Data sources & scope
What goes into a report — and what doesn’t.
Every verdict is built from public records. Four sources feed the report. Each has its own update cadence. Here is the plain-language version — read it once and you will know what the report covers, how fresh it is, and where it stops.
Sources checked
Four public-record sources drive the verdict. Every line on a report cites one of these, with the source filing date beside it.
Civil cases filed in U.S. District Courts against the homeowner or the homeowner entity — adversary proceedings, debt-collection actions, and federal-question disputes that hit the federal docket before they appear on a state-court index.
Why it matters: A federal civil filing is the earliest public signal that the homeowner is in active litigation. It predates the state-court judgment and lets you see a dispute before it resolves.
Money judgments recorded at the state trial-court level — open, satisfied, and vacated judgments against the homeowner or the contracting entity. Small-claims actions below the per-county threshold are deliberately not pulled.
Why it matters: An open money judgment is the clearest payment-risk signal on a report: a prior creditor already won a court fight, and the homeowner owes on top of the bid you are taking.
Recorded mechanic's liens against the property or against the homeowner entity. We surface liens naming the homeowner as the property owner, and (where indexed) the same homeowner showing up as an unpaid claimant on prior jobs.
Why it matters: A recorded mechanic's lien is direct evidence of payment friction — either the homeowner refused to pay a prior contractor, or a prior payment dispute went formal.
Chapter 7, 11, and 13 petitions filed by or against the homeowner in U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Active cases, discharges, and dismissals are all surfaced; the current status is flagged on every entry.
Why it matters: A pending bankruptcy automatically stays most collection activity, including judgment enforcement. A prior discharge also matters — debts wiped out there will not reappear as a fresh judgment later.
Update cadence per source
Each public-record source refreshes on its own schedule. Faster-refreshing sources catch changes sooner; the recorder feed is real-time at the point of filing, the rest are weekly pulls.
What we DO surface
Three rules apply to every record that lands on a report. Together they keep the verdict readable instead of a raw dump.
What we DON’T currently cover
Four signals are out of scope — two are deliberate boundaries, two are known gaps waiting on data or integrations. Knowing what a report does NOT cover is just as important as knowing what it does.
Small-claims actions frequently settle informally before they ever become a payment-risk signal, and the claim-amount ceiling varies county by county. We are still building the per-county thresholds into our index.
Scope: Small-claims under $5,000 in participating counties are not yet indexed. Small-claims over the threshold, and small-claims of any size in non-participating counties, fall outside the report until the per-county rollout completes. We will name participating counties as each one comes online.
A criminal-record search on a private individual is a regulated consumer report under the FCRA, and pre-bid vetting of a homeowner is not a permissible purpose. Pulling one would create real legal exposure for us and for you.
Scope: We never run a criminal background check on a homeowner, and we do not surface criminal-court dockets. This is a deliberate, permanent boundary — not a roadmap item that will quietly be added later.
Eviction filings are housed in county-level records with inconsistent format and retention, and several states seal or expunge eviction records after a period of years. We do not yet have a clean, nationwide data feed for this signal.
Scope: Eviction history is on the roadmap but is not currently surfaced. Until it ships, the report will be silent on prior evictions — treat that as an unknown, not as a clean record.
We have a planned integration with property-Owner-side data feeds (insurance-loss runs, prior contractor disputes, and self-reported project metadata) that would meaningfully expand what a report can show beyond the public record.
Scope: Pending the integration going live. Until then, Owner-side signals — anything the homeowner or property manager reports through TradeSafeJobs — do not feed into the public-record report you see today. This is a known gap, not a hidden one.
Updated 2026-08-13 09:00 UTC — Coming soon to a live, per-source timestamp
This timestamp is a placeholder while the per-source cadence rolls out to a live status page. Each source above runs on its own refresh schedule in production.