Property Intel
Property Intel / BuildLink Analytics
Every property has the building that stands today, and the paper trail of what was done to it. Those two stories are almost never read together. That is the whole job.
01 The gap
Inspectors inspect. Agents represent. Title companies examine title. Contractors price and build. Each of them is doing a defined job well. None of those jobs is taking what the house shows you and checking it against what the county has on file.
Read separately, both are ordinary. Read together, the question writes itself: the record does not show a permit for the work the house is showing you. That is not an accusation. It is a question worth asking before closing.
02 The loop
This is the Chain Economy loop with an address attached. Every stage takes the stage before it as its input, and the finished case becomes part of what the next case starts with. The folder structure is the status: a stage is done when its folder has something in it.
Stage 01 / Intelligence
An address, a county, and a decision about scope. Eight record types are required for every case. Seven more are add-ons that get ordered only when the property calls for them, because some of them cost money or require a trip to a counter.
Before anything is searched, the jurisdiction has to resolve: which county, inside city limits or not, and therefore which office issues permits. Johnson City crosses three county lines, so this is a real question and not a formality.
Stage 02 / Intelligence
Each record is retrieved and the page it came from is captured and filed. Every item carries a source, a URL, a timestamp, the method used, and the exact text as the source displayed it.
Searches that find nothing are logged just as carefully as searches that find something, with how far back that source's records actually go. A search that was down, blocked or ambiguous establishes nothing either way, and is recorded as exactly that.
Stage 03 / Coordination
The evidence becomes one structured record. This is the important inversion: the case file is the record, and the report is only a view of it. Nothing can appear in a report that is not a sourced fact in the file.
The file distinguishes three states that get blurred everywhere else. A value that was captured. A value that was searched for and confirmed absent. A value that was never captured at all. Those are not the same thing and the file never lets them collapse.
Stage 04 / Execution
Every rule runs against the file. Each one fires, clears, or reports that it could not be evaluated. Scores are computed. Release checks run. A person reads the result before anything is built from it.
Rules live in a rules file, not in code and not in a model. Changing a threshold means editing that file. A rule without an implementation, or an implementation without a rule, stops the engine at startup rather than running quietly wrong.
Stage 05 / Data
One self-contained page per case, built to print. The gaps print on the face of it, next to the findings, rather than being quietly dropped. So does the date each record was retrieved.
A language model drafts the prose and nothing else. Every number in that prose is checked against the file, every paragraph cites its evidence, and a model-introduced fact fails the check and blocks the release.
03 The rules
These are not values on a wall. Each one is enforced somewhere in the system, and several of them block a report from being produced at all.
Nothing appears in a report that is not a fact in the file with a source attached.
"No permits found" requires a logged search showing none found, the date it ran, and how far back that source goes. "Not searched" is never shown as "none".
A record we could not reach becomes a named gap on the face of the report. It does not become an assumption.
A name match is reported as a name match. Identity is asserted only when it has been confirmed.
Logic, scores and checks are deterministic. The model drafts narrative from the file and cannot add a fact, a finding or a number.
There is no field for either anywhere in the case file. Valuation and cost belong to the people licensed to give them.
Tennessee's assessment ratio, county reappraisal cycles and city versus county permit authority are encoded, not assumed away.
04 Confidence
Every fact in the file sits on one of three rungs, and the rung is printed next to it. A serious finding resting on a weak rung is labelled unverified on the report, where the reader can see it.
verifiedPrints as: official recordRead directly from a government system of record. The assessor, the Register of Deeds, the permit office, FEMA, a court clerk, a licensing board. A captured copy of the page is on file.
reportedPrints as: secondary sourceA listing service, a consumer real estate site, a statement from a party to the transaction, or an inspector's observation. Useful, and not the same as the official record.
inferredPrints as: inferredDerived from other facts in the file rather than read anywhere. It shows its work and it never quietly becomes a fact.
05 Findings
Most systems have two states: a problem, or silence. Silence is the dangerous one, because it reads as "fine" when it often means "never looked". Every rule here reports which of five things happened.
Could change whether or how the deal closes. Someone acts on it before closing.
Needs a document or an explanation. Somebody follows up and gets one.
Context worth knowing. No action required.
The check ran and passed. Shown on purpose, so the reader knows the ground was covered.
An input was never searched or never captured, so the rule could not run. Listed as a manual item. Never shown as clear.
That last row is the one that matters. A rule that cannot run is a known unknown, and a known unknown printed on the page is worth more to a decision than a clean-looking report that quietly skipped a check.
