Policy

What we will and will not do

Who owns this

Kit Home Finder is owned by Jeremy Vest, who also owns Octolithic, one of the 514 kit companies ranked here. That is a real conflict and it is handled with mechanics rather than a disclaimer. Every Octolithic entry is flagged as ours on every card. It gets no forgiveness for missing data and is currently Not rated, like any other maker that publishes too little. You can hide our kits from the Index with one switch and no account. The scoring code cannot read a commission rate on any kit, ours included, and that is enforced in the database schema and in the build rather than in this paragraph.

Money

Kit Home Finder participates in affiliate programs and may earn a commission when you buy a kit through links here, including from makers that compete with Octolithic. Commissions never change your price and never affect ranking. No kit maker has ever paid for placement here, at any price, and none ever will. There are no sponsored slots, no paid ranking and no kit maker sponsorships. Non-endemic sponsors, meaning tools, insurance, financing, solar and land services, are the only category we would ever accept, and they would be named.

What nothing here is

Nothing on this site is an engineering determination, and no result here clears a permit. Wind, snow, seismic and flood performance are site specific engineering, not properties of a kit. A maker stating a design capability is describing what they engineer to, not making a promise about your lot. "Hurricane rated" has no legal definition in the United States. No house can be tornado rated; ICC 500 covers a separate engineered safe room. LEED, NGBS, Passive House, HERS and ENERGY STAR all require a built, sited, inspected home and cannot be attached to a model from a spec sheet, so we never compute or assign one. Wind, fire and flood resistance depend on correct engineering, construction, foundation and siting. No home resists every hazard, and none is proof against any of them. Renderings are design intent, not to scale and not for construction. Your building department and your engineer decide what your house has to resist.

Where the data comes from

Kit specifications are what each maker published on their own pages, cited and dated on every kit page. We take no manufacturer supplied claim as verified. A blank is recorded as a blank and never filled in with a zero, an average or a guess. Hazard data comes from free United States government sources: USGS Design Maps for seismic, the FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer for flood, USFS Wildfire Hazard Potential and the FEMA National Risk Index for wildfire, and the NRCS soil survey. Photographs belong to the makers, are used to show the product they depict, and are credited and linked on every page. Any maker who would rather we did not use theirs can write to hello@kithomefinder.com and it comes down.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong or out of date, write to hello@kithomefinder.com and we will recheck it against the source and re-cite it. Members can dispute any figure, and the dispute and its resolution are both published. The grading rubric is public, with every weight, so anyone can recompute a grade by hand.