By Rui Xu, Founder of MyHomeScout
Short answer: Prices run from no listed fee for official sources (FEMA's flood layer; the Census API, which now needs a key) to $1,500 per API per month at Local Logic. RentCast starts at $74 for 1,000 requests, Realie at $50 for 1,250 tokens, and ATTOM and NeighborhoodScout only quote through sales. MyHomeScout's API is $49/month for 5,000 calls (Starter) or $199/month for 25,000 (Growth), over REST or MCP, for 15 counties in the Bay Area, Greater Los Angeles and San Diego. Pick by three things, in this order: the unit each value describes (parcel, tract or ZIP), whether you are allowed to display what it returns, and the cost of one finished user task, not one call.
I build MyHomeScout's API, so weigh this accordingly. Every competitor figure below comes from the vendor's own site, checked November 2026.
The market at a glance
Provider — What it is strongest at — Coverage it states — Published price
ATTOM — Property records: ownership, sales, loans, plus schools and crime per parcel — 160+ million U.S. properties, 99% of the population — Not published; 30-day free trial, then a sales quote
RentCast — Property records, AVM and rent estimates, listings, ZIP market data — 150+ million properties; listings in all 50 states — $0 (50 requests), $74 (1,000), $199 (5,000), $449 (25,000) a month
Realie — Parcel and deed records — Not stated on the pricing page — $0 (25 tokens), $50 (1,250), $150 (6,000), $350 (30,000) a month
Local Logic — Location scores and points of interest, as SDK widgets or API — Every address in the U.S. and Canada; 18 location scores, 41 POI categories — SDKs from $250, APIs from $1,500 per API a month
NeighborhoodScout (data) — Neighborhood crime, schools, demographics, real estate trends — "Hundreds of data elements"; bulk files, API, shapefiles — Not published; through sales
Precisely — Address verification, geocoding, maps and 220+ datasets — 160+ countries — 30-day trial with 2,500 credits; paid plans pay-as-you-go
MyHomeScout — Address-level hazard, environment, crime-record, school-result and permit layers — 15 counties in 3 California metros — $49 (5,000 calls), $199 (25,000 calls) a month
FEMA NFHL — Effective flood zones — Over 90% of the U.S. population — No fee listed; public downloads and web map services
Census Data API — ACS and decennial tables by tract, block group, ZIP — All of the U.S. — No fee listed; a key (organization name and email) is now required on every request
These are not interchangeable. ATTOM, RentCast and Realie describe the property. Local Logic and NeighborhoodScout describe the area. FEMA and our API describe what the location falls inside: flood, fire and fault zones, noise contours, distances to infrastructure. Most real products need two of the three.
What one call really costs
Divide each plan's price by its included volume and you get a floor for the price of one call:
Plan — Monthly price — Included — Price per included call
RentCast Foundation — $74 — 1,000 requests — $0.074
RentCast Growth — $199 — 5,000 requests — $0.040
RentCast Scale — $449 — 25,000 requests — $0.018
Realie Tier 1 — $50 — 1,250 tokens — $0.040
Realie Tier 3 — $350 — 30,000 tokens — $0.012
MyHomeScout Starter — $49 — 5,000 calls — $0.0098
MyHomeScout Growth — $199 — 25,000 calls — $0.0080
Over the limit, RentCast charges $0.20 down to $0.015 per extra request, and Realie $0.15 down to $0.012 per extra token.
Then do the real math. Say your listing app shows a hazard panel on every home a user opens, 3,000 addresses a month. If the panel needs 3 calls per address (flood, fire, noise), that is 9,000 calls. That fits Growth (25,000), not Starter (5,000). If you cache results by parcel and half the views are repeats, it drops to 4,500 and Starter is enough. The cost of a finished task depends more on your cache and your call pattern than on the rate card.
Seven questions to settle before you integrate
- Where is coverage real? Ask for coverage by dataset and by county, not one national claim. A geocoded address does not mean every layer has data there. Ours is 15 counties: 9 in the Bay Area, 5 in Greater Los Angeles (Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino), and San Diego.
- What unit does each value describe? A census tract holds 1,200 to 8,000 people, so a tract value cannot describe one house. A FEMA flood zone or a CAL FIRE hazard zone is a polygon the parcel is in or not. Label each field in your UI with its unit.
- What date is it? Keep three dates apart: when the source observed it, when the source published it, and when the provider fetched it. "Updated today" can still be a 2020 survey.
- What does empty mean? Ask for real responses for four cases: outside coverage, no matching records, source does not publish this, and service error. If your UI shows all four as a green check, you have a bug.
- What may you display and store? Read the API terms for display, caching, derived works and redistribution. Prices for display rights can differ from prices for internal use, and "bulk datasets are licensed separately" is common (Realie says exactly that).
- How does it fail? Check auth, rate limits (ours: 60 requests a minute on Starter, 120 on Growth), timeouts, retries and versioning. Test with your own traffic shape.
- Does it fit fair-housing rules? If home seekers use your product, do not rank, filter or describe areas by race, national origin, religion, familial status, disability or other protected traits. That applies to how you present data, not only to who supplies it.
Run a pilot that can fail
Build a test set of 50 to 100 addresses from your real service area:
- 60% ordinary homes
- 20% near a boundary (the edge of a flood zone, a county line, a freeway)
- 10% outside the coverage you expect
- 10% hard to geocode (new construction, unit numbers, rural routes)
For each vendor, log: the address it matched, the unit of each value, the source date, which layers came back empty and why, calls per address, latency, and every manual fix you had to make.
Write the pass rules before you start. For example: every out-of-coverage address must come back flagged, not empty; no failed request may show as "no concern"; every value must carry a source date your UI can show. Then run every vendor on the same tasks. A cached neighborhood lookup against a full multi-layer report is not a speed comparison.
REST or MCP
REST is right for a normal app: a fixed screen, a known set of fields, your own cache. Our REST API takes an `X-API-Key` header.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open protocol, built on JSON-RPC 2.0, that lets an AI host discover and call a server's tools. Use it when an assistant decides at run time which data it needs, for example "is this address in a flood zone, and how far is it from a freeway?" MCP's own specification says hosts must get the user's consent before invoking a tool. Plan for that in your UI.
Neither format changes the data. Both return the same records, with the same coverage and the same dates. Choose by client, not by hype. Starter and Growth both include MCP access; see the MCP docs for the tool list.
Where MyHomeScout fits, and where it doesn't
Use our API if your users are in the Bay Area, Greater Los Angeles or San Diego, and you need the address-level layers that change from one parcel to the next. That means 40+ public layers: FEMA flood zone, CAL FIRE fire hazard severity zone, Alquist-Priolo fault and CGS liquefaction zones, freeway, rail and airport noise, power lines, substations, gas pipelines and cell towers, Superfund sites and landfills, radon, nearby reported crime incidents, CAASPP results for nearby schools, and building permits on file. Each finding carries its source and date.
Do not use it if you need nationwide coverage, ownership and sales history, or a valuation model. ATTOM or RentCast are the right first calls for those. Many teams pair a property-records API with ours.
Both plans start with a 7-day free trial (card required, cancel anytime).
Read the API overview, check coverage and API pricing, then run your 100-address pilot on the trial.
Sources (checked November 2026): ATTOM API and ATTOM pricing support; RentCast API pricing; Realie pricing; Local Logic pricing; NeighborhoodScout data access; Precisely APIs; FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer; Census Data API; Census geography glossary; MCP specification 2025-06-18; MyHomeScout pricing.
Disclaimer：This article is for general information only and is not legal, tax, insurance, or other professional advice. Confirm official records and consult the appropriate professional before you decide.