About RE413
The Public Record, Made Usable.
The facts that decide a home purchase in Western Massachusetts were always public. They were also scattered, coded and unreadable. We publish them as one record.
What It Is
RE413 is the independent public record of homeownership in the 101 towns of Hampden, Hampshire, Franklin and Berkshire counties. We answer the questions every buyer, owner and renter actually asks: what a home costs to carry here, what it costs to heat, how the schools are organized, whether the water is town or well, whether the flood map has anything to say, what just sold, and what the town's own records show about any single address.
Why We Built It
The information that decides a home purchase in Western Massachusetts was always public. It was also scattered across dozens of state and federal systems, buried in PDFs, keyed to codes nobody outside an assessor's office can read, and absent from every listing site. Portals show photographs and prices. They do not show the tax rate's fiscal year, the Community Preservation Act surcharge, the seasonal share behind a vacancy number, or that a town's flood map was never digitized.
We built RE413 because that gap has a cost, and the people paying it are the people with the least professional help. The facts belong to the public. Our job is to make them readable.
How It Is Built
Every number on this site is drawn directly from a government source: the state's parcel and assessment rolls, its geographic and environmental layers, its municipal databank, and federal statistical agencies. More than sixty distinct public datasets feed the site. Nothing is scraped from private companies, and nothing is guessed.
The data refreshes on a weekly cycle, with slower sources on monthly, quarterly and annual clocks. Before any refresh publishes, an automated test suite checks the numbers against hundreds of known facts and rules. If a figure fails a check, the site does not update until a person looks at why. Every page names its sources and shows when each figure was last refreshed, and the Sources & Method page documents the whole system.
Where a record is missing, the page says exactly that. A blank on a map is never rendered as safety, and a town the data cannot describe is never quietly dropped.
What Pays for It
RE413 is a business, and it is paid for one way: clearly labeled sponsorships from local companies who want to be seen next to the region's reference numbers. A sponsor buys presence. A sponsor never buys influence: no sponsor can change a figure, a caveat, or a source line, sponsored placements are always marked, and the sources page carries no advertising at all.
There are no listings, no accounts, no subscriptions, no paid reports, and no lead selling. We do not collect reader data beyond a voluntary email address for the weekly issue, and we never sell it. If you run a local business and want your name beside the numbers your customers check, see Advertise with RE413.
The Rules We Never Break
- No rankings. We publish facts about towns and let you sort them. We never publish a best-towns list, a score, or a grade.
- No school ratings. Where a district's boundary falls and how its grades are organized are facts. How good a school is for your child is not ours to say.
- No owner names. Assessment records are public, but we never publish who owns a property, and our systems are built so they cannot.
- No demographic profiling. We publish counts about housing, never data about who lives where.
- Missing means missing. Where the record is absent the page says so, in the same words every time, and never substitutes a reassuring guess.
Who It Is For
Buyers and owners first: the site is written in plain language, and every trap we know about is explained where it matters. The people who work this market professionally get their own denser lane at For Pros, with sortable tables, CSV downloads, and a citation format, built from the same numbers.
Start anywhere: your town, any address, or this week's numbers.