06 Scores
How clear the paperwork is, and what condition the building is in, are different questions. Averaging them into one number would hide both. They are reported side by side and they stay apart.
How clear and consistent the public record is. Higher means easier to read. This is a measure of the paperwork, not of the house. Four components, weighted:
Each component has a minimum input. A component whose inputs never resolved scores zero rather than a perfect hundred, because a component that starts at 100 and deducts would otherwise read an empty record as a clean one. That correction came from a real case where it did exactly that.
Produced only when an inspection is part of the case. Never produced from records alone.
The score is capped regardless of the arithmetic when there is foundation failure, active water intrusion, an electrical fire hazard, no working heat or cooling, or a structural engineer referral. A weighted average should not be able to average away a fire hazard.
07 Gates
Gates are enforced in code. A violation does not produce a warning in a log somewhere. It blocks the report. They are the same discipline as the eleven checks a new link passes before it joins a chain, applied to a single case instead of a business.
G1JurisdictionCounty, city status and permit authority all resolved, and the address is inside covered territory.
G2Search coverageEvery required record type has a search logged. "Not searched" blocks. Any other outcome is allowed and prints.
G3Traceable evidenceEvery record cites an evidence item, and every source resolves in the county registry.
G4Absence claimsAny "none found" statement must cite a search that actually returned none, with its coverage note.
G5Finding evidenceEvery fired finding cites evidence. A critical one without verified evidence must carry the unverified label.
G6Wording about peopleFindings involving people state a name match and nothing more, unless identity has been confirmed with evidence.
G7No money fieldsNo price, fee or repair estimate on any object in the case file. Property values from the record are fine.
G8Inspection integrityThe inspected address must match. Every finding carries a page number and the inspector's exact words.
G9NarrativeEvery number in the prose matches the file. Nothing appears that is not already a finding or a fact.
G10StalenessThe permit search must be no more than fourteen days old at report date. Older evidence prints a currency warning.
G11LimitsThe limits and disclaimer block is present and unedited.
08 Coverage
The required set is the minimum viable case: what the parcel is, who is billed for it, what may be built on it, what was permitted, whether it floods, and how it has been marketed. Nothing in that list is optional and nothing else is conditional.
The add-ons are separate because each one costs money, requires a subscription, or requires a person to stand at a counter. They are ordered when the record suggests they are needed, and the report states plainly when one was not run.
09 A case
A house in Northeast Tennessee, anonymized. This is the case the system was built out of, and it started as an ordinary construction estimate.
A contractor was brought in to price work on a home already under contract. As part of estimating, he reorganized the buyer's inspection report into something usable: major issues separated from routine ones, priorities in order.
The sale closed and construction started. Conditions began appearing that were not in the inspection report. Structural concerns, mechanical irregularities, electrical defects, materials used in ways that raised questions. No single item was alarming. The pattern was.
The question that followed was not technical. It was: cars have a history report, what do houses have?
He pulled the property's public record and laid it next to what the house was showing. Ownership history, permit activity, tax records, transaction history, listing information. Sources that normally live in separate offices and are never compared.
The permit history showed no records corresponding to significant upgrades described in the inspection report from roughly a decade earlier. That does not prove the work was unpermitted. Records can be incomplete and can exist outside a searchable system. It was a question worth answering before closing, and nobody's job had been to ask it.
Following the ownership timeline surfaced a connection between a previous owner and a party to the later sale. Reported as what it was: a documented relationship in the public record, not a conclusion about anyone's conduct.
That case became the specification. Every rule in the system exists because something in this case had no rule covering it.
The scoring rules were later calibrated against this case as a fixture, and the fixture is still what the engine tests itself against on every run. It is committed in redacted form. Live case folders hold real names from public records and are never published.
10 Limits
Being clear about the edges is not a disclaimer at the bottom of a page. It is what makes the findings usable, because a reader knows exactly how far they go.
An inspection documents the physical property. This reads the record beside it. Both are needed and neither substitutes for the other.
We do not decide whether a code was violated, a permit was required, or anyone acted improperly. We report what the record shows and does not show.
A crack is reported as a documented observation. Whether a structure is failing is a question for an engineer.
No prices, no cost ranges, no repair estimates. Those belong to appraisers and licensed contractors, and the system has nowhere to put them.
A title company examines title at closing. Without the deeds add-on, liens are not searched, and the report says so on its face.
Public records are incomplete, delayed and inconsistent between offices. The system's job is to show you exactly where, not to pretend otherwise.
Property Intel is one link in the chain. The same loop runs the construction operating system and the pricing engine, and every case that closes leaves the next one better informed.