Sitehunt
Sitehunt is an AI-powered property database and RFI automation platform built for economic development organizations. It enriches every site with utility, zoning, workforce and environmental data, then turns incoming RFIs into scored, branded response packages within minutes.
What is Sitehunt?
Sitehunt is a browser-based platform that combines a property database with an RFI response engine, aimed squarely at economic development work. It is published from League City, Texas, and was co-founded by Dane Carlson, formerly Director of Economic Development for Galveston County and host of the Econ Dev Show podcast, and Angie Carlson, who leads its GIS, data and enrichment work. You start with whatever you already have: an address, a parcel ID, a PDF brochure, a spreadsheet, a shapefile or a listing feed from your commercial information exchange. Sitehunt locates the parcels, outlines the site and turns it into a structured record. An enrichment engine then pulls from local, regional, state and federal GIS and data sources to add utilities, zoning, infrastructure, workforce, environmental context and incentives, refreshing them on rolling schedules. The vendor claims more than 10,000 data points per property and a question-driven workflow, built from hundreds of real RFIs, that captures over 600 fields in plain language. Where a value is uncertain, the platform surfaces it as an AI Insight explicitly labelled as a guess and shows the underlying source, so your team can confirm or override it; every automated update and manual edit is logged in an audit trail, and local overrides take precedence. The second half of the product handles requests for information. Drop in a PDF, Word file or Excel workbook and the AI extracts the requirements it finds — acreage, building size, utility capacities, access distances, workforce thresholds, timelines, constraints — into a checklist you can edit. Sitehunt then matches each requirement to the right fields, scores every eligible property, and returns a ranked list of qualified sites, a list of disqualified ones with reasons, and a "needs more information" punch list. From there it assembles a branded response package with spec sheets, drive-time, radius, floodplain, soil and slope maps, and demographic, workforce, housing and education reports. Sitehunt is emphatic that it is not a GIS: GIS answers where something is, Sitehunt answers whether a site works. Unlimited users are included, nothing is installed, and no GIS skills are required.
What it does
- Build a structured property database automatically from an address, parcel ID, PDF, spreadsheet, GIS layer or listing feed
- Enrich every site with utility, zoning, infrastructure, workforce, environmental and incentive data on rolling refresh schedules
- Read an incoming RFI and extract its criteria into an editable checklist
- Score and rank sites against those criteria, flagging what is missing instead of guessing
- Assemble a complete branded response package with maps, reports and spec sheets
- Generate site sheets, drive-time and radius maps, demographic and workforce reports and social graphics
- Publish sites and community profiles to a public portal and share access with partners under controlled roles
When to use Sitehunt / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Sitehunt is the right fit.
When to use Sitehunt
- One-person economic development offices and small EDO teams that have to run an entire property inventory with almost no staff
- Communities whose site data is scattered across spreadsheets, shared drives, PDF brochures and GIS layers that never stay current
- Economic developers who field frequent RFIs and RFPs and lose days assembling each response by hand
- Regional coalitions and statewide EDOs that need partner accounts, shared inventories and role-based collaboration across many jurisdictions
- Utilities, regional allies and site selection consultants invited to fill data gaps and contribute to responses without full administrative access
When not to use Sitehunt
- Organizations outside the United States: the Terms of Service restrict the service to users located within the US, and the enrichment data is American
- Teams looking for a full GIS platform: Sitehunt deliberately answers whether a site works, not where things are, and expects you to keep your GIS tools
- Buyers who need a published price or a self-service sign-up: everything is quoted after a sales conversation, with no free plan and no advertised trial
- Anyone needing month-to-month flexibility: plans are annual, auto-renewing, require 30 days' notice to cancel and carry no refunds
- Developers who want to build on a documented public API: none is published, and there is no mobile app or browser extension either
How to use Sitehunt
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Book a 20-minute walkthrough through the scheduling link on the site: there is no self-service sign-up, and the app redirects to a login screen
- Agree a scope and a quote with the vendor, since pricing is tailored to your inventory, RFI volume, data layers and support cadence
- Go through concierge onboarding, where the Sitehunt team prepares and maps your data, runs the first enrichment and trains the team on real projects
- Load your properties from spreadsheets, CSV or Excel files, PDF brochures, addresses, parcel IDs, shapefiles, GeoJSON or an ongoing listing feed
- Let the enrichment engine fill in utilities, zoning, infrastructure, workforce, environmental and incentive data across every record
