The refusals are the product
A property report that answered every question would be easy to write and impossible to trust. Several of the things this one will not do are the reason the rest of it can be forwarded without a covering explanation.
It does not score, grade or rank anything
No safety rating. No letter for the block. No school ratings, ever. Every area count is compared with an average San Francisco area of the same size, and that comparison is a ratio, not a verdict.
This is not squeamishness. In the United States, characterizing a neighborhood is how an agent ends up on the wrong side of the Fair Housing Act, and school quality is the most common proxy for characteristics the Act protects. A document with a grade on it is a document a professional cannot forward.
It is not a consumer report
It may not be used to screen a tenant, or to make a decision about any individual. It is not an FCRA product and does not become one because of how it is used. It describes a place and a parcel, and never a person — there are no owner names, no residents, and no demographics anywhere in it.
It refuses sex-offender data outright
California Penal Code section 290.46(j)(2) makes it unlawful to use information from the state's Megan's Law database for purposes relating to housing. A property report is exactly that use. The database is public and you may consult it yourself at meganslaw.ca.gov, which is the use the law permits.
It is not a valuation, and not a disclosure
Not an appraisal. Not a valuation. The Assessor's figure is a Proposition 13 number anchored to the last sale and is not what the property is worth. Where a third party's market or rent estimate appears, it is labeled as that provider's estimate and shown with their range — never restated as ours.
It is also not the statutory Natural Hazard Disclosure. It names several of the same zones from the same maps; a seller still has to provide the document.
Where the records themselves fall short
Filed is not built
A permit is paperwork. It says work was declared, not that it happened. And the converse is the more important one: work done without a permit does not appear at all. The useful reading is the gap between what a building looks like and what its record says was permitted.
Police data is anonymised to the block
SFPD does not publish address-level locations, so nothing in the crime sections describes a specific building — only an area. A count near an address is not a statement about that address.
The city publishes on its own schedule
Every dataset has a lag, and they differ. The front page shows the most recent record in each feed, asked of the city rather than asserted by us, so you can see it. Where a dataset has not published for a period the report leaves it out of the recent section and says so, rather than counting a publishing gap as quiet streets.
A record of a complaint is not a finding
311 cases are things people reported. Eviction notices are filings, which start a process rather than conclude one. Registration is not occupancy — a business that closed without deregistering stays on the list.
What it will not replace
- An inspection. The city's files describe obligations and paperwork, not a foundation or a roof.
- A 3R. The report covers much of the same ground from the same block and lot. Order the 3R anyway.
- Legal advice. For rights and disputes: the Rent Board, or a lawyer.
- A title search. Ownership, liens and easements are a different record entirely, and not one this touches.
Why any of this is worth reading
Because the alternative is a document that quietly does all of it, and you find out which parts were invented at the worst possible moment. Every figure here carries the sentence that limits it. The judgment is left to you on purpose — that is the whole design, and it is the reason the report travels.