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, oil tanks and contamination sites, 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. Since launching this spring it has handled more than 18,000 searches from every county in the state.

“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.”

“And it isn’t only for buyers,” Betancor added. “With rates where they are, a lot of people are staying put. The house you already own has a paper trail too — an old oil tank, a flood zone change, a lead service line — and most owners have never seen it.”

Alongside the main lookup, the site includes free single-purpose tools: a contamination and tank lookup showing known spill sites and registered tanks near any address, a lead water pipe check, 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 DCA-certified lead evaluation and abatement contractors sorted by distance, a fire-incident map built from more than 40 years of state fire records, and a radon map covering every municipality.

Homeowners can also look up property taxes and assessments, check the age of a furnace, air conditioner or water heaterusing its serial number, and find their town’s certificate-of-occupancy requirements before selling or renting a home.

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.

Permit & Parcel carries no advertising and is funded entirely by Smart Choice Inspections, Betancor’s Cedar Grove home inspection company. Readers who find the site useful and need an inspection can claim $100 off a qualifying home inspection, or learn more on Betancor’s page.

The project was recently featured in TAPinto. Both sites are free at oprasearch.app and njflood.zone.