tract.earth

tract.earth user guide

This guide walks through the platform end to end: open the statewide value map, pick a market, search by address or by owner, read the ownership intelligence behind an LLC, turn a parcel into a deal, ask the Tract Agent, and staff Scouts to package findings in the background. Quick answers live in the FAQ; this page is the how-to.

Published · Updated · By tract.earth

Getting started — the statewide map

The Real Estate desk opens on all of Massachusetts. Every one of the 351 municipalities is drawn on the map, tinted by its average parcel assessed value — cool blues for lower-value markets, greens through the middle, amber and red for the $1M+ towns. This is the market-level read: underserved vs. primed, at a glance.

  • Hover a town for its card: name, county, average and median assessed value, and how many parcels are loaded.
  • Click a town to explore it. The county and city/town fields fill in automatically, the camera fits the municipality, and parcels stream in as you zoom past ~z13.
  • The Market Screener in the left panel ranks every town by median / average value and parcel count — sortable, filterable by town or county text, and every row is clickable. Pick a county in the dropdown to rank just that county's towns.
  • Towns still backfilling (fewer than 25 parcels loaded) stay neutral on the map and dimmed in the screener rather than ranking on noise.

A browser refresh always returns to the statewide view; your position and searches are preserved while you navigate within a session.

The search box has two modes, toggled by the addr / owner chip on its right edge:

  • Address mode — search addresses, streets, or parcel ids within the selected town. Autocomplete resolves addresses to the exact parcel and can geocode statewide.
  • Owner mode — search assessor owner names statewide, no town selection needed. Matching is order-insensitive ("first last" and "last, first" both work) and punctuation-tolerant. Results light up as amber pins on the map at any zoom, and selecting a result autofills the county and town, mounts that town's parcels, and highlights the one you picked.

Owner search covers people and entities — type an LLC or trust name to pull its holdings. Below the search box, the filter stack adds price, beds and baths, year built, square footage, lot size, property type, distress signals (tax delinquency, pre-foreclosure), absentee and corporate ownership, and more.

Property intelligence & cap rates

Selecting any parcel opens its intelligence card: assessed and market values, sales history, taxes, ownership, geospatial constraints (wetlands, flood, conservation), transit and amenity context, zoning, and what you can build.

Cap rates are estimated, and honest about it. Income is modeled from a per-square-foot rent benchmark for the town (seeded from public ACS data), adjusted by property type; expenses use a vacancy and operating-expense ratio plus the parcel's actual taxes. Where enough recent arms-length sales exist, the assessed→market factor is measured from that town's own sales rather than assumed — the card tells you which basis it used and on how many sales.

Your assumptions are adjustable. Open the comps panel's adjust toggle to set vacancy, operating-expense ratio, rent adjustment, and the assessed→market uplift. Your values recompute every estimated metric and are passed to the Tract Agent, which will cite "using your assumptions" when it reasons with them.

The comps panel also shows per-comp cap rates, the neighborhood median cap rate, and a three-year quarterly market trend chart built from actual recorded sales.

Owners, LLCs & the ownership graph

When a parcel is entity-owned (LLC, trust, corp — including assessor shorthand like "SMITH JOHN TR"), the card offers LLC / Entity Intelligence: entity type, status, formation date, registered agent, principal office, and the managers/officers behind it, sourced from the Secretary of the Commonwealth registry.

  • Find other MA parcels (entity) expands the entity's full assessor portfolio — parcel count, total assessed value, and the parcels themselves.
  • Each member offers Find MA parcels (assessor name) for their personal holdings (order-insensitive name matching). When both lists are loaded, toggle chips switch between them.
  • Skip Trace (owner phones/emails) is a metered research action — it runs only when you click it and confirm. Viewing LLC intel never spends credits.
  • Visualize opens the entity in the Tract Visualizer with its ownership network already loaded — and each member has their own Visualize link that centers the graph on that person instead.

The Tract Visualizer (Ownership tab) draws the whole network: entity → its parcels and towns, the people behind it, each person's personal portfolio, every other LLC the same person is on record with (one manager, five LLCs renders as five edges off one node), and entities sharing the same mailing address (one office running many LLCs). Search any entity, person, or parcel id to load its subgraph; click nodes for details including assessed values, last sales, and distress flags.

Discoveries are cumulative: every search merges into your explored network and stays rendered — the graph is a knowledge base you build about the market you work, saved to your account so it follows you across devices. Refresh re-runs your saved searches to pull in newly discovered connections; Reset clears the network. Every parcel in your network also shows on the map as a violet pin — Tract Intel (View → Tract Intel) — with a running rollup chip, so your research reads statewide at a glance. Ownership ties are assessor-name matches, not chain-of-title — treat them as leads, not legal conclusions.

