Real Estate · Findings · 24 August 2026
Severity is about the adapters, not the cities. New Orleans and Houston both ship on day one. The records are public. The lies are in how you read them.
Breaks the plan
F1 · Sheriff API abandoned
1,771 rows. 441 Pending. 873 Sale Stopped. 360 Sold. 97 No Bid. 334 rows use closeddate 1900-01-01. saledate is a text field that contains the string Null. Defendants are slash-packed multi-party strings, truncated mid-name. Live auctions sit on CivilView, countyId=28. The PRD’s Catalyst Clock cannot ingest this file as if it were today.
Verified: GET data.nola.gov/api/views/d52w-8nva.json rowsUpdatedAt 1542343551. Sample rows casenumbers 2012-5883, 2011-5587 still Pending.
F2 · The moat is free, for everyone, in Orleans
Code, hearings, violations, inspections, permits, 311, NORA, demolitions: all unauthenticated Socrata, same-week fresh. Budget the moat for hygiene, entity resolution, multi-year snapshots nobody else keeps, and the explanation UI. Do not tell capital that access is scarce.
Verified 24 August 2026: u6yx-v2tw 181,821 / 14,701 Open. Newest casefiled 21 August 2026. Permits rcm3-fn58 newest issuedate 23 August 2026. 311 2jgv-pqrq rowsUpdatedAt 24 August 2026 07:10 UTC.
F3 · Two day-one cities are two adapters, not one with a Houston skin
HCAD PDATA is a free annual tab-delimited dump. Houston CKAN is not Socrata: Department of Neighborhoods code-violation workbooks last modified 9 June 2023, monthly permit aggregates, zero tax-delinquent or foreclosure event APIs. gis.hctx.net presents a TLS hostname mismatch. The Houston clock that actually moves: first-Tuesday tax sales (hctax.net), trustee-sale notices, Linebarger and Perdue lists, and paid delinquency and deed rails. Those rails are month-one COGS. Jefferson is request-rich and is not day one.
F4 · Novice churn vs a $99 seat that already exists
If the feed is quiet, or wrong, the member leaves. A New Orleans digest can be daily events. A Houston digest is sale-cycle and delinquency, with a freshness stamp. Guarantee a live digest in the city they picked, or pause the month. Paywall action (alerts, owner intel, memory). Keep comprehension free.
Damages a phase
F5 · Equity has no free floor in Orleans. Houston does.
A domain-limited catalog search of data.nola.gov for assessor, assessed, or valuation returns zero datasets. Federated Socrata search surfaces Cook County. Harris County Appraisal District PDATA is the Houston assessed-value floor, certified annually. Do not render an Equity number above a confidence band without comps. Orleans starts with proxies and an honest LOW badge. Houston may show HCAD, dated.
F6 · Entity resolution is the hidden epic
Permit owner fields pack a dozen parties into one truncated string. Sheriff defendants mix slashes, aliases, and “or his succession heirs or assigns.” Owner intelligence, the paywall jewel, is bounded by this. Give it its own eval set and a human queue before any contact reveal.
F7 · Incumbents own the supply rail
Orleans: CivicSource is the tax-certificate exchange. CivilView is the sheriff listing. Adjudicated inventory is a closed set going forward (no new adjudications after 1 January 2026) with more than 6,500 legacy parcels and a mayoral task force as of 11 June 2026. Houston: hctax.net first-Tuesday sales, Daily Court Review, Linebarger and Perdue lists, Harris County auction inventory. Partner and ingest in both cities. Do not out-auction the auction.
F8 · Insurance is not a later module
Commissioner Temple still called it a property crisis at the start of the 2026 hurricane season. Rates have started to ease (nola.com, 3 August 2026). Naive ARV that ignores premium trajectory and flood still kills a Gulf rental, in either city. Underwrite insurance in v1 in New Orleans and in Houston, not as a later module.
Erodes quality if ignored
F9 · Hearings calendar is a picture, not a table
g7yr-kp9j is a calendar visualization on 44ct-56tr. Empty objects via the JSON API. Contract-test the dataset you actually query.
F10 · Vacancy is an inference
No vacancy field on the Orleans portal. Strongest free proxy there is the live 311 nuisance feed. Houston has no equivalent daily nuisance API on CKAN. Market the inference. Do not pretend a ground truth.
F11 · Per-investor scores defeat naive caching
Precompute the five static axes. Fit is a thin layer. Measure cost per member from alpha day one.
F12 · Recommendation liability
The stronger the nudge, the more the platform owns the outcome. Never say “good deal.” Say “matches your stated criteria; here is what is unverified.” Data Confidence must be allowed to hide a card, not decorate it.
F13 · NORA is a history, not a live tape
hpm5-48nj includes sales from 1980. Useful backfill. Not a weekly catalyst.
F14 · Two-product focus
Fair question from capital. Answer it on the test page. Do not hide the second door inside the mesh raise.
Name, firm, email. Christopher Wolff replies from [email protected].