told the buyer.
Case 1 — 5377 Gene Circle, West Palm Beach, FL
Listed at $370,000 in Summit Pines. One address, three flood answers — and only one of them came from the official map.
The listing ecosystem showed this home in Zone X (unshaded) — a minimal-risk flood area, with an estimated payment of $2,651/mo. Nothing on the page suggested a second look.
We queried FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer at the home's exact coordinates. The answer: Zone AE — the high-risk zone where lenders require flood insurance. Zone X begins roughly 130 feet away. In this neighborhood, the line runs street by street, sometimes lot by lot.
Our report led with the disagreement — Eyes Open Score 54 — and turned it into a checklist: certified flood determination, elevation certificate, insurance priced both ways. It also reset the tax expectation (the seller pays $3,890/yr on a capped assessment; a buyer should budget $4,800–$6,200) and put the true monthly cost at $2,820–$3,070, not the listing's $2,651.
And the free data-dump report for this subdivision? It has no flood field at all — the question never gets asked. Its sale table prints $0 per square foot on every row, and its registry line reads "0 within 1 mile" for an area whose ZIP holds 53 registrants on the official state compilation (about 1 per 956 residents).
Case 2 — 354 Edmor Road, West Palm Beach, FL
Asking $1,150,000, described as a "development opportunity." The price history is a public record. No free report we tested prints it — the listing certainly doesn't volunteer it.
First offered in mid-September, pending the same day.
The sale closes at a round million.
One day later. A 50% markup in 24 hours, with no renovation in between.
A $350,000 cut within the week — still 15% above what the home itself sold for two weeks earlier.
The CurbFacts Report (Eyes Open Score 49) prints this timeline on page one. It also catches the quieter trap: the seller's tax bill is $2,162 a year on a capped $133,611 assessment. A buyer's reassessed bill at this price is an estimated $18,000–$22,000 a year — a difference no listing page and no free report shows.
The head-to-head
Checked against the free surfaces a buyer finds tonight, on the addresses above.
| The check | CurbFacts | Free data-dump reports | Neighborhood statistics sites |
|---|---|---|---|
| A verdict for this address | Eyes Open Score, 0–100, published method | None | City-level index only |
| Flood zone from the official map, at the address point | Yes — queried live, cross-checked | Not shown | Not shown |
| When the listing and the map disagree | Printed as the headline finding | No flood answer to disagree with | No flood answer to disagree with |
| Source and date on every fact | Yes | Generic labels | Method named for crime data only |
| Sale & listing history, analyzed | Yes — flips and markups flagged | Raw rows, unflagged — $0 prices print as-is | Not at address level |
| What the taxes become after you buy | Estimated, method shown | Seller's history only | Not shown |
| True monthly cost of owning it | Yes | No | No |
| Registry picture | Counts + proximity bands, sourced | One radius line | Not on free pages |
| Demographic steering | Never — not a layer, not a score input | Demographics sold as data | Ancestry & language data headline the profile |
| A printable edition with your agent's name on it | Yes | No | No |
Fair's fair
Free data-dump sites will hand you a parcel number, a legal description, and a decade of tax assessments for almost any home in America, free. As a raw lookup, that works. What they don't do is check it — $0 sale prices and $0 tax components print without a flag — or turn it into an answer about the home you're about to buy.
Neighborhood statistics sites publish real, FBI-based city crime counts and rates, with the method stated. If you want to compare cities, use them. They just can't tell you about a street, a flood line, a tax reset, or a flip — and their headline neighborhood layer is demographic composition, which no buyer report should steer by.
Method note: competitor observations were captured from the free, public pages of the data-dump and neighborhood-statistics services in November 2026, on the addresses above and same-subdivision addresses where an exact page wasn't public. Every CurbFacts figure on this page comes from the sample reports, which cite their records inline.
Run the free preview. If the full record matters — and on the biggest purchase of your life it does — the full report is $29.