◢ About CheckHazard
Hazard answers for any
Philippine address, in 30 seconds.
The Philippine government has spent decades producing world-class hazard maps: flood modeling from UP NOAH, fault traces from PHIVOLCS, terrain rasters, barangay boundaries. The data has always been free. Almost nobody outside a GIS lab has ever used it. CheckHazard packages all of it into one searchable, ₱99 report any buyer or planner can read.
Our mission
Make Philippine hazard intelligence accessible to the people who need it most.
A homebuyer signing a ₱4M sale-and-purchase agreement should not need to hire a geotechnical engineer just to find out whether the lot floods. An LGU planner reviewing a development permit should not have to learn QGIS to verify the project clears the West Valley Fault buffer. The information already exists, paid for by public research dollars and licensed for free use. CheckHazard is the layer that turns that data into something a non-technical reader can act on in 30 seconds, without giving up the underlying rigor.
Why this exists
The Philippines has world-class hazard data, with a 100-fold gap between who can use it and who needs to.
Today, the standard answer to “is this property at risk?” is hire a geotechnical engineer for ₱10,000 and wait two weeks, or guess. Most buyers guess. The consequences land in the news every typhoon season: subdivisions built on alluvial fans, condominiums on liquefaction-prone sand, lots straddling unmapped fault traces.
The blind spot
₱10,000+
per professional site survey
2-3 week turnaround. Most buyers skip it because it costs more than the earnest-money deposit and arrives after the option period.
The volume
90,727
Pag-IBIG home loans / yr
Plus ~1.23M used-vehicle and OFW remittance-funded property transactions annually; every one of them an address that could have been pre-screened.
The cost we replace
₱99
per address, instant
Below the threshold where a Filipino buyer needs to discuss it with a partner. GCash-payable. The full report in 30 seconds.
The wedge is timing. UP NOAH made the polygon layers public years ago. AI made plain-English explanations cheap. What used to be a 30-minute domain-expert paragraph now costs two pesos in tokens. ₱99sits at the impulse-buy threshold. GCash unlocks the long tail of buyers who don’t carry credit cards. Each piece existed; nobody had assembled them.
What we built
One report. One ₱99 unlock. Two audiences who both need the same answer.
Type a Philippine address. We geocode it, run eleven spatial calculations against the hazard tables, and return a structured report: flood return periods, fault distance, landslide susceptibility, storm-surge advisory, terrain elevation and slope, nearest waterway, and a liquefaction screen. The free preview shows the property’s measured site characteristics (elevation, slope, distance to the nearest fault and waterway) and what sits within 2km. A free account unlocks the full hazard findings; ₱99 unlocks the overall composite rating and the hazard map.
Homebuyers
28-45, ₱2M-₱8M property bracket, often OFW remittance-funded. The report is the screening step before they fly back for the viewing, and the document they show their spouse or parents to justify backing out of a deal that doesn't pass.
LGU planners
Building Officials, MDRRMOs, City Planning Office staff. The report cites NSCP 2019, Water Code easements, and PHIVOLCS distance bands inline, so the same evidence used in the field becomes the evidence in the council memo.
How a report is made
Eleven formulas, every threshold documented, every band cited.
CheckHazard isn’t an opinion engine. The report is the output of eleven well-defined PostGIS queries: point-in-polygon checks, nearest-distance computations, raster-value lookups, proximity buffers, a liquefaction screening estimate, a composite-rating algorithm. Each formula is documented in plain English with its exact thresholds, its reasoning, and its limitations. If a finding shows up in the report, you can trace it back to the exact polygon or distance band that produced it.
Step 01
Geocode
Google Geocoding → cached lat/lng. We never re-bill an address we’ve seen before.
Step 02
Spatial query
PostGIS 3.6 + 11 formulas. ST_Intersects, ST_Distance, ST_Slope on the SRTM raster.
Step 03
Categorize
Documented thresholds turn raw distances and polygon levels into Low → Severe ratings.
