An Essex County home inspector has built a free website that lets anyone look up the public records behind a New Jersey property — building permits, flood zones, fire history, property taxes, and more — by typing in an address. The site, Permit & Parcel, covers all 564 New Jersey municipalities and brings together records from official sources, including state and county databases, FEMA flood maps, and the towns’ own municipal codes. No account or email is required, and there’s no cost.
“I kept watching buyers fall in love with a house before anyone checked the paper trail — the open permits, the flood zone, what the town actually requires when a home changes hands,” said Leo Betancor, a Certified Master Inspector based in Cedar Grove and the founder of the site. “All of that is public record. It just wasn’t in one place anyone could actually use.”
A companion site, njflood.zone, gives instant FEMA flood-zone answers for any New Jersey address — built after the federal government shutdown left FEMA’s own map site unreliable — running on the site’s own servers with the complete flood map data for the state loaded locally.
