Pulling a moisture risk report for an address
How to pull a moisture risk report for an address: enter the address, confirm the property record, and read the four module contributions with the data-completeness figure beside them.
Step by step
Enter the address
Street address, city and state. Geocoding falls back through several sources — a commercial geocoder, then the US Census geocoder — so most addresses resolve. New construction and recently subdivided parcels are the usual failures, and where nothing resolves the check says so rather than quietly scoring a neighbouring property.
Confirm the property record
The lookup returns what it found: construction year, cladding, roof type, basement type, lot characteristics. Check the construction year in particular. Where it came from a parcel record it is marked verified; where it came from a census-tract median or a mapped building footprint it is marked an estimate, and correcting it here can move the building module substantially.
Read the module breakdown, not the headline
Four modules with their own contributions: Regional Moisture Burden out of 20, Terrain and Drainage out of 10, Building Vulnerability out of 25, Disclosure and Event History out of 45. The headline number sorts properties. The breakdown tells you which of them is doing the work, and therefore what to do.
Check data completeness before acting on the number
It is reported beside the score, never folded into it. A 55 built from a verified construction year, a parcel record and a filed disclosure is a much stronger claim than a 55 built from a postal code and a neighbourhood median. Same number, different confidence, and a report that hid the difference would be the more useful-looking and less honest one.
Add the disclosure, if you have one
The disclosure module is the largest and it is inert without a document. Uploading a state disclosure form — the PA SPD, NJ SPCDS or DE SDCR — has the events parsed, categorised and severity-rated, and the score recalculated against them. This is the single largest improvement available to any report.
Take the driver list to whoever inspects
The output most worth forwarding is not the score, it is the inspection priorities the drivers generate. An inspector who arrives already knowing the property is 1994 stucco on low-lying ground with a disclosed basement event spends their time differently.
What the output contains
A score from 0 to 100 with its band, a completeness figure, and a module breakdown showing what each of the four contributed and whether it was analysed at all.
A ranked driver list: the specific factors that moved the number, each with its evidence strength, so you can tell a documented fact from an inference about the building's cohort.
Inspection priorities generated from those drivers, which is the part that translates into action.
Where a module could not be analysed — most commonly disclosure, outside the three covered states — the report says so rather than presenting a partial score as a complete one.
Coverage and data vintage
The full four-module model runs in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, where the terrain profiles are built out and the statutory disclosure forms can be parsed. Elsewhere a report covers climate, terrain and building data without the disclosure layer.
Property records come from commercial parcel data with public fallbacks; hazard exposure from federal sources. Every score carries the model version it was produced by, so a report can be identified as the current model's output or an earlier one's, and recomputed rather than compared across versions.
Questions people ask
- How do I check moisture risk on a house before purchase?
- Pull the report on the listing address before you write the offer — it needs no access and no permission. Then ask for the seller's disclosure and add it, which activates the largest module.
- Do I need the property's permission?
- No. Everything read is public record or commercially available property data, and nothing about the check touches the building or notifies anyone.
- How current is the data?
- Property records reflect the last recorded transaction or assessment, so recent work may not appear. Climate profiles are long-run normals and move slowly. Anything you have fixed that no record knows about has to be supplied rather than assumed.