Step 04
Assemble
Categorized findings flow into the structured report sections: the composite rating, the full findings grid, the severity index, the insurance guidance, and the legal constraints check.
Where the data comes from
Seven public data sources. Every one credited on every report.
We don’t own a single proprietary dataset, and that’s on purpose. Building on public sources licensed under ODbL and CC-BY means our findings can be audited against the same evidence an LGU’s GIS office or a court-appointed expert would use. Each report’s footer carries the full attribution; this is the short list.
UP NOAH Center
DOST-funded
Flood, landslide, storm-surge, debris-flow, and alluvial-fan polygons.
PHIVOLCS
DOST
Active fault traces and the active-volcano inventory.
GEM Foundation
Global seismic atlas
Independent fault-segment validation for active traces.
MGB-DENR
Mines & Geosciences
Landslide susceptibility (cross-checked against NOAH).
PSA · NAMRIA
Mapping authority
Barangay and municipal admin boundaries.
OpenStreetMap
OSM Foundation
Waterway centerlines (rivers, creeks, esteros) and nearby-facility data.
OpenTopography / SRTM
NASA / OpenTopography
Elevation and slope rasters (SRTM GL1 30m, public domain).
Coverage is nationwide for hazard polygons, faults, waterways, and admin boundaries. Terrain (elevation + slope) is loaded as resampled rasters so reports return the same numbers off-grid as in Metro Manila. The exact tables, row counts, and license terms are listed on /research.
What CheckHazard is not
The boundaries we draw on every page, so you know exactly what you’re paying for.
Not a professional engineering report.
A CheckHazard report is the screening step before you book a geotechnical or structural survey, not a substitute for one. We say so on every page and reinforce it in the report’s methodology footer.
Not an insurance product.
We don’t underwrite, sell, or settle policies. The Insurance Guidance section is for educational comparison only; actual premiums and coverage come from a licensed insurer.
Not a real-estate listing site.
We don’t sell properties, take referral fees from brokers, or accept developer-paid placements. Our incentives stay aligned with the buyer.
Not a subscription.
₱99 per report, one-time. No ladder, no upsell, no auto-renewal. If the question is “is this address safe?”, you should never owe us a recurring bill to ask it.
Not a government tool.
CheckHazard is a private product built on public data. We’re not affiliated with DOST, PHIVOLCS, NOAH, MGB-DENR, NAMRIA, or any LGU; we just credit them every chance we get.
Who’s behind it
Built and maintained by Armin Almuete.
CheckHazard started as a personal project: a Filipino engineer wanting a way to help his family screen properties without paying survey-firm prices. The first prototype was a Jupyter notebook running PostGIS queries against a one-province NOAH dump. Today it’s nationwide, runs on Supabase + Vercel, and serves anyone with a Philippine address and ₱99.
The product is independent. There’s no agency, no PR firm, no team of contractors. Just the founder writing code, talking to users, and posting from a personal Instagram account. The choice is deliberate: at this scale, founder voice beats brand voice for a ₱99transaction users haven’t made before.
Acknowledgments
Standing on a lot of public-research shoulders.
Every hazard polygon, fault trace, and elevation raster CheckHazard reads was paid for by Filipino taxpayers and produced by people we will never get to thank by name. The UP NOAH researchers who modeled a country’s flood risk into 5-, 25-, and 100-year polygons. The PHIVOLCS field teams who walked the Marikina, Valley, and Philippine Faults to map them. The NAMRIA cartographers maintaining the barangay boundary set. The MGB-DENR geologists classifying landslide susceptibility. The OpenStreetMap volunteers tracing every creek and estero. We didn’t produce any of this; we just made it readable for ₱99.
Footer attribution on every report: Hazard data: UP NOAH Center / DOST, PHIVOLCS / GEM, OpenStreetMap contributors, PSA NAMRIA. CheckHazard does not replace a professional geotechnical or engineering survey.
◢ Ready to try it
Type any Philippine address.
See what the data already knows.
The free preview shows the property’s measured site characteristics and what sits within 2km. No account needed.
Search a property