What public records get wrong about your home.

The assessor’s card for the house I live in says it was built in 2002. We bought it in 2018. Sixteen years was enough time for that single number to have been wrong four times, then quietly corrected three of them — without ever telling us.

County records are a layered document, not a single source of truth. Each layer was written by a different person, for a different reason, at a different time. Some of those reasons were legal. Some were administrative. Some were clerical. Treating them all as facts is how homeowners get surprised.

The three things to check first.

Three fields drive almost every downstream assumption a stranger — your insurance adjuster, your roofer’s estimator, your AI assistant — will make about the house. Get these three right and the rest of the file becomes useful.

Year built — wrong more often than you think.

Insurance underwriters use it. Roofers quote off it. Realtors price comp sets around it. And nine times out of ten, the year on the assessor’s card is the year the permit closed, not the year you would have called the house finished.

For most homes the difference is under twelve months. For some, it’s four years. We've seen six.

What’s downstream of that year matters more than the year itself. A house dated 1998 will be assumed to have late-90s insulation code, an upgraded 100-amp panel, no radon mitigation, and a roof that started aging on Jan 1 1999 even if the shingles weren’t laid until late 2001. Every one of those assumptions is wrong in a way that costs you money, until you correct the year.

What we do about it.

In Homaic, every fact-claim from a public record is editable. You can correct your year built without a phone call to the assessor. The plan recalibrates. The original is kept as a co-claim — so when a future record updates, we can ask if you want to revert.

That’s not a feature. That’s a posture: we never assume the file is right just because it’s the file.