Measure/Portfolio water risk assessment
For managers, funds and owners
Property portfolio water risk assessment
Maintenance budget goes where the loudest tenant is. A portfolio water risk assessment replaces that with something physical: every building you hold, measured the same way — ground slope at each wall, upstream area draining to it, modeled surface flow, and where water stands with nowhere to go — then ranked against the rest of the portfolio.
The framing matters and we will not soften it. This tells you which buildings the ground is working against. It does not tell you which buildings will have water. Those are different claims and only the first one is measured.
What comes back per building
| Quantity | How it is measured |
|---|---|
| Per-wall grade | Slope on each wall's own outward normal, measured 0.75–3.25 m out and combined so no single reading decides it. Target: a 5% fall over 3 m. |
| Contributing area | Square meters draining to each wall, sampled at nine points beside it and re-sampled at every displaced footprint position. Published with its range. |
| Flow paths | Modeled flow over a surface with every hollow filled to its spill point and buildings standing as walls. |
| Standing water | Depth and extent within 20 m of the footprint and outside every building. Under 3 cm is measurement noise and is not counted. |
| What was declined | Walls whose direction did not survive the uncertainty pass, walls with no readable profile, and addresses whose ground data failed the quality gate — named, not omitted. |
Why the last row is the one to read first
A vendor report with no gaps in it has either measured a very simple portfolio or quietly dropped what it could not do. Across a few hundred buildings, the silent drop is the expensive failure mode, because the buildings a model finds hard are not a random sample of your holdings.
So the quantity we declined travels in the payload beside the ones we answered. Three kinds of decline exist:
- Refused addresses. The ground data fails a quality gate — the median step between adjacent elevations must clear 0.004 m, below which the surface is a coarse source stretched onto a fine grid and every channel drawn from it is interpolation. Those addresses are declined outright rather than measured anyway.
- Unestablished identity. Where we cannot tell which building an address names, we say so. A refusal is never billed.
- Undecided walls. Directions that did not survive the uncertainty pass ship as too close to call.
The uncertainty pass, and why your ranking is shorter than you expected
A published building outline is a trace of a roof, and it can sit a meter from the wall it claims to be. On a real Pittsburgh footprint, shifting it north in 0.2 m steps moved one wall from +5.4% to −23.5%, crossing zero inside 1.4 m.
So every footprint is displaced one meter in each of sixteen directions and re-measured — seventeen positions in all — and a direction is printed only when all seventeen agree on the sign. Everything else is reported as undecided.
Near-misses come back with which way they lean and how many of the seventeen agreed, so they stay useful. What that buys you is a ranking you can put in front of a board rather than one that reorders itself when somebody re-traces a roof.
Identity, which is the failure nobody audits
At portfolio scale, nobody is looking at an aerial photo to catch a wrong building. Identity is decided by graded evidence, strongest first, and the engine stops the moment it has an identification. Every answer names how strongly the building was identified — because a building we identified and a building we merely located are not the same claim.
The limits belong here rather than in a footnote. We publish no headline identification rate, because across a portfolio one figure would hide the only thing that helps you triage: which properties were identified and which were merely located. Where the underlying records are thin the evidence is thin too. And not every disagreement is a different building — some are our source and somebody else's tracing the same roof differently.
If the building is wrong, the property is replaced free.
The claim, and its boundary
The measurement is ground slope, contributing area and standing water at a structure. It is not a finding that a property has a drainage problem, a wet basement, or any defect, and no ranking we produce should be read that way in a tenant letter, a disclosure, or a valuation.
Ground falling toward a foundation raises the risk of water reaching it. That is ordinary building science and we will state it. That a particular building has water was not measured.
We also quote no incident rate. Measured terrain tested against Chicago's 311 basement-water complaints did not separate them — largely a verdict on the proxy, and entirely a reason not to promise a number we have not observed.
How it is priced, and why it is not per lookup
Portfolio is annual, priced per property rather than per lookup, because a portfolio owner is not sitting looking addresses up. Every building is measured and ranked against the others, storm-ahead alerts run on the ground already measured, and the whole set re-runs each year or when new coverage lands over you.
That is a different shape from the self-serve plans — Solo at $99 a month for 25 lookups, Pro at $399 for 150 — which are for people who do want to look things up. Insurers scoring a book run on a custom API plan priced by volume.
Talk to us about your portfolio
Four questions about size, type and where the holdings are, then a call. Bring the addresses you most want checked — including the ones you expect us to refuse.
You can also run a single address free first to see the shape of the output.
Does this predict which buildings will have water problems?
No. It ranks buildings by measured ground condition, not by predicted outcome.
How is a portfolio priced?
Annually, per property, not per lookup. It re-runs each year or when new coverage lands.
What happens to buildings you cannot measure?
They are named in the output, not dropped. A refusal is never billed.
How reliable is identification at scale?
Identity is settled by graded evidence, strongest first, and where none is strong enough the address is refused rather than matched to the nearest roof. Every property carries the grade that answered, so an identification and a location are never mistaken for each other across a large file. A wrong building is replaced free.