About
What this is, and what it is not
A research tool over public property records in 38 Blue Ridge counties across North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia and South Carolina.
It is not a listing service
Most of what is here is a parcel record. A parcel record says a property exists and describes it. It does not say the property is for sale, and it certainly does not mean its owner wants to hear from you. That is why the interface has two lanes that are never mixed: On market / in distress, where a dated and linked piece of evidence exists, and Prospecting — not known to be for sale, which ships collapsed and labelled in full everywhere it appears.
No owner names
Owner names are stripped before anything is published. The site shows only booleans — out-of-state owner, entity-owned — and an integer for years since the last recorded transfer. There is no name in this site, in the published payload, or in the repository, and a build gate re-checks the built output for one on every deploy rather than trusting that a type prevented it.
Unknown is not zero
A missing assessed value renders as unknown, never as $0. A missing acreage renders as unknown, never as 0 ac. In the score, an unknown signal is excluded from the denominator rather than scored zero — because "we could not see it" and "it is bad" are different facts, and flattening them would confidently rank the counties we cannot see below the counties we can, which is exactly backwards.
Coverage is stated, not implied
Every county carries a tier: rich, partial, thin or notices-only. An empty result in a rich county means we looked and found nothing. An empty result in a notices-only county means no parcel data source exists there and we cannot see it at all. The interface never renders those two the same way. The per-county table is here.
The crawler
- User agent:
blue-ridge-deal-finder/0.1 (+contact matt@ravenpower.net) - Rate: one request at a time per host, with a delay between requests, and it honours
robots.txtandCrawl-delay. - What it fetches: published parcel/assessment layers and public sale and foreclosure notices. Nothing behind a login, nothing behind a paywall, no form submissions.
- Purpose: one person evaluating land to buy.
How to make it stop
Email matt@ravenpower.net or open an issue on the
repository. Naming a host stops all fetching of it in the next commit — a PAUSE
file in the repo stops all egress within one commit. You do not need to block
anything or file anything for this to work, and asking is faster than either.
Search engines
This site sends noindex, nofollow on every page and Disallow: / in
robots.txt. It has no SEO goal, and a search-result page for someone's tax foreclosure is a
harm with no upside here. Be clear about the limit, though: that is hygiene, not access
control. A public Pages site has none.
Do not act on this alone
Everything here is derived from a public record by an automated process, and every row links to its source so you can check it. Acreage marked GIS-derived is measured from a published polygon and is not a survey. Assessed values have a vintage and some counties reappraise on a cycle that will move them. Confirm against the deed, the survey, the plat and the county before spending money.