What’s new

Every Sunday night, we send an email summarizing the last seven days of activity for your portfolio.

Citizen subscribers receive a summary of what happened at their building, the block (lots within a three-minute walk), the neighborhood, and citywide over the past week. Updates include both pending and approved permits, new businesses, 311 complaint trends, and notable failed inspections.

If you're a paying subscriber, your "Home" address can be changed in your Dashboard and can be viewed on any day of the week.

If you're a Professional user with a portfolio of properties, you receive an additional email summarizing all activity at your addresses and surrounding properties.

It's on by default for every account. If you'd rather not get it, you can turn it off under Account → Notifications.

Building Reports synthesize public and private information to construct a detailed profile of a site's condition, habitability, zoning (when relevant) and maintenance profile (deferred or up-to-date).

Reports are handcrafted (by humans, not AI) to the specific situation of the requester and building: condominium reports highlight HOA fees and deferred maintenance, apartment buildings address living conditions and management reputation, and industrial/residential reports focus on zoning. All reports contextualize the building against a cohort of its peers in the same neighborhood.

You can check out a collection of ten real reports here, unlocked for free. You can request a report for any address at the top of its property page. Reports currently run $50 per request, or one per month on the Professional plan.

Jim sat down with Mark Ainley and Tom Shallcross for episode 475 of Straight Up Chicago Investor, the Chicago real estate investing and property management podcast.

The episode is about leveraging 311 and the city's scattered public data sources for Chicago buildings: what the complaint, violation and permit records actually say about a building, where each one lives, and how an owner reads them before the city comes knocking.

Nearly five hundred episodes in, the show has walked through Chicago one neighborhood at a time with the people who work in it: investors, lenders, developers, real estate attorneys, property managers and aldermen.

Mark is a founding partner at GC Realty & Development, which manages more than 1,200 investment properties across Chicagoland, and Tom is a born-and-raised Chicagoan and the owner of Now Serving Properties, a rental portfolio he built on the North Side while holding down a full-time job.

We worked closely with Mark on monitoring his 500+ unit portfolio in the city.

Listen to episode 475

Every unlocked property page now opens with a written summary of the lot: building characteristics, who owns it, what type of permitted investment it's had, and what the tenants or neighbors have been complaining about.

The summary is generated by an AI with the explicit instructions to only dress up the important details already served on the page; the summary should never hallucinate details that aren't there.

We are constantly improving the relevancy of the summary output to user specifics and property type, so it may not always surface the most relevant details. For a complete profile of the lot, we recommend using the summary as a guide and looking through the 311 complaints and other records in detail.