Real Estate · Diligence · 24 August 2026

Two cities, day one. Two adapters. Frozen files still lie.

We ran the product thesis against the live parish and county feeds it depends on, the same day, from this machine. Then we compared that pass to an internal review written hours earlier. The launch set is New Orleans and Houston together. The adapters are not interchangeable.

Orleans has a daily free event clock. Houston has a parcel floor and a monthly sale clock. Jefferson is not day one. The city of New Orleans’ own sheriff-sale API has been frozen since 2018. Houston’s published code-violation workbooks last moved in 2023. Anyone who treats those files as live will lie to members at scale.

Request a conversation The findings

Method

Live systems, not slideware.

On 24 August 2026 we queried data.nola.gov, Houston’s CKAN portal, Harris County Appraisal District, Jefferson Parish assessor and code pages, the Orleans Parish CivilView sales site, and the City of New Orleans treasury tax-sale page. Competitor pricing was taken from vendor pages the same day. Louisiana and Texas instruments were taken from statute and enrolled acts, not investor blogs.

An earlier internal review the same day (Hermes / ox-alpha) reached a similar top-line. We did not inherit its conclusions. Several of them still hold. One load-bearing claim does not.

Verdict

Ship New Orleans and Houston together. Budget two clocks.

Holds

Hyperlocal public records are economically useful, and national platforms underuse them

Orleans: 14,701 open code cases, 103,093 hearings, 243,835 inspections, 269,571 violations, 346,556 permits, 1,022,141 311 calls. Newest code cases and permits are from this week. Houston: Harris Central Appraisal District bulk parcels, first-Tuesday tax sales on hctax.net, trustee-sale notices (Harris led Texas this cycle). That is not one moat. It is two floors.

Breaks naive ingestion

Frozen files will manufacture false urgency in both cities

Orleans sheriff-sale dataset d52w-8nva last wrote a row on 16 November 2018. 441 of 1,771 rows are still Pending. Houston’s Department of Neighborhoods code-violation workbooks on data.houstontx.gov last modified 9 June 2023. A naive urgency score turns either file into fake catalysts. Live Orleans sales sit on CivilView. Live Houston tax sales sit on hctax.net.

Day-one design, not Phase 5

Houston is a different sport. That is why its adapter ships on day one.

Harris County gives annual certified parcel dumps. Houston CKAN is not Socrata and has zero tax-delinquent or foreclosure event APIs. gis.hctx.net presents a TLS hostname mismatch. The Houston clock is monthly tax sales, trustee-sale notices, and paid delinquency and deed rails. Those rails are cost of goods in month one, not a later purchase. Jefferson is a follow-on. It does not ride along for free.

Changes the ethics and the GTM

The $99 novice seat churns unless a true catalyst fires every week, in the city they picked

PropStream Essentials is already $99. Ranking houses is table stakes. The winnable frame is jurisdiction depth plus explainability, in both metros. A New Orleans member gets a daily event digest. A Houston member gets a sale-cycle digest with an honest freshness stamp. Frozen files will not provide either.

Against the earlier review

What we kept. What we overturned.

Kept

Hygiene, entity resolution, incumbents, compliance

Zombie records, truncated multi-party owner strings, CivicSource as the tax-certificate exchange, FCRA on contact enrichment, Texas Tax Code 34.21 redemption math, and the owner-side twin as ethics-as-product all still hold after re-query.

Overturned

“Every NOLA distress input is a free API updated daily, including sheriff sales”

False for sheriff sales. The Socrata file is an eight-year snapshot. Building a Catalyst Clock on it is the original sin, not a documentation issue. CivilView is the live listing. Partner or ingest that. Do not parse 2018.

Amended

Hearings “calendar” is empty because it is a visualization

g7yr-kp9j is assetType calendar, a view on the All Hearings table, with an empty column list. Count inherits 103,093. Rows return as empty objects. An adapter that trusts a calendar view will fail silently. Use 44ct-56tr.

New since morning

Law already moved under the PRD

Louisiana Act 807 (HB 468) is in force as of 1 August 2026: wholesale disclosure, five-day cancellation, 1% earnest money. Orleans has more than 6,500 legacy adjudicated properties and will create no new ones after 1 January 2026. The 2026 tax-lien auction date on nola.gov is still “to be announced” (page dated 26 May 2026).

The company objection

Two public products is a fair attack.

Edge Orbital is also the layer that makes “text me when you get home” still work. Putting distressed-property intelligence next to that, on the same domain, invites a focus question from capital.

The honest answer: same job, different object. Local public signals, turned into a next step. The mesh raise on /invest/ does not change. This page is a second door, not a rewrite of the first. New Orleans is home for the walk. New Orleans and Houston are home for the house.

If that answer is not good enough for a given fund, this is not their deal. We would rather lose that meeting than pretend the house and the walk are the same SKU.