Terms of Use

The Short Version

• Use it freely. Read it, share it, quote it, teach with it, report with it. No account, no fee, no permission needed.
• We are a publisher, not an adviser. Nothing here is legal, financial, tax, appraisal, engineering, or real estate advice.
• Verify before you act. Our figures come from public records that lag, contain errors, and get revised. Before you spend money, confirm with the town and the Commonwealth.
• The town is the authority, not us. On any question of what you owe or what you may build, the assessor, the clerk and the building department outrank this website.
• We publish no owner names and rank no towns. That is a permanent rule, not a current setting.

Agreement to These Terms

By using https://www.re413.com you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, the remedy is simple and costs you nothing: do not use the site. There is no account to close and no subscription to cancel, because there are none of either.

RE413 publishes at https://www.re413.com under the name Property Data for Western Massachusetts. Where these terms say "we", "us" or "the site", they mean that publication.

What This Site Is, and What It Is Not

This site is a publication. It gathers records that government bodies already make public, joins them together, and presents them per town and per address for the 101 towns of Western Massachusetts.

It is specifically none of the following, and it is worth being exact about that:

• Not a real estate broker or salesperson. We are not licensed as either, we represent no buyer or seller, and we hold no listings. Nothing here is an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any property.
• Not an appraiser. Assessed values on this site are the town's figure for taxation. An assessment is not an appraisal and not a market value, and the two commonly differ by a lot.
• Not a lender, mortgage broker, or financial adviser. Rates shown are published national averages, not an offer, not a quote, and not a rate available to you.
• Not a lead generator. We do not collect your details and we do not sell introductions to anyone. There is no arrangement under which a professional pays us for your attention beyond a labelled advertising slot.
• Not a home inspector, surveyor, engineer, or environmental consultant. Nothing here substitutes for a site visit by a qualified person.
• Not a legal or tax adviser. Tax figures illustrate what a bill would be under stated assumptions. Your actual liability depends on exemptions, abatements, betterments and circumstances we cannot see.

Accuracy, and Why You Must Still Verify

We take accuracy seriously enough to build the whole site around it. Every figure names its source and the date it was retrieved. Where a number is commonly misread we attach the caveat to the number itself rather than burying it here. Where a record is missing we say so in plain words instead of printing a zero. That is the standard we hold ourselves to.

None of that makes the underlying records perfect, and honesty requires us to be specific about how they fail:

• Public records lag. Parcel data reaches the state layer at different times for different towns. A recent sale, split, or new build may not appear for months or longer.
• Public records contain errors. Towns file corrections. Assessors revise. Coding differs between towns for the same kind of property.
• Surveys are estimates, not counts. American Community Survey figures carry margins of error, and in small towns those margins are wide. We suppress the least reliable ones, which means silence rather than a false certainty.
• Boundaries have edges. A service area, a flood zone, or a district boundary is a mapped line. Whether a specific building sits inside it is a question for the town, not for a map at a website's zoom level.
• Absence is not proof. If no flood zone is mapped, that means unmapped, not safe. If no cleanup site is registered, that means none is registered, not none exists. The site says this at each point it matters and it applies everywhere.
• Derived figures carry their assumptions. A calculated tax bill, a heating cost, or a break-even point is arithmetic on stated inputs. Change an input and the answer changes.

So: verify before you act. Before you make an offer, sign a contract, apply for a permit, or budget for a tax bill, confirm the facts with the town assessor, the town clerk, the building and conservation departments, the registry of deeds, and where relevant a licensed inspector, surveyor, attorney, or lender. Where this site and an official record disagree, the official record is right and we would like to hear about it.

No Warranty

The site and everything on it is provided as it is and as it happens to be available. To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all warranties, whether express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, title, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the site will be available without interruption, that it will be free of errors, or that any figure is current, complete, or correct at the moment you read it. Live lookups depend on government services we do not control and that are sometimes slow, unavailable, or wrong.

Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profit, revenue, data, opportunity, or goodwill, arising out of your use of the site or your reliance on anything published here. This applies however the claim arises, whether in contract, negligence, or otherwise, and whether or not we were told such damage was possible.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages. Where that is the case, the exclusions and limits above apply only as far as that jurisdiction allows, and nothing here removes a right you have that cannot lawfully be removed.

Fair Housing

We support the letter and the purpose of the federal Fair Housing Act and the Massachusetts anti-discrimination statutes. That commitment shapes what we refuse to publish, not only how we word things.

We publish no data on race, ethnicity, ancestry, disability, or family composition. We publish no school ratings or rankings, which are well documented proxies for steering, and no league table of towns. Where towns differ we show the range with both ends named, and we let you sort the facts yourself rather than ordering them by anything we call better. Copy across the site is screened at build time against the phrase families that generate Fair Housing complaints.

If you use material from this site in your own advertising or advice, that obligation travels with it and becomes yours.

Using What We Publish

The underlying facts are public records and nobody owns them, including us. Our selection, arrangement, wording, design, and code are ours. Within that, we want this material used.

You are welcome to:

• Read, print, and share pages for any purpose, personal or commercial.
• Quote figures and passages in reporting, research, teaching, listings, valuations, and client advice, with attribution to RE413 and a link where the medium allows.
• Use the data files published under /data/, which are served openly for exactly that reason.
• Use our embeddable widgets on your own site as provided.

Please do not:

• Republish the site wholesale, or a substantial part of it, so as to substitute for it.
• Present our material as your own work or strip its attribution and sourcing.
• Alter a figure and continue to attribute it to us. Say what you changed.
• Place unreasonable automated load on the site or on the government services our pages call. If you want the data in bulk, take the files under /data/, which exist so that you do not have to crawl anything.
• Use the site to build a product that does what we refuse to do, in particular attaching owner names to parcels or ranking towns and schools.
• Attempt to breach, probe, overload, or interfere with the site or its infrastructure.

Third-party components carry their own licences, which ship with the site. The map library is used under the BSD licence and its notice is served at /LEAFLET-LICENSE.txt. The typefaces are used under the SIL Open Font License and their notices ship alongside them. Source data remains subject to the terms of the body that published it, and rate data from Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey is attributed wherever it appears.

Sponsorship and Independence

The site is paid for by sponsorship. Every sponsored slot is labelled as one. A sponsor buys placement beside independent facts and buys nothing else. Sponsors do not see, review, influence, or approve any figure, and no figure changes because of who is paying. The independent number always renders first and unaltered.

A sponsor appearing on a page is not an endorsement of that sponsor by us, and is certainly not our verification of their claims, their licensing, or their work. Check anyone you hire. If you believe a sponsored slot is misleading, tell us at the contact form and we will look at it.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, we want to know, and we would rather hear it bluntly than not at all. Write to the contact form with the page, the figure, and what you believe the correct value is. If our published figure is wrong we will fix it. If the public record itself is wrong we will tell you which body holds it, because that is where a correction has to be made to be real.

Availability and Changes to the Site

We may change, add, or remove any part of the site at any time, and we may stop publishing it entirely. Nothing here is a commitment to keep any page, figure, product, or file available forever. Where a page moves we try to redirect it.

Cookies, Measurement, and Third Parties

Governing Law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, without regard to its conflict of law rules, and the state and federal courts sitting in Massachusetts are the venue for any dispute. If any provision of these terms is held unenforceable, the rest remain in force and that provision is narrowed only as far as necessary.

Changes to These Terms

If these terms change, this page changes and the date at the top changes with it. Continuing to use the site after that means you accept the revised terms.

Contact

Questions about these terms, corrections, or anything else: the contact form. Advertising enquiries go to the contact form.

See also the Privacy Policy, About RE413, and Sources and Method.