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.

"Content" means everything published here: figures, text, tables, charts, maps, data files, downloads, code and design. "You" means whoever is using the site, and where you are using it on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you may bind that organisation to these terms.

These terms include the privacy policy, which is part of them rather than a separate document.

Who May Use This Site

Anyone, without an account. There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to pay. Three limits apply anyway:

• Not for children. This site is written for adults doing adult transactions. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. See the privacy policy.
• Written for Massachusetts. The site is published from the United States and covers property in western Massachusetts. We make no claim that it is appropriate, or lawful to use, anywhere else. If you use it from elsewhere, that is your decision and your local law is your responsibility.
• Not where the law forbids it. If your use of a public property record is restricted where you are, these terms do not override that.

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 either published national averages or dated entries from named local lenders' public rate tables. Neither is an offer, quote, approval, or a rate available to you. Loan amount, LTV, credit, occupancy, membership, property, underwriting, fees and points differ; the lender's page and a written Loan Estimate control. Rate order is not a borrower-specific cheapest-lender ranking, and inclusion in the survey is editorial.
• 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.
• Not a title search. A recorded deed date and price is not a title examination. We do not search liens, easements, encumbrances, restrictions, boundary disputes or chain of title, and nothing here tells you whether title is marketable.
• Not a survey. Parcel outlines and boundaries here are mapped approximations from a state layer built for assessment. They are not a boundary survey and must never be used to site a structure, a fence, a well or a septic field.
• Not an environmental site assessment. Cleanup sites and release records are what a state or federal register happens to hold. A Phase I is a different exercise performed by a qualified professional.

Not a Consumer Report, and Never to Be Used as One

This is the most important restriction on this page, and it is not negotiable.

RE413 is not a consumer reporting agency as that term is defined in the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, and nothing published here is a consumer report or a consumer file. We do not assemble information for the purpose of anyone deciding anything about an individual, and we publish no property owner names at all, which is a permanent design rule rather than a current setting.

You therefore may not use this site, any page on it, or any file we publish, in whole or in part, as a factor in establishing eligibility for any of the following:

• Credit, lending, or insurance underwriting or pricing.
• Tenant screening, or any decision to rent, refuse to rent, or set terms for a tenancy.
• Employment, promotion, reassignment or retention.
• A licence or other benefit granted by a government body.
• Any other purpose listed in section 604 of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, 15 U.S.C. 1681b.

If your intended use is on that list, stop and obtain the information from a consumer reporting agency, which carries obligations to the consumer that we do not and cannot carry. Using this site for such a purpose is a breach of these terms, and any liability arising from it is yours.

Flood, Wetlands and Hazard Information

Flood pages on this site report what the federal mapping shows, and, just as often, that no digitised federal map exists for that town. Both are worth publishing. Neither is a flood determination.

• Not a Standard Flood Hazard Determination. Lenders require a determination from an approved provider, on the specific structure. This is not that and cannot substitute for it.
• Not an elevation certificate. Whether a building sits above or below a base flood elevation is a surveyed question about that building, not a question about the parcel it stands on.
• Unmapped is not unexposed. Where a town has no digitised map, the risk is unknown rather than absent, and the site says so at the point it matters. Do not read silence as an all clear.
• Wetland and resource boundaries are mapped lines. Whether a specific spot falls inside a resource area, or its buffer, is a determination for the local conservation commission.
• Maps are revised. Federal flood maps change, and a property's designation can change with them, in either direction.

Insurance decisions, construction decisions and purchase decisions on any of these points require the official determination and a qualified professional. Not a website.

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.

The cap. To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to the site or these terms, taken together, will not exceed one hundred United States dollars, or the amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, whichever is greater. For almost every reader that figure is one hundred dollars, because the site is free and nobody pays us anything.

That is deliberately plain rather than buried. This site is given away, it carries no advertising revenue from any reader, and it publishes government records that we did not create and cannot correct at source. A publication offered on those terms cannot also carry unlimited exposure to decisions somebody makes after reading it. The protection you actually have is the instruction above: verify with the town before you act.

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, including any liability for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence, which we do not attempt to exclude.

Your Decisions Are Yours

You decide what to do with what you read here, and you accept the risk of that decision. We have no way of knowing your circumstances, your property, your lender's requirements, your town's practice or what the record looked like on the day you read it.

In particular, we are not responsible for what happens when a public record we republish turns out to be wrong, incomplete, out of date or revised after you read it, nor for the availability or accuracy of the live government services this site queries on your behalf. Those records are the town's and the Commonwealth's, and the place to correct them is the body that holds them.

If Your Use of the Site Causes a Claim

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless RE413 and anyone working on it against any claim, demand, loss, liability or cost, including reasonable legal fees, arising out of your breach of these terms, your misuse of the site or of anything published here, or your use of our material in your own advertising, advice or product.

This is aimed at exactly two situations and no others: somebody using this data for a purpose the consumer report section forbids, and somebody republishing our figures with the caveats stripped off and then being complained about. We will tell you if we intend to rely on this and you may take over the defence at your own cost with counsel we reasonably approve.

Time Limit on Claims

Any claim arising out of or relating to the site or these terms must be brought within one year of the day it arose, to the extent the law allows a period to be agreed. After that it is permanently barred. A figure on this site is a snapshot of a record on a date, and a dispute about what it said three years ago is not one anybody can usefully reconstruct.

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, as part of the test gate every release must pass, 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.

