Data & accuracy updates

A running log of what we improve in the data behind our reports — and what we change on reports we have already delivered

August 2026 — protected-lands data, and a re-read of our own work

What got better. We finished loading the full national record of protected land and conservation easements. Before this we queried that federal service parcel by parcel, and it frequently could not answer us — so the question “is any of this land protected?” often went unanswered on reports that did not say so.

What that made us find. Putting it in place meant re-reading the readings we had already published, and some of them were more confident than they had any right to be. They are all the same mistake wearing different clothes: our code was written so that “all clear” was what came out when no rule matched — and that is indistinguishable from “all clear” when the reading never arrived at all. A quiet result and a clean result looked the same to us, so we published the clean one.

What we changed. We updated 123 already-delivered reports in place, changing 2,477 individual readings across them. Nothing was deleted. A report is authoritative in the form you see it in now — if you open one you were given before this, you are looking at the current reading, and that is the one to rely on.

Some readers we could not write to. A number of these reports were run without an account, so we hold no address for whoever read them and no message can reach them. That is why this page exists: it carries the same updates, in the same per-axis form, for anyone who received a report from us and never heard from us again.

What moved, measured per axis

Every figure below is the number of reports in the set it describes — measured on 2026-08-27 from the correction logs of the runs themselves. Do not add two rows together. The land due-diligence score and the investor risk score are the same reports, measured twice: a report whose due-diligence score moved is a report whose investor score moved, not a second report. Summing the two axes would double-count every one of them.

Reports	What changed	Axis
120	reports whose land due-diligence score moved	land_due_diligence_score
49	…of those, the score fell	land_due_diligence_score
71	…of those, the score rose	land_due_diligence_score
120	reports whose investor risk score moved	investor_risk_score
47	…of those, the score fell	investor_risk_score
73	…of those, the score rose	investor_risk_score
41	reports that entered the 90+ investor band	investor_risk_score
0	reports that left the 90+ investor band	investor_risk_score
34	reports whose published due-diligence rating band moved	land_due_diligence_rating
25	…of those, the band got worse	land_due_diligence_rating
9	…of those, the band got better	land_due_diligence_rating
77	reports that left a LOW contamination rung	contamination_risk_buyer_flag
5	reports where a contamination check we could not run has now run, and found something	contamination_risk_buyer_flag
3	reports where a contamination check we could not run has now run, and came back clear	contamination_risk_buyer_flag
0	reports carrying a conservation all-clear we could not stand behind	conservation_all_clear
119	reports whose distance to the nearest water or wetland was corrected	dist_to_water_or_wetland_m
16	…of those, water or wetland turned out to be inside the parcel	dist_to_water_or_wetland_m
11	…of those, the report had shown nothing within range	dist_to_water_or_wetland_m
92	…of those, the nearest one is closer than the report showed	dist_to_water_or_wetland_m
2	reports where the two scores did not move together	land_due_diligence_score\|investor_risk_score

What we changed, and why it was wrong

Conservation easements. Reports could say no easement or protected area was on record. The federal service we ask for that had not been reachable from our servers, so we were never in a position to know. Those reports now say so plainly, and point to the local NRCS field office.

Contamination. Our severity check compared each federal source against a list of severity words — and, through a flaw in how the comparison was written, the two most serious readings each source can return matched none of them and fell through into “no significant sources.” Those readings now surface where they belong.

Historic land use. Every parcel was being flagged for possible industrial history, because the check searched for the word “industrial” in a paragraph that always contained our own boilerplate mention of industrial sites. It was our text triggering our own alarm.

Ground, structures and slope. On some reports, readings that should have been measured from the actual parcel boundary were a single figure repeated, or were carried over from a measurement that had not run. Those are now measured from the boundary.

Readings moved in both directions

More reports went up than down — mostly because the historic-land-use flag had been deducting points it had not earned. That is not the point. Some went down, and a number of reports now carry a contamination finding they did not carry before. We would rather hand you the harder number than a comfortable one we cannot stand behind.

One movement in that table is not a change in risk at all. A few reports previously said our contamination sources could not be retrieved — which was never an all-clear, only a gap. Those checks have since run. Where they came back clear, nothing about the land improved; we simply could not look before and can now, and this time the all-clear is a measured one.

Questions

If something in a report you were given does not sit right, email [email protected]. It comes straight to the founder.