Terms of use
What this is, and what it is not
Last revised 12 September 2026.
A report describes a building
Before These Walls assembles public records about a single address into one page. Every statement carries the source it came from, and the wording follows the source rather than interpreting it. A report is an informational curiosity about a building and its surroundings. It is not advice, and it is not a substitute for a title search, a survey, an inspection or a lawyer.
Not a consumer report
Before These Walls is not a consumer reporting agency and a report is not a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. You may not use anything on this site to decide whether to rent to, employ, insure, lend to or extend credit to any person, or for any other purpose that the Fair Credit Reporting Act regulates.
People are not the subject
Reports are about structures and places. They do not name residents, and they are not built from, or linked to, any record about a person. Where a public deed record is one day quoted, it will be quoted as the record words it and attributed to that record.
The record can be wrong
Sources are queried live and cached. An assessor can lag a renovation by years, a geocoder can place a point a lot to the left, a flood map can be redrawn. A source that does not answer is reported as a gap, never as an absence. If something in a report about your building is wrong, or you would rather it were not shown, use the corrections and removal form. Requests are reviewed within 72 hours.
Use of the site
Reports are free for personal, non-commercial use. Automated querying, scraping and bulk lookups are not permitted; the site rate-limits to human speed and blocks anything faster. Links to third-party archives lead to those archives on their own terms.
No warranty
The site is provided as it is, without warranty of any kind. To the fullest extent the law allows, Before These Walls is not liable for any loss arising from use of, or reliance on, a report.