Make the first call

A public property-record and land-use rules API for U.S. real estate: public property records, and what each jurisdiction allows, requires, has decided and is about to change about building on land. Every record traces to its public source, and every rule quotes the ordinance and says when it took effect.

How the paths are organized

• Ask about a place: /place, /rule, /conformance, /parcel. A location is a parameter set
• (address, point=lat,lon, geometry plus buffer, parcel, apn plus fips, plss,
• location_token), never a separate resolve step.
• Public property records: /property (assessment, tax, ownership and structures embedded) and
• /transaction (recorded sales, transfers and mortgages). Public sources only; an undisclosed value
• is withheld, never estimated.
• Browse one town by its own names: /jurisdiction/{id}/district/{code}, /code/{kind},
• /plan, /process/{type}.
• Search across towns: /permission, /ordinance, /section, /moratorium, /case,
• /permit, /meeting, /metric, /change_event, /coverage. Each takes one scope:
• region, jurisdiction (repeatable), state, county, or geometry plus buffer.
• Reference by id: /citation/{id}, /document/{id}, /answer/{id}.

Paths are singular nouns with no verbs. A relationship is a query parameter or an embedded array, never a nested path of peers. Leaf records (fees, votes, conditions, provenance, district shares) are embedded in the resource they belong to rather than served on their own.

Time

as_of is valid time, the law in force then. known_as_of is knowledge time, the answer we would have given then. Both default to now and both work identically everywhere. An interval as_of returns segment[], the maximal sub-intervals over which each fact was constant, never a winner.

Coverage

Every answer about law carries a coverage block saying what is held for the jurisdiction and layer it answered from, and how fresh it is. A fact's status distinguishes stated, conflicting and withheld. 404 means no such id and nothing else.

Collections, filters, errors

Cursor pagination only (cursor, size, total=true on the first page). sort=field or sort=-field. filter[<field>][<op>]=<value>; a row a filter cannot evaluate is returned as indeterminate, never silently dropped. Refusals are {"detail": {"error": {"code", "field", "detail", "message", "message_title"}}} with a code from GET /vocabulary/error_code. Mutations accept Idempotency-Key; updates require If-Match.