What Montana Build Report is, and what it is not.

Montana Build Report organizes available public data to help identify issues worth investigating. It does not replace site inspections, title work, surveying, engineering, permitting or professional due diligence.

It is preliminary property intelligence

We aggregate authoritative federal, state and county records for a single parcel, run geospatial analysis against that parcel’s mapped boundary, and translate the result into plain language with an explicit confidence level and source for every finding. The purpose is to tell you what deserves a professional’s attention — and what does not.

It is not any of the following

• Legal advice
• Land surveying or a boundary determination
• Title research or a title opinion
• Engineering or geotechnical analysis
• A wetland delineation or jurisdictional determination
• A septic permit, site evaluation or approval
• A zoning determination
• A building permit or any assurance that one will be issued
• A guarantee that a property can or cannot be built upon
• An appraisal, or a statement about value, insurability or insurance pricing

Specific limits worth stating twice

Flood. Being outside a mapped high-risk flood area is not an absence of flood risk, and an unmapped area carries no determination at all in either direction.

Wetlands. Mapped wetland features are photo-interpreted and are explicitly not jurisdictional determinations. Only a delineation and a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers determination answer the regulatory question.

Access. A mapped road is evidence that a physical route may exist. It is not evidence of legal access. Legal access is established by recorded documents and title work.

Soils and terrain. Soil mapping and elevation models describe landscape patterns at a scale coarser than a building envelope. Neither replaces test pits, a percolation test, a geotechnical investigation or a survey.

County rules. Montana counties differ enormously in what they regulate and publish. The authoritative answer for a specific parcel always comes from the office that administers it.

Independence

Montana Build Report is an independent informational tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced by the Montana State Library, Montana DNRC, the U.S. Geological Survey, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, or any Montana county government.

Data currency

Every report records the date its data was accessed. Underlying datasets are refreshed on their own schedules and can lag reality — a recent sale, a new plat, an annexation, a map revision or a fresh county ordinance may not yet be reflected.