Real Estate · Plan · after the test
The first twelve months succeed if a serious first-time investor in New Orleans or Houston can be guided toward a real next step, at software scale, without being lied to by a dead file. National is not that proof. A Houston skin on an Orleans adapter is not that proof either.
What success is
The commercial milestone in the product document is 250 paid members at $99, $24,750 MRR. That number is reachable. It is also the wrong north star by itself. The number we will actually watch: qualified opportunities progressed per active investor, split by city. DNA completed. First brief opened. First house watched. First lawful next act. New Orleans and Houston each have to show that clock moving.
Reported first transactions are a trailing trophy. Time-to-first-investigation is the leading one. If that clock is dead in either city, the seat is a course with a nicer UI, and the category already sells those.
Day one
0–5 months · both cities
New Orleans: ingest the live Socrata event feeds. Do not ingest the 2018 sheriff file as live. CivilView and CivicSource are the auction ground truth. Houston: HCAD PDATA as the parcel and assessed-value floor. First-Tuesday tax sales from hctax.net. Trustee-sale notices. Paid delinquency and deed rails as cost of goods, not a later purchase. Do not ingest the 2023 Department of Neighborhoods workbooks as live. Record-hygiene gate in both adapters: liveness cross-check, sentinel dictionary, staleness decay. Data Confidence may hide a card. Evidence Ledger shows what we could not verify. Weekly digest in the city they picked, or the month pauses. Act 807-compliant wholesale templates for Louisiana. Texas §34.21 calculator before a Houston user sees a number. Insurance bands in the underwrite in both cities.
4–9 months · still both, deeper
Entity resolution as a named epic, with labeled eval sets from Orleans succession filings and Harris recorded instruments. Chain-reader on both clerks. Owner-side twin in both metros: the same clocks, dignity-preserving, for the person whose name is on the bill. Outcome rails: log contact → offer → close even before a model exists, tagged by city. Fairness audit of scores against geography in each market.
After both metros are true
Jefferson does not inherit Orleans assumptions. Public-records cadence, GIS assessor, sheriff tax collector. It ships after New Orleans and Houston each have a live digest a member will pay to keep. Do not promise Dallas, Atlanta, or a national lead platform on a twelve-month clock.
What each adapter owes on day one
New Orleans
Code, hearings, inspections, permits, 311. CivilView for live sheriff sales. CivicSource for tax-lien certificates. Insurance and flood in every underwrite. Louisiana tax-lien regime and Act 807 in Strategy Lab.
Houston
HCAD certified rolls. hctax.net tax-sale inventory. Trustee-sale notices. Delinquency and deeds purchased, not hoped for from CKAN. Freshness stamp on every Houston card. Texas §34.21 in Strategy Lab. Insurance in the underwrite, not a footnote.
Build toward
Publish when a city file is dead. The 2018 Orleans sheriff snapshot and the 2023 Houston code workbooks are the first exhibits. A public Gulf Distress Index, city by city, forces copycats to chase a moving target we already cleaned.
Normalized blight and enforcement dashboards sold back to the city that already pays consultants for this. Orleans has 6,500 adjudicated parcels and a June 2026 task force. Houston has a monthly sale machine. Both are open doors.
That aisle is occupied and regulated. Our contact rail is lawful, usage-priced, and optional. The compounder is verified outcomes in two cities, not more ringing phones.
Regime switch by parish, county, and sale date. Texas calculator from §34.21 on day one. Act 807 on day one of any Louisiana wholesale copy. FCRA perimeter. Model cards. Owner-side twin before scale outreach.
What we are not claiming
There is no paid membership today. There is no LOI. There is no fielded investor app. There is a product thesis, two day-one cities whose records we interrogated, and a company that already ships a New Orleans civic map.
The dream is a first-time investor who can approach a distressed house in New Orleans or Houston with the judgment an operator spent a decade earning. The test said: that dream is available in both cities if we tell the truth about the files, and budget two clocks. It is not available as a national lead platform on a 12-month clock.
Name, firm, email. Christopher Wolff replies from [email protected].