Category: Resource Center

There’s a particular kind of information that only people on the ground have access to, and no database or expensive data subscription will catch up to them. It’s the information you accumulate just from being in a place — driving the same streets every day, walking the same blocks, working a delivery route, mowing the…

You can buy a lot of real estate information online. Property records, tax data, ownership history, mortgage status, recent sales — all of it is collected, packaged, and sold to anyone with a subscription. There are entire companies whose whole business is selling lists of properties that match various criteria. So why does local observation…

“Motivated seller” is one of those terms that real estate people use as if everyone knows what it means, and that everyone outside the industry tends to interpret as something more aggressive or dramatic than it actually is. The term has no legal definition. It’s just shorthand for a particular kind of situation. The actual…

Short answer: no. Slightly longer answer: notice and observation are not licensed activities. Buying, selling, listing, negotiating, brokering, soliciting clients, and representing parties in real estate transactions are all licensed activities. Telling someone, “Hey, the green house at 412 Maple has been quiet for months,” is not. This is a question worth taking seriously, because…

If you’ve ever submitted information somewhere online and then heard nothing for a month, you know how unsatisfying that is. We try to do the opposite. Here’s exactly what happens between the moment you press submit and the moment a property tip becomes — or doesn’t become — actionable. Step 1: We receive your tip…

Look, nobody wants to be the neighbor walking up to somebody else’s mailbox. That’s a whole thing. Nobody’s asking you to do that. But you don’t have to. Most of what you need to know about whether a house is vacant, you can read from the other side of the street, in three seconds, while…

If you’ve been wondering why so many houses in our neighborhoods sit empty for ten, fifteen, twenty years with nobody doing anything about them, the answer is usually three words: heir property situation. Let me break it down. What heir property is Heir property is what happens when somebody dies and the house doesn’t get…

Real estate has its own vocabulary, and most of it sounds more complicated than it actually is. Here are the terms that come up most often when people are reading or talking about property condition, ownership, and sales — defined in plain English, without jargon. Off-market A property that is for sale (or could be)…

Real talk: if I want to know what’s happening on a block, I’m asking the delivery driver before I’m asking anybody at city hall. Think about who actually moves through your neighborhood every day. Not the people who live there — they see their own street, sometimes the next one over. I’m talking about the…

Every neighborhood has one. Sometimes it’s an actual auntie. Sometimes it’s a granny on the porch. Sometimes it’s the lady who’s been deaconess at the church for forty years. Whoever she is, she knows whose house is empty before the county does, before the bank does, before the new young couple looking at the block…