About SitePrior
SitePrior was built by a team of engineers with a decade of dam-safety, stormwater, and drainage work across the Southeast U.S.
Why this exists
People buy land all the time without knowing it sits in a flood zone, has unbuildable soils, or is half wetland. Realtors don't always know either. The data exists — FEMA, USDA, NOAA, USGS all publish it for free — but it's spread across eight different government portals with bad UX and worse interpretation. Most homeowners give up.
SitePrior pulls all of it together for one address, runs the same checks an engineer would run, and writes the result in plain English. $29 buys you the kind of pre-purchase screening that used to take a half-day of an engineer's billable time.
What we use
- FEMA NFHL — National Flood Hazard Layer, the authoritative U.S. flood map
- USFWS NWI — National Wetlands Inventory
- USDA SSURGO — Soil Survey Geographic Database
- USGS 3DEP — 1-meter elevation model
- USGS NHD — National Hydrography Dataset (streams, water bodies)
- NOAA Atlas 14 — Site-specific design rainfall
- USGS NLCD 2021 — National Land Cover Database
- U.S. Census Geocoder — address-to-coordinate resolution
All sources are public, federal, and free. We add the integration, interpretation, and presentation.
What we don't do
We don't replace a Phase I ESA, a wetland delineation, a geotechnical investigation, a survey, or any other permit-stamped work. Those things require a state-licensed professional in your state. SitePrior helps you know whether you need them before you write the offer.
Who's behind it
Michael Flynn — founder
Engineer with about a decade of stormwater, drainage, and dam-safety work across the Southeast. Also builds HydroComplete (engineering SaaS for stormwater design) and PE-Calc (free engineering calculators). Reach out: hello@siteprior.com.