- What exactly do I get?
- A .zip containing one .kmz with all 19 layers merged, the full written guide, a quickstart, and the licence. $25 for the set, which works out around $1.32 a layer.
- How does the download arrive?
- Checkout and delivery both run through Ko-fi. You get the download immediately on the thank-you screen after paying, and again as a link in your email receipt. Nothing is manual, and there is nothing to wait for.
- Why Ko-fi rather than checkout on this site?
- Because it is the same product either way and Ko-fi already does fulfilment properly. Running payments here would mean a payment integration, a delivery service and an email sender to maintain, all to sell one file. Ko-fi takes a small cut and I get to spend that time on the layers instead.
- Can I buy just one layer?
- Not at the moment. Individual layers were priced at $5, but the fixed per-transaction card fee eats close to a tenth of that before anything else, and the bundle meant five layers already cost the same as all of them. If there is a layer you specifically want on its own, email me and say which — enough of those and it comes back.
- Which one should I start with?
- County Screen. It is the only layer that ranks rather than excludes, and it is the one the whole method is built around — every county in the lower 48 scored, with the top 150 individually clickable. The filter layers are most useful as sanity checks on a county it points you at.
- Do I need Google Earth Pro?
- No. It opens in Google Earth Web in a browser, in Google Earth Pro on desktop, and on the mobile apps. Pro is the most comfortable for heavy filtering because the layer tree is easier to work with, but nothing here requires it.
- Is there a subscription, or updates?
- Neither. It is a one-time purchase of a file you keep. The underlying datasets change on a multi-year cycle, so these do not go stale quickly.
- The state screens remove states I would actually consider. Can I get them back?
- Yes, and that is the intended workflow. Gun law and homeschool law are two separate tickboxes covering 7 and 19 states. Untick either and those states come straight back. The homeschool rule alone is the single biggest lever: dropping it adds roughly 800 counties to the County Screen ranking, and West Virginia takes the top three outright.
- Does a high-ranking county mean a good property?
- No, and this is the most important limitation to understand. These describe places, not parcels. They know nothing about flood zone, deeded access, HOA rules, severed mineral rights, or whether there is water on the ground. They tell you where to look. Everything after that is your own due diligence.
- Do you sell property listings?
- No. Nothing here is a listing feed and none of it tells you what is for sale. These are screening layers for deciding which regions are worth searching in — you take that to whichever listing site or agent you prefer.
- Where does the data come from?
- All public sources: NLCD land cover, NOAA Climate Normals, USFS wildfire hazard, EPA radon zones, US Census population and geography, USGS groundwater and seismic hazard, USDA NRCS soil survey, CMS hospital records, and state water-law doctrine. The datasets are free; the work is in assembling, reconciling and scoring them. Every layer names its own sources in its guide.
- Why are the county scores so close together?
- Because they genuinely are. The first 40 counties fall inside four points. Treat the top tier as one group of comparable options rather than a strict ranking — the difference between #3 and #19 is not meaningful.
- Can you build me something that is not in the set?
- Yes — $100 per custom layer, for anything derivable from public data. There is no buy button: email me, I tell you whether it is buildable and where it would be weak, we agree the scope in writing, and only then does a payment link go out. If it cannot be done properly you pay nothing. One condition: what I build for you may also be sold here afterwards. See the custom layers page.
- Can I resell or redistribute the files?
- No. The purchase is a personal licence for your own land search. The underlying public datasets are of course free for anyone to use; the assembled and scored layers are not.
- Something went wrong with my order.
- Email support@preparedground.com and I will sort it out. The refund policy is on the terms page.
- I lost my download.
- Ko-fi keeps your purchases against your account, so the link in your email receipt should still work. If it does not, email support@preparedground.com from the address you paid with and I will send it over.