Properties and activation

Searching an address

Search is on the left nav under Search. Type an address and press Search. As you type nothing happens: the lookup runs on the press, not on every keystroke.

If the press turns up several real places, you get a short list to pick from. Picking one hands us a confirmed line and the coordinate that goes with it, which is a better starting point than a fragment. If it turns up exactly one, we go straight there, because confirming your own address is friction with nothing in it. If it turns up none, we search on what you typed anyway: a county's own address layer sometimes holds a line that a general geocoder does not.

What each answer means

A search is a tracked request rather than a box that either fills or stays empty, so every dead end has its own answer instead of collapsing into "no results".

The property opens

We placed the address inside a region we cover and found the property. This is the common case for somewhere that has been looked at before.

Nobody has looked at this before

Normal, not an error. We hold a small fraction of any region's parcels at any moment and fetch the rest when somebody asks, so a first visit to an address goes out to the region live. It usually takes a few seconds.

We could not place it

The line did not resolve to a point at all, or it resolved to a street or a neighbourhood rather than one address. Add a house number, or pick one of the suggestions as you type.

It is in a region we do not cover yet

A real place, outside our footprint. The answer names the nearest region we do cover, because coverage follows county lines and a miss can be two streets wide.

We asked and the region has no record of it

The region answered and does not have that address. Check the street number, or try it without a unit number.

Its spelling does not match ours yet

The region answered with something, and the way it writes that address does not line up with the way we do. We record the difference so it can be corrected.

That region cannot be searched by address

Some regions publish parcels in a way that can only be asked by parcel number, so a cold address has nothing to query. The region is still covered and still appears on the map; it just cannot be entered this way. See address search by region.

Where an address turns out to stand for more than one property, we show them rather than guessing. That happens with a stack of units folding to one street line, and with a house whose address the county published in two spellings. From the outside those are indistinguishable, and the person searching knows which one they meant.

Activating a property

An unactivated property shows its identity: the address, the region, the parcel number, and the owner if the assessor publishes one. What it does not show is the record list, because until somebody asks, what we hold at that address is whatever a routine poll happened to deliver. Presenting that as the property's history would be a claim we have not earned.

Activating asks every source in that region about that one place and assembles what comes back. While it runs, the screen names what it is fetching, which is the real request list rather than a decorative animation.

Three consequences worth knowing:

• A failed gather is not charged. If a region times out or goes unreachable mid-request, nothing is spent. Pressing Activate again retries.
• Activating does not always cause a fetch. If another customer already gathered that property, we serve what was collected. You are still charged, because what you are buying is the assembled view of a place rather than the outbound requests.
• Some properties cannot be looked up. The button says so before you press it rather than failing afterwards. Either no source in that region can be queried yet, or the property carries no parcel number and no address that identifies it on its own.

How many activations you have left is shown under the button, and only when there is a number to show. The allowance renews every month on your subscription date; the properties you have already opened do not expire with it and never count again.

Reading a property page

The page is four blocks, in one order at every width.

Identity and standing conditions

The address, the region and jurisdiction, the parcel number, the owner, and any standing conditions as pills. A condition is a state rather than an event: "tax delinquent, $71,677 owed" is often the reason somebody opened the page at all. Cleared ones stay, in the past tense, because "was condemned, lifted" is also information.

On record

Everything filed here, newest first, with a tally above it and a timeline strip. The tally counts by kind and says how many are still open. The strip plots the records in time, coloured by kind and sized by weight, which is what tells you the shape of a property that the reverse-chronological list cannot.

About this property

The parcel outline on a map, and the assessor's own account: land use, assessed value, lot and building measurements, year built, whatever that county publishes. The read date beside the owner is when we last fetched the roll, not the date the roll was issued.

The record you clicked

Clicking any record opens its own page, with its full detail, its inspections, and a link back up to the property. Clicking another record at the same address swaps to it without stacking up history.

Two limits stated on the page itself. The record list is capped at the hundred most recent, and says so when it is capped. Standing conditions are deliberately absent from the timeline strip, because the only date a condition carries is when we observed it, so plotting them would draw a decade-old delinquency as something that happened this week.

When an activated property genuinely has nothing, the page says how many sources were asked rather than asserting that nothing exists at that address. Those are different claims and only one of them is ours to make.

Watching one property

Every property you hold carries a Watch toggle next to its address. Turning it on puts that property into your account's daily property digest, so a permit pulled or a delinquency opened there reaches you without your having to come back and look.

It is free, reversible, and spends nothing. Activating the property was already the expression of interest; this only decides whether we tell you when it moves. New activations are watched by default, and the toggle appears only on properties your organization holds, because there is nothing to watch on one you have not activated.

Turning it on starts the clock from that moment. A property you activate with twenty years of permits behind it does not produce twenty years of news; the digest covers what happens from the moment you started watching. Turning it off and on again does not replay the stretch in between either.

Watching is a property of the holding, so it is shared: everybody on your account sees the same watched set and can change it. That is the opposite of a watcher, which belongs to the person who built it.

My Properties

My Properties in the left nav is everything your organization has ever activated. It only grows, and everything on it is free to reopen.

It is sorted by Recently changed by default rather than by when you bought each one, because what moved is the reason to come back. Recently activated is the other order, for the times the question is what you bought and when.

Why a first visit is slow and the second is not

We do not hold whole county rolls sitting idle. A region's routine feeds bring in what has recently changed, and everything else is fetched on demand, at the moment somebody asks for a specific address. So the first person to open an address waits a few seconds while we go out to the region, and everybody after that gets it immediately.

That is also why the activation gate exists where it does. Browsing a region day by day on the map is included on every plan and costs nothing; assembling one place's whole record is the metered act.