Seller Signals Methodology

Seller Signals are informational indicators that a property may be approaching a sale, ownership transition, inheritance transition, distress event or other disposition-related condition. They are an intelligence product — not a prediction presented as certainty.

A single signal never means a homeowner intends to sell. Even strong signals, like an estate sale at a property, are described exactly as what they are: activity detected at or associated with the property.

Signals come from property records BehindTheDeed already holds (deeds, permits, code cases, title events, tax and listing records), from configured public sources such as estate-sale listings, and from observations submitted by subscribers through the Intelligence Inbox.

Every signal records its source, provider, detection date, event date and geographic precision. Signals with only city- or ZIP-level geography are never attached to an individual property.

The score (0–100) estimates the strength of observed indicators associated with a possible disposition. It is not a probability and not a certainty. Multiple independent, current signals produce higher scores than repeated copies of the same event.

The same real-world event reported through several sources is deduplicated into one canonical signal; those sources corroborate it rather than multiplying its weight.

Each signal type has a configurable strength (1 = informational, 5 = very strong) and a decay horizon — an estate sale yesterday is far more relevant than one three years ago, and old events eventually become historical only.

States are Watch (weak or historical), Emerging (corroborating indicators), High Transition Signal (strong current evidence) and Priority Off-Market (multiple strong, independent, current signals). None of these states is a claim that an owner intends to sell.

Confidence dimensions are kept separate. Source confidence says how reliable the origin is. Property match confidence says how certain the parcel association is — user-confirmed associations are labeled USER CONFIRMED, distinct from SYSTEM VERIFIED. Signal strength says how meaningful the evidence is for a possible disposition.

Only exact or high-confidence property matches materially influence a property score without corroboration.

They do not establish that an owner intends to sell, is experiencing financial hardship, or will list the property. Absence of signals does not mean a property will not be sold.

We avoid language like 'must sell', 'ready to sell', 'desperate seller' or 'guaranteed' anywhere in the product.

Marketplace and social observations may be incomplete, approximate or user-submitted. They are treated as corroborating evidence unless independently verified, and they stay low-to-moderate until corroborated by public records or additional independent signals.

Facebook/Meta integrations are permission-dependent: BTD uses only authorized APIs or content you intentionally submit. Connecting Facebook does not grant BTD unrestricted access to everything you can see.

Observations that cannot be reliably matched to one property are not discarded. They become area social intelligence: the Social Intel feed lists them by ZIP or city together with the highest-scoring candidate properties in the same area, so 'moving sale in 48317' becomes an investigable lead instead of dead-end data.

When you know the address, you can confirm the association yourself. The link is recorded as USER CONFIRMED — distinct from system-verified records — and the signal stays low-to-moderate until independently corroborated. If the property already holds independent signals, you are notified that your observation was corroborated, and the corroboration is reflected in the property's Seller Transition Score.

BTD also ingests configured public sale-event feeds (estate-sale companies, community sale calendars) that are intended for public syndication. Feed items follow the same rules: exact-address items may attach to properties; everything else stays area-level and never changes a property's score by itself.

Scores change as new events are detected, as signals age past their decay horizons, or as corrections are confirmed in manual review. Every score change is recorded with the reason, so 'why was this property 72 last month and 88 today?' always has an answer.

Every signal shows when it was detected, its source date and its current relevance. Coverage depends on the sources available in each jurisdiction; when a source is unavailable, Seller Signals continue with the sources that remain.