Terms

Real Estate Field Guide is an educational publication. The content on the site describes how things generally work in US residential real estate, mortgage products, contracts, closing processes, taxes, calculator math, and related subjects. The content is not legal advice, tax advice, financial advice, investment advice, or real estate brokerage advice, and readers should not act on it as if it were.

For decisions that depend on your specific situation, consult the licensed professional whose work it is to evaluate that situation. The site identifies the relevant professional throughout, real estate attorney, loan officer, mortgage broker, CPA or licensed tax professional, real estate agent, home inspector, county tax assessor, financial planner, depending on the topic. None of those professionals are us; we are an editorial publication that describes the general framework within which they operate.

Calculator outputs are illustrative. The math is documented in each calculator’s assumptions panel and follows published methodology, but the actual figures applicable to a real transaction come from the closing professional, the lender’s Loan Estimate or Closing Disclosure, or the tax professional handling the relevant return.

Reading this site does not create an attorney-client relationship, an advisory relationship, an agency relationship, or any other fiduciary relationship between you and the site or its operators. The site does not represent any reader in any specific transaction.

The site is updated periodically and tries to be accurate as of each article’s “last updated” date. Real estate is jurisdictionally and temporally complex, tax law changes, regulations move, mortgage products evolve, and state-specific rules vary. The site cannot guarantee that any specific claim is current at the moment a reader is acting on it; verifying with a current authoritative source or the relevant licensed professional is the reader’s responsibility.

If you spot an error or stale citation, please flag it at /contact so it can be corrected. Corrections are documented in the article’s updated date and, when material, called out in the article itself.

All content on the site, articles, glossary entries, calculators, illustrations, and the site’s visual design, is the property of Real Estate Field Guide and its operators, except where attributed to third parties via citation. The content is published for individual reader use; please link to the site rather than copying content for other publications. For republication or excerpt-with-attribution requests, please contact the editorial team.

Cited sources are quoted under fair use for educational commentary, with attribution and link to the original. The underlying source materials remain the property of their respective publishers (CFPB, IRS, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, HUD, VA, NAR, ALTA, and others enumerated at /sources).

The site does not currently support user accounts, comments, or user-generated content. Where future features add user-contributed content, additional terms governing that content will be published.

Automated scraping, bulk download, or unauthorized commercial use of the site’s content is not permitted without prior written authorization. Reasonable bot access (search crawlers, link checkers, archive crawlers) is permitted within the constraints documented in robots.txt.

The site is provided on an “as is” basis. To the extent permitted by law, Real Estate Field Guide and its operators are not liable for losses, damages, or claims arising from a reader’s use of the site, reliance on information published here, or actions taken based on calculator outputs or editorial content. Decisions about specific transactions remain the responsibility of the reader and the licensed professionals they engage.

Specific limitation-of-liability language, indemnification terms, and dispute resolution provisions are pending counsel review and will appear in this section when the review is complete.

These terms may change as the site evolves, new features, new commercial relationships, new regulatory requirements. Material changes will be disclosed on this page with an updated date. Continued use of the site after a material update constitutes acceptance of the updated terms.