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First, this is cool! Well done.

I live next to a State Park. It sounded really cool when I bought the house. No neighbors! Privacy! There is a trail accessible from my properly that goes into some woods, which you only want to be in during the Fall / Spring because the ticks and chiggers are intense.

The biggest issue with sharing a border with the state is the fence line. Technically it's on them to maintain. The woods are filled with mostly 200 foot trees. They exist right up to my property and fall every year during big storms. There goes the fence line. I have dogs so the fence is important. Otherwise they run out into the woods that have licensed bow-hunting during the Winter.

In practice its impossible to get the fence fixed. You are working through layers of bureaucracy and mismanagement. There is no vested interest from a parks service to work well with hundreds of neighbors individually. I'd build fence lines myself, and could easily pay for it, but it's the upkeep of those fences that would be difficult because so many trees (really, it's every year) fall down from their side.

My main point is that sharing a properly line with the government is more like sharing a properly line with nobody. You may as well own that land. Don't expect any upkeep and go in with eyes open.

I owned a house on 60 acres in Washington State that was bordered on 2 sides by state land (WA DNR). It was generally great and the only time I closed my gate was actually these two weeks of every year for regular rifle deer season. I never had issues with hunters coming on my property (I did give some friends permission to bow hunt). My driveway was about a mile long and had to cross DNR land to reach my property, but I had an easement. The easements typically have a 35 year expiration and it would take extreme circumstances for the state not to renew an existing easement. Complete and total privacy is really nice, but it's certainly a lot of effort and money to maintain a remote property of that size with a large house. I had to travel to SF a lot for work and that was certainly not ideal: 2.5 hour drive minimum to a tiny airport that only served Seattle, then on to SF.

This is interesting though not really for me. I know that without trails, I won't be walking past the end of my property onto other property. I've probably spent a year of my life building trails on my own property.

When I look for a parcel of land, I'm also interested in proximity to healthcare, groceries, airports (bad!), motor sports, shooting ranges; general steepness of the property particularly at the roadway (too steep makes the property unusable), topography in general (any flat spots to build a house?); availability of power; water features; bikability (checked by looking at Strava's heatmap); average number of days temperature > 85F; average number of days temperature < 30F. There's more but this list is long enough already.

This is super unreliable. I clicked through a few of the listings and none of them were what this site seemed to think they were. In one case it said a unit had 50 acres of land, and when I clicked through it was a two-bedroom condo with no land. Another said it had 1400 acres of land and when I clicked through it was 0.14.

It's blowing mind a bit that you made this and released it because I was on the verge of doing it myself. Very nice work.

Really curious about your data sources. Where are you getting all this stuff?

If you have public land do you just have people walking over the property boundary onto your parcel all the time? Especially in the more populous states like NJ some of them I'd expect that to be pretty common, interesting idea as a thing that people search out specifically for though.

Regardless, neat site. Couple things, first maybe a disclaimer on why you would want this on the home page? And on the state page itself I can't tell how bordering is different than adjacent. IMO just calling it "within 75m" would be better, and since this is for the US consider making it based on feet :p. Also, I would recommend that at least for user facing strings though you give it a little TLC and remove the really really obvious Claudisms

> official boundary maps, not listing descriptions.

> An analysis of publicly available boundary data — not a survey, and not a listing service

plus everything on the How It Works page is extremely obviously LLM.

A price filter would be useful.

Most of the listings near me are for tens of acres and >$5 million

This is cool, but isn't owning property bordering public land undesirable?

Sure, there's the ability to hike directly from your home, but I imagine you'll regularly have people wander on to your property. And if something illegal happens on your property by a different party, you might be liable.

Seems like the cons outweigh the pros. Or is there something I'm missing?

It seems to not find quite a few properties that border public land. For example, if I scroll around Zillow to find stuff that borders the Gifford Pinchot national forest, I can find properties like this one.[1] But I don't see anything matching it on the Unfenced map.

I bought 20 acres bordering the national forest a couple years ago. The seller made sure I had some idea of what I was getting into. Due to the isolation and terrain, everything is more difficult. It's been a lot of work to build a road, level an area to build on, construct a shed, and set up off-grid solar power. But it's also very rewarding. The views are spectacular, and at night you can see the milky way. There's still a lot more work to do before it's worthy of being called a vacation spot, but I'm very happy with my decision.

1. https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/Snag-Mountain-Rd-110-Wash...

Very well executed and built ! Great example for what agentic coding can enable for projects run by someone with good 'taste' !

Thanks for sharing

Very cool thought about something similar. How are you getting the data if you dont mind me asking?

This is super cool. I love this use of public data to do something cool. The page seems like it's biggest value is to help potential property buyers find property they wouldn't easily be able to otherwise (that's what I like about it). Given that, seems like being able to filter on cost and size of lot would be useful filters on top.

Cool concept!

