Cedar Grove Home Inspector Builds Free Property-Records Lookup for Every NJ Town

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 (oprasearch.app), covers all 564 New Jersey municipalities and pulls only from official sources: state and county databases, FEMA flood maps, and the towns' own municipal codes. There's no account, no email capture, and 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."

Alongside the main lookup, the site includes free single-purpose tools: a lead-safe inspection lookup showing which of the two state-required inspection methods each town uses under New Jersey's lead paint law, a searchable directory of every DCA-certified lead evaluation and abatement contractor sorted by distance, a fire-incident map built from more than 40 years of state fire records, and a radon map covering every municipality.

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.

The project was recently featured in TAPinto's "At Home with Holly" column. Both sites are free at oprasearch.app and njflood.zone.