About
The report I wish we'd had
Some of my first memories sit on a Windows XP machine in the early 2000s, playing 3D Pinball: Space Cadet, the game baked into the Start menu. I did not have a word for what I was looking at yet. I knew I liked the way the machine answered back when I did something to it.
Military service came next. I served in the U.S. Navy, working around systems that had to stay up no matter what. A wrong number or a missed connection was not an option.
After the Navy, I spent my career close to those same kinds of systems. I wrote software, stood up servers, wired networks, and kept information systems running. The titles changed; the thread did not. Get the pieces to work together.
What all of it taught me is plain. I like learning technology, and I like to tinker. I open something up to see how the parts connect, why they connect, and why each one matters to the next. The relationship between systems holds my attention longer than any single system does.
Welcome to my next project.
How sounding started
Sounding began as a tool for my wife and me. We were house-hunting, and the math lived in a spreadsheet, a wall of cells we retyped for every new listing. I wanted something faster than punching numbers into Excel, with cleaner output, in a format we could hand to each other and read like a real report instead of a worksheet.
Here is the part that stung. When we bought our home, we did not know what the supplemental tax would cost. We did not know about the Mello-Roos we would still be paying, a fixed charge that can run hundreds of dollars a month on top of everything else. Those bills arrived after we had already signed. We went over budget that year, and we spent a lot of it wishing we had seen those numbers before the deal closed, not after.
Sounding is the report I wish we'd had. Every hidden line, in your monthly number from the start.
If it helps you, help me back
If this makes your San Diego home search a little clearer, two small asks.
- Share it with friends and family who are looking. Word of mouth is how a small site like this survives.
- Tell me what is broken. If you find a wrong number or something that does not add up, reach out through the contact page. There is an intake form there, and I read every submission.
And if you want to buy me a coffee, I would love that. It helps keep the site up.
Thanks for stopping by. Come back and poke around. There is more depth here on what you would be getting into before you buy.
Editorial standards
Every guide, city and neighborhood page on this site is published under the “Sounding Research” byline. That is me, the same person who wrote the story above and built the tool. It is a one-person operation, so the byline is the site’s name rather than a masthead, but there is no team of freelancers behind it and nothing here is syndicated or bought.
Where the numbers come from. Tax mechanics come from the California Revenue & Taxation Code and the San Diego County Assessor and Auditor-Controller. Mello-Roos district details come from the County Auditor-Controller’s active CFD list. Loan limits come from FHFA, mortgage insurance and funding-fee rules from HUD handbooks and the VA, rates from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, rents from HUD, flood layers from FEMA, and fire hazard zones from CAL FIRE. Each page ends with a Sources list naming what it used and the date it was retrieved.
How the financing math is produced. The worked examples on the place pages are not typed in by hand. They are computed from the same code that generates a real report, so a guide cannot quietly drift from what the tool would tell you about an actual address. When that code’s dated constants are refreshed (loan limits each November, VA and FHA schedules on the agencies’ own cycles), the pages are regenerated with them.
Corrections and dates. The “Updated” date on each page is the date it was last substantively revised, not the date it was last touched, and it matches the date published in that page’s structured data. If you find something wrong, the contact form reaches me directly and I would rather hear it than not.
What this is not. Everything on the site is an estimate built from public data. None of it is an appraisal, a lender’s quote, an insurance binder, or legal, tax or financial advice, and no page should be the last thing you read before signing something.