- Review the AI Insights flagged as guesses and override any field with verified local intelligence, keeping the audit trail intact
- Set up roles and partner access: Admin for settings and users, Editor for properties and responses, Viewer for read-only stakeholders
- Upload an incoming RFI, then edit the extracted criteria and mark each one as required or optional before scoring
- Review the ranked sites, close the gaps on the missing-data punch list, and assemble the branded response package
- Publish maps, site sheets, reports and community profiles, or export everything to CSV and open formats whenever you need it
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Unlimited users on every plan, with no per-seat fees for staff, boards, utilities, partners or consultants
- Strong data portability: ad-hoc exports at any time and a complete export in open formats within seven business days on written request, at no extra cost
- Unusually honest about uncertainty: AI guesses are labelled as such with their sources shown, and unconfirmed criteria are flagged as missing rather than invented
- Full traceability, with dated and sourced values plus an audit trail covering automated updates, manual edits and approvals
- No installation and no GIS expertise required, with concierge onboarding, office hours and coaching bundled into every plan
- Built by practising economic developers from hundreds of real RFIs, which shows in the field structure and the workflow
- Hosted in facilities certified to ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II, with TLS 1.3, audit logs and documented backup and disaster-recovery practices
Cons
- No privacy policy is published anywhere on the site, even though the Terms of Service explicitly refer users to one; the page existed in April 2024 and now returns a 404
- No published pricing at all, no permanent free plan, no advertised free trial and no self-service sign-up: budgeting requires a sales conversation
- Annual, auto-renewing subscriptions with 30 days' notice to cancel and no refunds, not even for unused periods
- Available only to users located within the United States, which rules the platform out everywhere else
- User contributions are used to train the AI with no documented way to opt out, and no DPA, subprocessor list, Article 27 representative or GDPR contact exists
- The Terms allow Sitehunt to delete or anonymize your data without notice once a subscription lapses or an account is terminated, and place backups on you
- No documented public API, no mobile app and no browser extension, and support runs through a co-founder's personal address rather than a team inbox
Pricing & Plans
Sitehunt publishes no prices. Pricing is quoted for each community after a scoping conversation covering inventory size, RFI volume, required data layers, integrations and support cadence. The Terms of Service establish that plans are sold on an annual basis, billed in US dollars (USD) through Stripe, with purchase orders accepted for annual subscriptions, automatic renewal, 30 days' notice to cancel and no refunds. There is no permanent free plan and no free trial is advertised. Consequently, no lowest price point can be stated: the entry cost is not public. The vendor claims only that a tailored plan often costs less than a single GIS seat, without putting a figure on it. A tailored proposal is promised within two business days of the scoping call.
- the full platform
- unlimited seats with role-based access
- audit trails and approvals
- partner collaboration
- concierge onboarding with data cleanup and mapping
- guided launch sessions
- playbooks and office hours
- plus data ownership with CSV and GIS exports and CRM or portal integrations. Billed annually in USD
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Sitehunt handles your data.
GDPR overview
The Terms of Service claim compliance with all applicable data protection laws, including but not limited to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for users in the European Union. Users are told they may access, review, update or delete their personal data at any time and withdraw consent, with requests routed through the support team rather than a dedicated address. Security measures, regular review and breach notification are described in general terms. Beyond that, the GDPR apparatus is absent: no Article 27 EU representative, no data protection officer, no GDPR e-mail, no Data Processing Agreement and no subprocessor list. The claim also sits awkwardly against another clause that reserves the service to users located within the United States, and against the fact that no privacy policy is published at all even though the Terms refer to one.
Who owns the data?
The Terms of Service state that users retain ownership of all content they generate and post, and that Sitehunt claims no ownership rights over it. Users grant the vendor a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to use, display and distribute that content in order to operate and improve the service; the licence lasts as long as the content stays on the platform and does not stop users from using their material elsewhere. The important nuance sits in the AI section: ownership of AI-generated insights is declared shared between the user who enters and verifies the data and the platform itself, and users are expressly forbidden from monetizing those insights directly. The FAQ answers the ownership question plainly: you do.
