About ATLAS
Before anyone signs a lease or buys land, the same questions come up: can I build this here, what will the City charge, how long will it take, and what’s wrong with the site that nobody mentioned. The answers are public. They are spread across dozens of agencies, maps and fee schedules. ATLAS puts them on one map.
What ATLAS is
A site-intelligence map for small businesses, developers and investors. Pick a building, click a spot, and ATLAS reads every public layer under it: zoning and the City’s use tables, floodplain, the Edwards Aquifer zones, wetlands, soils, contamination, traffic, households and renters, competitors, permit and plat times, and every published fee that applies. It can also score a whole part of town and outline where a building fits best.
San Antonio and Bexar County are covered in full. Elsewhere in the United States, ATLAS shows the national layers and whatever zoning and parcel data each place publishes.
How ATLAS treats a number
Every figure carries its kind and its source.
- Published figure
- A fee, rate or rule an agency publishes, with the document and page it came from.
- ATLAS estimate
- Worked out from public data and stated assumptions, labelled as an estimate with the assumptions listed. Never shown as a published figure.
- Your number
- What only you know: your land price, site work, design, financing and contingency. ATLAS never fills these in.
- XX
- Nobody publishes it and there is no reasonable way to work it out. ATLAS says so instead of guessing.
Where the numbers come from
ATLAS uses public data only, from more than 180 sources: the City of San Antonio’s code, fee schedules, permits and map layers; the Bexar Appraisal District’s parcels; Bexar County; SAWS; TxDOT; TCEQ; the U.S. Census Bureau; FEMA; the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service; USDA; EPA; USGS; the Federal Highway Administration; the Bureau of Labor Statistics; and OpenStreetMap.
Zoning and parcels are read fresh on every scan. Each stored source is fingerprinted when its numbers are checked, so when an agency publishes a new version, ATLAS flags it for review rather than quietly keeping old figures. When a source is down, an answer from a saved copy is labelled with the date it was saved.
What ATLAS isn’t
A planning aid, not an appraisal, survey, zoning determination, bid, or legal, engineering or financial advice. Lot fits and costs are estimates to test a site against. A licensed professional and the City confirm them before you commit.
The beta
ATLAS is in public beta. Every mode, including the Business, Developer and Investor tools, is open and free while we test it. Things will change and some answers will be wrong; each one shows its source so you can check it.