Coverage and history

What a region is

A region is the unit of coverage: a county, a parish, a borough, or an independent city. We say regions rather than counties because the right unit differs by state, and in some places the city is the publisher and in others the county is.

We cover 57 of them across 31 states today, reading 324 separate feeds. Every one has its own page under Coverage, and the map inside the app draws every region we cover.

Regions are the unit everywhere: a watcher points at regions, the map opens one at a time, and a searched address is placed inside one before anything else happens.

Coverage is stated per region, never averaged

Two regions with the same shape on the map can carry very different things, because they publish different things. One county puts its permits, its code cases and its delinquent tax roll online in queryable form; the next publishes a permit feed and nothing else.

So there is no single completeness number, and we do not print one. What exists instead is a per-region answer, in three places:

• The coverage box on the map, which lists what is live in a region and what is supported but not yet seen.
• The watcher builder's signal menu, which offers only what the regions you picked can produce.
• Each region's public page under Coverage.

Live, and supported but not seen

A signal in a region is in one of these states, and the difference is worth reading before you build on one.

Live

We have seen this signal in this region, recently. It is proven end to end.

Supported, none seen yet

The feed is wired, the region publishes it, and nothing has come through yet. Shown as limited in the watcher builder. It is genuinely waiting rather than broken, but a watcher made only of these will be quiet.

Not offered

Nothing in that region's feeds can produce it, so it is never offered anywhere. You will not see it in the builder for that region, which is deliberate: a signal that can never fire is a permanent no, and offering it would let you build a watcher that cannot work.

A signal that was live and has gone quiet is tracked too, which is how we notice a feed that has broken at the publisher's end.

How far back the record goes

There are two different answers, and confusing them is the most common misreading of this product.

A region's routine feeds carry a recent window. Each feed is polled on its own schedule and brings in what has changed lately. That is what fills the map, the day view and your digest, and it is why paging back on a region eventually runs out of days.

A property you activate is gathered in full. Activating asks that region's sources directly about that one address, and takes what they still hold for it, which is frequently decades. That is why a property page can show a permit from 1998 while the region's day view only goes back a few months.

Freshness

Each feed follows its publisher's own release schedule. Some counties update permits several times a day; some post a file weekly; some assessor rolls are refreshed annually.

We do not publish a latency guarantee, because it would be a promise about somebody else's publication cadence. What we do instead is show the real number: the day view carries a freshness line saying how recently the newest event in that region landed, and the assessor block on a property says when we last read the roll.

Why some regions cannot be searched by address

Searching a cold address means going out to the region and asking it about a specific street line. That needs a source that can be queried by address, and not every region has one: some publish parcels keyed only on the parcel number.

Those regions are still fully covered. Their feeds run, the map shows them day by day, their records appear in watchers and digests, and a property that has come through a feed opens normally. What does not work is typing an address nobody has ever looked at there, and the search tells you so rather than returning nothing.

What an empty answer means

When an activated property genuinely has no records, the page says how many sources were asked in that region. That is deliberate. "Nothing is on record at this property" is a claim about the world; "we asked six sources in this region and none holds a record here" is a claim about us, and only the second one is ours to make.

It also says something the first sentence cannot: a region we cover thinly reads as thin, rather than reading as a quiet address.

Asking for a region

The footprint grows, and where it grows next is driven by what customers ask for. Email [email protected] or use the contact form with the county or city you work in.

It helps to say which signals matter to you, because a region can be worth standing up for its permit feed alone and a different one is only worth it for the delinquent tax roll. Regions opened recently are listed under the map inside the app, so a "not covered" answer is worth re-checking.