How a screening reads the record

From typed address to graded screening

1. The address is pinned down first. The Census Bureau geocoder resolves what you typed into a fixed point, and you confirm it is the right one. Nothing is sold against an unresolved address.
2. Coverage comes before money. We test all ten layers against the location while checkout is still ahead of you, and show any gaps plainly. An order whose coverage sits below a usable threshold does not go through.
3. Primary endpoints only. Where an agency publishes its own service, that is the endpoint we query for the layer. Resellers and scraped copies play no part.
4. Grades follow written rules. Each layer receives one of four plain-language grades, assigned by fixed criteria rather than judgment calls made per order.
5. The overall reading is derived, not invented. The verdict falls out of the layer grades by arithmetic. No composite score, no weighting model, nothing proprietary sitting between you and the record.

The ten layers

Every screening reads the same ten layers, in the same order:

1. Floodplain standing
2. Wildfire hazard
3. Seismic ground motion
4. Slope & landslide record
5. Wetlands & mapped waters
6. Cleanup & Superfund sites
7. Industrial neighbours
8. Radon standing
9. Drinking water systems
10. County disaster record

What each grade commits to

• Flagged — the record holds something with enough weight to change your plans or to justify a professional follow-up.
• Look closer — an entry exists, but at the source’s scale its bearing on this particular parcel is not settled.
• Nothing found — the sources read contain no entry for the layer. That is a statement about the record, never a synonym for “safe”.
• No data — the source does not cover the location, and the screening says so rather than guessing.

The overall reading uses the same restraint. A screening concludes with one of four sentences: The record shows material flags, Worth a closer look, Nothing found in the sources read, or Coverage too thin to grade.

Confidence, stated on every layer

A confidence level, with its reasoning, travels with every layer. When the source speaks at parcel scale — say the point falls inside a flood zone polygon — confidence is high. When scale or vintage blurs the reading, as with community-level wildfire ratings or matching a county to the utility that actually serves it, confidence drops to medium. Low is reserved for reported gaps. And context that only exists at county scale is labelled that way; it never quietly becomes a statement about the parcel itself.

Where the data comes from

What a screening is not

A screening is not a home inspection, not a Phase I environmental site assessment, not a title search, legal opinion, survey, appraisal or insurance decision. Nobody visits the property; no soil, water or air is sampled. What it does instead comes earlier: while negotiation and walking away are both still open to you, it shows which of those professional services the address gives you grounds to order, and backs each one with a dated, sourced entry you can verify yourself.

Versions and corrections

Versioning protects what you bought: a purchased screening is never edited in place. Use the included thirty-day re-run, or trigger a confirmed correction, and what appears is a new version — separately dated, with the change on record. If a layer looks wrong, the “Report an issue” form inside the screening reaches a person — or write to info@ecosi.global.