Research, sources and corrections

What this site will not publish

A policy is only worth reading if it rules something out, so that part comes first. These are not preferences; they are where housing writing does the most damage.

• No crime or safety claims. Not a rate, not a ranking, not a comparison, not a reassurance. Writing of that kind is the most common way housing copy steers people toward and away from places, along the lines the Fair Housing Act exists to protect. That information belongs to the police and sheriff's departments that publish it, with their definitions attached.
• No school ratings and no school quality judgments. What a page may tell you is structural: which district serves an address, how the grades are arranged, and that zones are set by address and change — so you confirm with the district and pull performance data from the Tennessee Department of Education rather than from a third-party score.
• No market statistics without a source and a date. No median price, days on market or appreciation figure appears without naming its source and the date it was pulled. Where a number moves faster than a page can be reviewed, the page gives you the method for getting a current one, which is the approach behind reading Tennessee market data.
• No language about who lives somewhere. Nothing here describes the racial, religious, ethnic or national-origin composition of a place, or suggests a reader would or would not belong in one — including the flattering versions, and the household-shaped ones such as "family-friendly" that sort readers by a protected characteristic while sounding like a compliment.
• No listings, no property search and no lead capture. No form, no sign-up, nothing that turns a reader into a contact record for somebody else to work.
• No payment from anyone we write about. No agent, brokerage, lender, inspector or insurer pays for coverage, placement or wording.

Where facts come from

Sources are ranked, and the ranking decides which wins when two disagree: the record that governs a thing outranks any description of it.

1. The office that owns the record. The county assessor of property for a parcel and its appraised value; the register of deeds for what was recorded; the codes department for what may be built; the utility for service; the school district for a zone.
2. State and federal primary data. The Census Bureau for population, state departments for their own programmes, and the published rate or form itself rather than an article about it.
3. Documents you can obtain. A statute, an ordinance, a recorded plat, a disclosure form.
4. Everything else — portals, aggregators, news write-ups — which may show us a question worth answering, but is never cited as the answer.

Automated valuations are model output, not price: such a figure may be described as an estimate from someone else's model, never as what a house is worth.

Geography and dates

Place names change the answer. A mailing address is not a jurisdiction; a city name is not a county; a consolidated government is not the same as every municipality inside its county. So a page records which jurisdiction it means, and where a boundary cannot be verified from a published source it says so rather than drawing a confident line. The scope and ordering on the city comparison come from one named Census file with one date on it, for that reason.

Every figure travels with its date. Where a value resets on a cycle — a reappraisal, an annual levy, a programme limit — the page names the cycle and the office instead of a number that will silently expire, which is why the property tax guide describes how assessment and levy work rather than quoting a rate.

Comparisons without rankings

Two places are compared on the same axes, in the same order, using attributes that can be checked: housing stock and era, water and sewer against well and septic, boundaries, the records that govern the address, flood exposure, and the road to wherever you spend your days. No page scores a place, names a winner or tells you which suits you. The reader holds the weightings, because only the reader knows them.

Corrections

Write to the editors with the page, the sentence, and what the record says — the assessor's parcel, the recorded plat, the statute, the district's zone lookup. That settles almost anything; the contact page lists what to send.

A claim that cannot be supported is corrected or removed rather than softened, and a page resting on a withdrawn source comes down until it can be rebuilt. There is no published response-time commitment. Who stands behind this, and what commercial relationships exist — none — is on the about page.