Reuse rights
Users can reuse their own content freely: the licence granted to Sitehunt is non-exclusive and explicitly does not restrict use elsewhere. AI-generated insights are more constrained. Users may use them to create and enrich database content, in promotional material, in RFI responses and on public-facing property displays, and they may modify them and extend that right to third parties with permission; but direct monetization of AI-generated insights is prohibited, and third parties wanting to use them must obtain permission from the users who verified the underlying data. Portability is a stated principle: ad-hoc exports are available at any time, and a complete export in open formats such as CSV is delivered within seven business days on written request, at no extra cost. On the vendor's side, user contributions that help train the AI are used solely to improve the software, and content may be transmitted to third-party services such as Canva to deliver a requested function.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Sitehunt describes itself as a secure, browser-based hosted stack and says it is hosted in facilities certified to ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II, with TLS 1.3 in transit, audit logs and documented backup and disaster-recovery practices. Two caveats matter. First, those certifications describe the hosting facilities, not Sitehunt itself: the vendor publishes no audit report of its own. Second, and more practically, no hosting country or region is named anywhere on the site — not in the Terms, not on the feature pages, and not in a trust or security page, because none exists. Network observation shows the site resolving to infrastructure operated by Fly.io and geolocated in the United States, but that is an external measurement rather than a commitment by the vendor. No subprocessor list is published; only Canva, named as a third-party integration, and Stripe, named as the payment processor, appear in the Terms. Jurisdiction is Texas: the Terms are governed by Texas law with exclusive venue in Galveston County.
Where Sitehunt works
Country-level availability.
Available in
Not available in
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Sitehunt.
- No privacy policy is published even though the Terms point to one, so there is no document telling you how personal data is actually handled, retained or shared
- The Terms let Sitehunt delete or anonymize your data without notice once a subscription lapses or an account ends, and place the burden of keeping backups on you
- Ownership of AI-generated insights is declared shared with the platform, and you may not monetize them directly, which limits what you can do with work built on your own data
- User contributions are used to train the AI with no documented way to opt out, so the more local intelligence you enter, the more of it feeds the vendor's models
- Convenience can erode scrutiny: when a polished package assembles itself in minutes, it is tempting to send numbers nobody on the team has actually checked
- The Terms disclaim any guarantee on the reliability of AI insights and place verification squarely on you, yet those insights end up in documents prospects treat as authoritative
- Automating the research also thins the institutional knowledge that used to come from doing it by hand, which matters when a site selector asks something the database does not cover
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Low, by design. Nothing is installed and no GIS expertise is required: Sitehunt runs entirely in a browser and presents spatial context in plain language. The vendor handles onboarding itself, preparing and mapping your data, running the first enrichment and training the team on live projects. Imports accept non-technical inputs — an address, a parcel ID, a PDF, a CSV or Excel file — as well as shapefiles, GeoJSON and listing feeds. There is no API to wire up. The real effort is not technical but editorial: how long onboarding takes depends on the state of your existing data and how many gaps have to be closed.
Deployment
Integrations
Behind Sitehunt
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Sitehunt.
Frequently asked questions
Is Sitehunt a GIS platform?
Do I need GIS skills to use it?
How much does Sitehunt cost?
Is there a free plan or a free trial?
Are users charged per seat?
Can we get our data back out?
Who owns the data and the AI-generated content?
Is Sitehunt available outside the United States?
Where is the privacy policy?
Is there a public API?
Should you pick Sitehunt?
Sitehunt is a narrow tool that knows exactly how narrow it is, and that focus is its main strength. It is built for American economic development organizations, by people who did the job, and the product reflects that: a question-driven field structure taken from real RFIs, enrichment that reaches into local, state and federal sources, and a response workflow that ends in a package you can actually send. Three habits stand out as genuinely uncommon. Uncertain values are labelled as guesses with their sources shown. Criteria the system cannot confirm are flagged as missing rather than filled with something plausible. And data portability is treated as a promise rather than a concession, with a full export in open formats within seven business days at no cost. The reservations are mostly documentary rather than functional. Nothing about the price is public, there is no free plan or advertised trial, and the only way in is a sales conversation followed by an annual, auto-renewing, non-refundable contract. More seriously, no privacy policy is published at all, even though the Terms of Service send users to one; an archived copy shows it was online in April 2024 and has since been removed. Alongside that gap sit a GDPR compliance claim with none of the usual machinery behind it, AI training on user contributions with no documented opt-out, and a clause allowing deletion of your data without notice once a subscription lapses. The publisher is also very young and very small, with a legal structure still consolidating. For a US economic development office drowning in spreadsheets and RFI deadlines, Sitehunt is a credible answer. Outside the United States it is simply unavailable, and anyone signing should read the retention and ownership clauses closely.
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