Instead of looking up one address, state what you can afford and get back a list of homes that fit both a home-price budget and an insurance-premium budget.
Who this is for: home buyers (and agents shopping on a client's behalf). Where: the Search tab → Search By Budget tab (/check?mode=budget). Time: ~2 min.
When to use it
Use this when you're exploring an area rather than checking a specific home — especially if your monthly budget is tight and insurance cost could make or break affordability.
Steps
- Open the Search tab and click the Search By Budget tab (the Search tab
leads with a property search; this tab flips it to budget mode).
- Either fill in the fields yourself, or describe it in one sentence — type
something like "under $600k in Austin, insurance under $250/mo" into the Describe it in one sentence box above the form and click Fill in fields (or press Enter). AI reads your sentence and fills in whichever of the home price, insurance budget, and area it could confidently pull out — each filled field is marked AI-filled — while leaving anything it couldn't tell for you to fill in by hand. Nothing is ever guessed: if a part isn't clear, that field stays blank instead of being populated with a wrong number.
- Every field — whether you typed it or the AI filled it — stays fully editable.
Edit any value and the edit is what runs; the AI-filled marker disappears from a field the moment you change it yourself.
- Enter your budgets and area (if you haven't already from the sentence above):
- Home-price ceiling (and optional floor).
- Insurance-premium ceiling — monthly or annual.
- Area — city, state, and/or ZIP.
- Run it. You get a list of matching properties, each with a **modeled insurance
premium and a fit badge**.
Reading the results
- Matches are sorted fits-both-budgets first, then cheapest premium.
- Every match is plotted as a pin on the map beside the budget form — click a pin to
see the address and open its Record, the same map you get from an address search. To zoom it, hold Ctrl (⌘ on a Mac) while scrolling, or pinch with two fingers; a plain scroll moves the page, so the map never traps you mid-scroll.
- Each match shows price, estimated monthly/annual premium, a fit badge, an
insurability band chip marked Hazard (the same band the search results page shows, read from hazard data alone — the full assessment can only place a property in a harder band, never an easier one), and a link to the full Record. The chip also carries the date that reading was last worked out (Hazard · Aug 26, in amber once it is over 30 days old) — hazard readings refresh when a property is opened, not on a timer, so open the Record to bring an old one up to date.
- Save any match with the star, or click View Record to open the full Record —
matches flow into your saved/dashboard surfaces like any other property.
Client-side controls let you re-sort (best-fit / premium / price / lowest-risk) and filter (max risk band, fits-budget-only).
What the flags mean
- Modeled estimate — premiums here are modeled, so the whole result set carries the
"Modeled estimate" basis. Use it to compare and shortlist, not as a final bill.
- Thin inventory — the candidate pool is only as deep as properties previously searched
in that area (there's no bulk area ingestion), so a quiet area can return a short list. The UI flags this so you know the list is short because of coverage, not because nothing fits.
- Partial risk data — an un-assessed property gets a homeowners-only, low-confidence
estimate, flagged accordingly.
Metering
Shop-by-budget is metered like a property search (free tier: 1 lifetime; refunded if the search errors). Upgrade to run it repeatedly. The Describe it in one sentence box uses the same shared CoverGuard Advisor question allowance every other natural-language search box draws from — if you've used up your free AI questions, filling in fields from a sentence prompts you to upgrade, but the plain structured form keeps working either way.
Troubleshooting
- Short or empty list → thin inventory for that area, or budgets set too tight. Widen
the area or raise a ceiling. See Search & Records.
- Premiums look approximate → they're a modeled estimate; that's expected.
Do this next
Open the best-fit match to confirm the details in its full Record, then save your finalists.
- Reading a CoverGuard Record
- Mortgage calculator — turn a match into a full monthly payment
- Saving & comparing properties