Montana
Public record
Independent
One property.
Several reports.
Montana Property Reports is a family of specialised property-intelligence tools. Each one takes a set of public records that is real, scattered and genuinely hard to assemble, and turns it into something a person can read before they buy, build, or price a decision.
The framework
A property is a layered object.
The things that decide what a Montana property costs, what it can become, and what it risks do not sit in one place — or at one depth. Some are in the air and the fuels around it. Some are in the ground under it. Some are in the soil, the slope and the county rules on top of it.
Each report takes one of those depths seriously enough to be useful on its own.
Section, not to scale. The reports are three depths through the same ground.
Montana
Fire Report
What the landscape around a property does in a fire — and the hundred feet that research keeps finding matters most.
- 01Wildfire exposure
- 02Active fires
- 03Fire history
- 04Fuels
- 05Terrain & slope
- 06Canopy structure
- 07Defensible space
- 08Mitigation
Free screening · no account required
Rings drawn to true ground distance. Whether a home survives is driven less by the surrounding landscape than by the structure itself and the first hundred feet around it.
Home Ignition Zones as defined by Montana DNRC. Fuel, canopy and burn-probability layers published December 2019, built from LANDFIRE Remap 2016.
Montana
Water Report
The only part of a property you cannot walk out and inspect. What the well logs, the aquifer and the water-right records actually say — and where they stay silent.
- 01Nearby wells
- 02Well depth
- 03Well yield
- 04Static levels
- 05Aquifers
- 06Water rights
- 07Basin restrictions
- 08Water quality
- 09Drilling outlook
- 10Original records
Free overview · no account required
Illustrative section. Depth, yield and static-level figures are real aggregates for Ravalli County from the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology Ground Water Information Center.
Montana
Build Report
Twelve layers over one parcel. What the ground, the soils, the mapping and the county say about putting something on it — and which questions are worth a professional’s time.
Free snapshot · no account required
Illustrative parcel. Elevation from USGS 3DEP, soils from USDA NRCS SSURGO, flood from the FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer, wetlands from the USFWS National Wetlands Inventory, parcels from the Montana State Library cadastral framework.
Why this exists
The record is public.
It is not assembled.
What decides a Montana property sits in a dozen systems that do not share a map, a format, or a definition. Ten of them are below. None of them is written for the person standing on the ground.
Public is not the same as findable, connected, or legible.
- Parcels, ownership, boundariesMontana State Library
- Elevation, slope, aspectUSGS 3DEP
- Soils, restrictive layersUSDA NRCS
- Flood mappingFEMA
- WetlandsUS Fish & Wildlife Service
- Wildfire modelling, fuels, canopyMontana DNRC
- Well logs, depth, yieldMBMG Ground Water Information Center
- Water rights, basin closuresMontana DNRC
- Public land ownershipBureau of Land Management
- Zoning, septic, floodplain permits56 individual counties
How we report
Every figure says how we know it.
- Recorded
- Calculated
- Estimated
- Mapped
- Potential
Provenance on every number
Each figure is labelled by how it was arrived at, and cites its source and the date it was retrieved. A reader can check any of it.
A map is not the ground
Outside a mapped flood zone is not the same as no flood risk. A mapped wetland is not a jurisdictional determination. A road on a map is not legal access.
Silence is reported, not filled
Where a county publishes nothing, the report says so and names the office to call. Missing data is never quietly turned into a favourable finding.
Links to the original record
Well logs, water-right abstracts and government datasets are linked directly, so the underlying document is always one click away.
Montana Property Reports is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced by the State of Montana, the Department of Natural Resources & Conservation, the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, the Montana State Library, the USDA Forest Service, FEMA, or any other agency whose public records these reports draw on. The reports are preliminary property intelligence — not legal advice, land surveying, title research, engineering, a wetland delineation, a septic approval, a zoning determination, or a building permit.
Where this is going
The plural is the plan.
Three reports answer three questions about one piece of ground. The name is plural because the system is built to hold more than three — and because the eventual shape of this is a single address that shows you every report available for that property.
That is a direction, not a promise with a date on it. What exists today is below.
Reports available
Coverage is honest and partial: Build Report is fully searchable in four counties, Water Report in eight, with the regulatory registry covering all fifty-six.
About
Built for the decision in front of you.
Montana Property Reports is an independent Montana project. Each report does the assembly for one property at a time: it gathers records from state and federal systems, intersects them against that specific parcel, translates the result into plain language, and says plainly which questions are worth a professional’s time.
The people who use them are buyers, landowners, realtors, builders, contractors, architects, developers, investors and lenders. The reports are not tailored to any of them. They are tailored to the property, because that is the thing everyone in a transaction is actually asking about.
What this is not
- A government agency, or any kind of official determination
- Legal advice, surveying, title research or engineering
- A property listing, valuation or insurance service
- A substitute for a site visit by a qualified professional
- A prediction of what will happen to any particular property