One big issue: not having a price and acreage range selectors means you see a lot of 0.2acre lots and $8mm parcels which I'm assuming most of us wouldn't be looking for

Very cool project. One of my favorite Show HN posts. It’s interesting to see how hard it is to line up the maps from different sources, but in most cases it is close enough to dig further. A really useful tool. Thank you

Yes! As another Pennsylvanian, this is a hard requirement for my forever home. The idea that I’d go all-in on a large property in an undeveloped area, only for the surrounding land to get developed or demolished is scary. State game lands is a way to protect against that outcome.

Also a concern is proximity to fracking and now data centers. Not sure how to see if neighbors sold their underground…

As an anecdote, my parent’s home, where I grew up, is a small plot along my town’s watershed property. When the price of lumber went up recently, the town council conveniently remembered that the watershed property was once a massive “tree farm,” and since has leveled all of the surrounding woods. We never expected this. It has been emotionally crushing.

Very cool! I would love the ability to search for land with or without a house, or at least to be able to sort by $ per acre.

Whoa, one of these is right up the road from a cannibal murder.

Small world.

I appreciate this OP

As somebody who is constantly looking for property adjacent to BLM this is a really good resource.

Edit: as of 1200ET the OP responding to me nicely is flagged/dead which is crazy. What is happening?

*in the US only.

Did you exclude NPS units intentionally?

Feature request: near bike trail.

It would be nice to already see parts of the entire map coloured so you can see (extremely approximately) what's available.

Are you using this for parcel data? Or are you sourcing them directly from every county

https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/landrecordsus/us-parcel-laye...

neat :)

I know some folks to have a cabin that they use seasonally that borders national forest land. First of all, it's gorgeous and being able to open their back gate and walk out into unspoiled wilderness is awesome. But it does have some drawbacks; their biggest "neighbors" are cattle ranchers who let their cows graze in the forest. The cows will often wander onto their property, and the cowboys are not shy about breaking fences or cutting wire to get their cattle back out. Since they're only there for part of the year, they've also had issues with hunters breaking the locks and using their cabin as a place to hang out while they're not there.

Surprisingly easy to manage, though. You'd think that things like propane delivery and septic system service would be hard to hire when you're miles out of town, up a steep logging trail, and across a home-made bridge, but the local businesses are used to it. I genuinely don't know how they find the place most of the time.

Hi HN, I built this. Listings that say "borders state land" can't easily be checked: you open the county's GIS viewer and line up parcel lines against public-land maps by hand. I did that a lot while looking for land of my own, then automated it.

How it works, once a week:

1. About 700,000 active U.S. listings come in from a licensed listings API.

2. Each listing near public land gets its county parcel boundary, from state and county GIS services where they publish them and from a licensed parcel provider elsewhere. With no boundary, the page says so and measures from the listing point, but never claims a shared edge.

3. Public land is USGS PAD-US 4.1, narrowed to land an agency actually owns (Category = Fee, so no conservation easements), that's open to the public, and that's at least 50 acres.

4. Parcel and public land are compared in a local metric projection (shapely/geopandas): within (an inholding), bordering (the boundaries touch, and the shared edge is measured in feet), or adjacent (within 75 m, about a road's width).

Each property also gets the size of the connected public land behind it, its elevation (USGS 3DEP), road access (Census TIGER roads), FEMA flood zone and Forest Service wildfire hazard. The output is about 16,000 static pages with Leaflet maps on Cloudflare Pages, rebuilt every Monday on a Mac mini. ZIP search looks the ZIP up in your browser from Census centroids, so nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Things that were harder than expected:

- Lot sizes sometimes arrive in square feet in the acres field. A Birmingham, AL listing came through at 7,000 acres. Sizes are now checked against price, property type and the parcel itself, and corrected or withheld with a note.

- Condo and subdivision listings often resolve to the association's common tract, so a single town lot can appear to share miles of boundary. Those are flagged as shared parcels.

- PAD-US stores some units as one multipart polygon. My first "connected public land" figure for one Montana property was 69.7 million acres, about three-quarters of the state. Units are now split into pieces and joined only where they actually touch.

- Road centerlines and lot lines come from different agencies and are often tens of meters apart, so "does a road touch this parcel" needs a tolerance, and frontage only counts where the boundary runs along the road.

It's free, with no account and no cookies. There are free weekly email alerts for any search, starting Monday. I'd especially like to hear from anyone who has bought rural land: what should it measure that it doesn't?

I'd love to chat to you about this. I have been solo building in the real estate space for about 5 years now. I've finally got to a point where I make a roughly market salary from it, and I'm starting to venture wider into providing a listing service for everyone from FSBO's to large brokerages. Theres a huge opportunity to displace the position Zillow et al have, but it's riddled with legal challenges and risk (They've done a great job of making it hard to break in).

If you're up for a chat, please ping me! This is pretty cool and I'm wondering if theres a collaboration, or if I can straight up use some of what you've made.