Data Sources

FLREMA aggregates data from public records and other publicly-accessible third-party sources to power its tools. This page identifies those sources, the legal basis for accessing them, and the limits of what FLREMA represents about the data.

1. Public-records doctrine

Florida property appraiser records are public records under Article I, Section 24 of the Florida Constitution and Chapter 119 of the Florida Statutes (the "Sunshine Law"). FLREMA accesses those records on a member-initiated, single-parcel basis (no bulk downloads), through interfaces that the issuing public agencies make available to the general public. Members request specific parcels; the Services retrieve and display public-record data for those parcels.

We do not represent that our access posture has been reviewed or approved by any specific source operator. Each source operator's terms of use apply to that operator's site; FLREMA acts as a downstream user, not as a republisher with a contractual relationship to the source operator.

2. Florida county property appraisers we currently access

• Broward County Property Appraiser (BCPA) — bcpa.net — HTML scrape of RecInfo.asp and RecBuildingCard.asp + Census Geocoder for lat/lon.
• Hillsborough County Property Appraiser (HCPAFL) — gis.hcpafl.org — ArcGIS REST WebParcels layer + ParcelData JSON endpoint + Census Geocoder.
• Miami-Dade Property Appraiser — apps.miamidadepa.gov — ArcGIS REST PaGISView FeatureServer + PaServicesProxy.ashx (the SPA's public backend).
• Orange County Property Appraiser (OCPA) — ocpaweb.ocpafl.org — OCPA's public Azure-Front-Door-fronted API (the same backend used by the official OCPA SPA) + Census Geocoder.
• Palm Beach County Property Appraiser (PBCPAO) — pbcpao.gov + PAO ArcGIS REST — HTML scrape + Census Geocoder.
• Pinellas County Property Appraiser (PCPAO) — pcpao.gov — ArcGIS REST PropertyPopup_A MapServer.

We expect to expand to additional Florida counties over time. This list will be updated as we add coverage.

3. Federal sources

• U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder — geocoding.geo.census.gov — public no-key endpoint that converts a street address into WGS84 lat/lon. Used when a county source doesn't expose parcel geometry.
• FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer (NFHL) — ArcGIS-hosted public flood-zone determinations. Queried by lat/lon to surface the official flood zone designation for a parcel.
• Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) licensee directory — used to verify member license status at signup and periodically thereafter.

4. Third-party services that travel with a request, not through FLREMA's data layer

• Anthropic (Claude API) — receives AI-tool inputs and returns generated text. See AI Output Disclosure.
• Microsoft Azure — hosts the Services and the application database.
• Google reCAPTCHA — bot prevention on signup and sign-in.

5. What FLREMA does NOT represent about source data

• That source data is current, complete, correct, or matches what the issuing agency would tell you if you asked it directly.
• That a source endpoint is or will remain available, formatted as expected, or free of breaking changes.
• That data from one source matches data from another source for the same parcel.
• That the parcel a geocoder returns for a given address is the parcel you intended.
• That cached data is current (we cache to be polite to source operators; cache ages vary by data type).

The full data, automated-processing, and mandatory verification provision is in Section 7 of the Terms of Service.

6. Operational discipline

FLREMA accesses source data with the following discipline:

• User-initiated only. A request to a county or federal source happens because a member clicked something. We do not run background sweeps or bulk downloads.
• Polite User-Agent. Every request identifies FLREMA and includes a contact email so source operators can reach us.
• Sequential single requests. No parallelism, no batching.
• Caching. 7-day cache on per-parcel detail records; 90-day cache on geocoder results. Failures are also cached short-term so retries don't hammer a struggling source.
• robots.txt awareness. Where a source publishes robots.txt, we mirror what a member clicking a link would do rather than what an automated crawler would do.

7. Source-operator concerns

If you are a county property appraiser, state or federal agency, or other public-records operator and have a concern about FLREMA's access to your data, please email info@flrema.org. We will respond promptly.

8. Property-owner concerns

If you are a property owner and believe data displayed about your parcel is incorrect, see our Data Correction / Takedown page. Note that FLREMA passes through public-record data; you may also need to contact the source operator directly to correct the underlying record.