Built from experience. The expensive kind.

I bought a house in Seattle in 2018. The inspector didn't flag any electrical issues. A few years later, I put $200,000 into renovating it, including electrical work. The electrician didn't mention anything either.

Summer 2025, getting the house ready to sell, a listing inspector pulled off a wall plate and found knob-and-tube wiring. The original 1940 electrical, still in the walls. Twelve thousand dollars to remediate.

The house was built in 1940. King County says so on the assessor page. There's no full electrical rewire permit on file with the city. A 1940 home with no rewire permit almost certainly has knob-and-tube behind the walls. Two public records, one inference. Three professionals missed it.

That would have been enough. But it wasn't the only time.

My husband and I looked at four houses in a few months. One sat in a landslide zone, the kind of slope that gets you excluded from standard insurance entirely. We offered on a beautiful Victorian. That night at 9pm, our agent called. Buried oil tank, $48,000 state remediation on record. I woke up at 2am in a cold sweat and rescinded the offer, wondering what else might be hiding. That remediation record had been sitting in a public database the whole time.

The home we finally bought? Cosmetic updates over original plumbing. It failed within days of moving in. Nearly $200,000 in damage.

CaveatBuyer is the report I wished existed at every one of those moments. Enter an address, answer a few questions, and get personalized intelligence that connects the dots across land risk, house condition, and neighborhood trajectory.

The foundation is public data: permits, remediation records, assessor files. The intelligence is not. Nobody was connecting it. Now CaveatBuyer does.