Ian Smith

I grew up in Houston and bought a house in the Heights in 2025.

When I bought it, I wanted a straight answer to one question. Has this house flooded and is it going to?

It turns out that answer is really hard to get. It's spread across FEMA flood maps, county appraisal records, flood-control studies, and federal insurance claims. Most of it is written for engineers instead of the people actually buying the house. And the flood zone on your lender's paperwork tells you a lot less than you'd think.

So I built FloodMaps.

Type in an address and you get a plain-English flood report for that home—its FEMA zone, whether your lender will require flood insurance, where the floor sits against the flood line, and what past storms did to the neighborhood. All of it comes from public sources (FEMA maps, lidar elevation surveys, flood insurance claims, and county property records) so you can check the work yourself.

We started with the Houston area. In October 2026 we added all 67 Florida counties, where there are about 1.8 million federal flood insurance policies—more than any other state. More states are on the way.

Our mission is to make sure anyone buying or renting a home can see its real flood risk in plain English before they sign anything.

And if you're buying in Houston or Florida, check the flood data before you check the kitchen.

• Every figure comes from a named public source, mostly government, listed on Our Data with its accuracy and coverage.
• Saved copies of FEMA's flood maps are checked against FEMA's every day.
• Pages with figures say whose records they come from and how current the data is.
• When a source doesn't answer, the report says so instead of guessing.
• The AI that explains a report is told to use only that home's data and never to invent a number.