Uses That Are Not Permitted at All

Distinct from the list above, which is a request. These are conditions of use, and doing any of them ends your permission to use the site:

• Any use covered by the consumer report restriction above.
• Identifying, contacting, profiling, harassing or surveilling any individual, or attempting to re-identify a household from anything published here.
• Marketing to a specific household on the basis of a page about their property.
• Any use that discriminates on a protected characteristic, or that assists somebody else to.
• Reverse engineering, decompiling, or circumventing any technical measure, security control or access limit.
• Introducing malicious code, probing for vulnerabilities without written permission, or interfering with anyone else's use of the site.
• Framing or mirroring the site so that it appears to be yours, or removing, obscuring or altering any attribution, source line, caveat or sponsorship label.
• Training a model, or building a dataset, in a way that strips the sourcing and caveats from figures that are only safe to read with them.
• Misrepresenting your relationship with us, including implying endorsement, partnership, verification or accreditation that does not exist.
• Anything unlawful, or in breach of the terms of the government body that published the underlying record.

Automated Access

Crawling and automated reading are allowed within reason and we would rather you took the published files than crawled anything. What "within reason" means, so that nobody has to guess: obey robots.txt, identify yourself in your user agent, keep concurrency low and rate modest, and do not hammer the live government lookups our pages call, which are not our servers and which we would like to keep access to. We may block, rate limit or refuse any client that ignores this, without notice and without explanation.

Bulk copying of the site as a whole, or of any substantial part of it, in order to publish a substitute for it, is not permitted regardless of how politely it is done.

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. The drive-time figures, in the pages that show them and in the file under /data/, are computed by openrouteservice by HeiGIT over OpenStreetMap's road network: those results are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 and travel under that licence rather than ours, and OpenStreetMap's own terms are at openstreetmap.org/copyright.

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

Names, Marks and Links

RE413 and the site's design and logo are ours. Every other name on this site belongs to whoever owns it: towns, state and federal agencies, banks, employers and sponsors. We use those names to identify the body, the record or the product they refer to, which is what the law calls nominative use. It is not a claim of affiliation, endorsement, sponsorship or approval in either direction.

Links to other sites are provided because they are useful, usually because they are the authoritative source for a figure we republish. We do not control them, we are not responsible for their content, their accuracy or their privacy practices, and a link is not an endorsement. That includes every link to a bank's own rate page and every link in a labelled sponsorship, which is marked as a paid link in the markup.

One mark deserves naming specifically. REALTOR® is a registered collective membership mark of the National Association of REALTORS® and identifies that association's members.RE413 is not a member of, affiliated with, or endorsed by the association, and nobody here is held out as a REALTOR®. Where this site speaks about the profession generally it says agents or brokerages. A handful of legacy web addresses containing the word survive only as redirects to the relevant town's record and serve no content.

If you own a name or mark used here and believe it is used wrongly, tell us at the contact form and we will look at it promptly.

Anything You Send Us

This site hosts no user accounts, no comments, no reviews and no uploads. The only things you can send us are a message through the contact form and, if you choose, an email address for the weekly figures.

• Nothing you send is confidential. Do not send anything you would mind us reading, storing or acting on, and please do not send personal information about anyone else.
• Corrections and suggestions. If you tell us a figure is wrong, or suggest something we should publish, we may act on it, publish the corrected figure and describe the change, with no obligation to you and no compensation. That is how a correction becomes useful to everybody else.
• You keep your own material. You grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to use what you send for the purpose of answering you and improving the site. We will not publish your name or your message without asking.
• Do not send trade secrets. There is no confidentiality here and we cannot promise any.

Copyright Complaints

Almost everything here is either a government record, which carries no copyright, or our own writing. We host nothing uploaded by users, so the usual notice and takedown situation does not arise. If you nevertheless believe something on this site infringes your copyright, write to us through the contact form with enough detail to identify the work, the page it appears on, and your authority to act, and we will investigate and remove anything infringing.

Ending Your Access

We may block, rate limit or refuse access to any person or client at any time, with or without notice, if we reasonably believe these terms are being breached, the site is being harmed, or another reader's use is being affected. There is no account to suspend, so in practice this means blocking a client or an address.

The sections on accuracy, warranties, liability, indemnity, permitted use and governing law survive any end of your use of the site.

Things Outside Our Control

We are not liable for failure or delay caused by anything beyond our reasonable control, including outages at our host, at the government services this site depends on, or in the networks in between. A large part of this site is a window onto other people's systems, and when they are down the window shows that rather than pretending otherwise.

If We Disagree

Talk to us first. Before starting any proceeding, please write to us through the contact form setting out what happened and what you want, and give us thirty days to resolve it. Most things that reach this page are a wrong figure, and a wrong figure is fixed in an afternoon.

If that does not resolve it, 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 have exclusive jurisdiction. You and we each consent to that venue.

Nothing here prevents either of us from seeking an injunction where one is genuinely needed, or you from making a complaint to a regulator or an attorney general, which no agreement can or should take away.

Accessibility

This is a public reference and it should work for everybody who needs it. We build towards the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines at level AA: every data table names itself and its columns, figures are readable as text and not only as charts, and the site is checked at phone widths on every build. That is a standard we work to rather than a certification we hold.

If any part of this site is difficult or impossible for you to use, tell us through the contact form, name the page, and we will fix it and tell you when it is done. If you need a figure in another format in the meantime, ask and we will send it.

The Rest of It

• Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, it is narrowed only as far as necessary and the rest stays in force.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given it up.
• Entire agreement. These terms and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between us about the site, and replace anything said before.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these terms. We may transfer ours if the site changes hands, and the same terms would then apply.
• No third party rights. Nobody other than you and us gains rights under these terms.
• Headings. Headings are there to help you find things and do not change the meaning of what sits under them.
• Notices. Notices to us go through the contact form, which reaches a person. Notices to you are given by posting on this site, and if you have given us an email address, by email.

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.