Map tools — overlays, Build & Assemble

The map header holds the working tools:

  • Overlays — parcel value tint (with optional 3D value terrain and a value-range filter), MassDEP wetlands with buffer, building footprints, flood, conservation, historic districts, zoning atlas layers, and statewide amenity layers. One click turns everything on or off.
  • Build — draws the buildable envelope for the selected parcel from zoning setbacks, with massing scenarios (addition, ADU, cottage, teardown/new construction), editable setback and usable-area shapes, and live square-footage math.
  • Assemble — click adjacent parcels to combine them into one land assemblage with merged lot area and assessed totals; save the set as a list or send it to the Tract Agent for an assemblage read.
  • Measure — distance and area tools.
  • View — basemap, highlight and hover colors, Tract Intel (your Tract Visualizer discoveries as violet pins at any zoom), Town zoom (how close a town selection zooms — default keeps the whole municipality in view), and starting zoom.

Deals, proforma & capital

The Deal Desk turns research into a pipeline:

  • Add to pipeline from any property card creates a deal (acquisition, development, or flip) linked to the parcel.
  • The kanban board tracks stages with value rollups; the deal page carries tasks, documents, activity, and the property record.
  • Work it with the Tract Agent opens the agent already loaded with that parcel; Build it myself jumps straight into the proforma.
  • The proforma models the deal — budget lines can be seeded from a CSV or drafted by the agent — and bridges directly into underwriting: lender boxes (LTV, LTC, DSCR), a go/no-go read, and funding-probability visuals. A personal financial statement (PFS) can back sponsor underwriting, and capital requests can be shared with capital partners with the identifying details anonymized.

The Tract Agent and Scouts

The Tract Agent is the AI copilot on the desk — a research analyst wired into the platform's tools. It can pull property intelligence, comps and cap rates, owner portfolios, LLC and ownership-graph context, distress signals, assemblage rollups, and can draft memos, letters of intent, and proformas.

  • Send any parcel to the agent from its card, or select a deal and choose Work it with the Tract Agent. The Agent tab is the desk landing; on other tabs the agent docks as a panel you can expand.
  • The agent uses your underwriting assumptions when you've customized them, and says so.
  • It remembers what matters across conversations in your private memory graph (the Tract Visualizer's Personal tab) — contacts, deals, parcels, insights. The Ownership tab is the shared LLC↔parcel graph; the two are kept separate.
  • It also consults your Tract Intel network: when a parcel or deal touches an owner, manager, or mailing address you've already mapped, the agent cross-references your explored network and tells you the connection.
  • Actions that cost metered credits (like skip tracing) are never run by the agent implicitly.

Scouts are named background agents you staff. Each scout watches a market and a play you set, joins Secretary of the Commonwealth filings, and writes a complete package (parcel, play, LLC members, cached contact channels). The desk Agent dispatches them — dispatch is not an in-turn poll. Scout labor is staffed by plan slots, not charged as chat credits.

Reports, data & billing

Reports. Any parcel (or comparison set) can generate a property report: values, comps, distress, zoning honesty, buildability, points of interest, and map snapshots. Reports are titled by address and render progress live while they build.

Coverage & freshness. The foundation is the MassGIS Level 3 statewide parcel layer — all 351 municipalities — enriched with assessor records, registry entity data, sales, and infrastructure context. Parcel data tracks the state refresh cycle; distress signals update continuously.

Credits & metering. Actions that call metered third-party APIs — like the Skip Trace research action — always require an explicit click and say so before they run. Research, search, comps, cap rates, maps, and the Tract Visualizer don't consume credits.

For plans and pricing, see the FAQ.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a how-to guide for the platform?

Yes. The User Guide at tract.earth/guide walks through the whole platform: the statewide value map and Market Screener, address and owner search, property intelligence and cap rates, LLC and ownership research, the map tools (overlays, Build, Assemble), deals and underwriting, the Tract Agent, and Scouts.

What is the Tract Agent?

The Tract Agent is the AI copilot built into tract.earth — the reason the platform is AI-powered, not only a parcel database. It works through the desk: it resolves addresses to parcels, pulls assessor records and distress signals, runs comps, reads your pipeline, creates tasks, drafts LOIs and fee-sharing agreements, and remembers what matters in a private knowledge graph that belongs to your account. Click "send to agent" on any property card, or open the Agent tab, and it starts a conversation with the intel brief.

What are Scouts?

Scouts are named background agents on tract.earth — a roster you staff, not the name of the free billing plan. You set a market and a play; a scout sweeps parcels, joins Secretary of the Commonwealth filings, and writes a complete package — parcel, play, LLC members, and cached contact channels — without you sitting in the chat. The desk Tract Agent dispatches them. Scout labor is staffed by plan slots, not charged as chat credits.

What is the statewide value map?

The map opens on all of Massachusetts with every municipality tinted by the average assessed value of its parcels — a one-glance read on which markets are underserved and which are primed. Hover a town for its value card, click it to load its parcels, or open the Market Screener to rank all 351 towns by median value, average value, and parcel count. The full walkthrough is in the User Guide at tract.earth/guide.

Yes. Switch the search box to owner mode and type a person, LLC, trust, or corporation name — no town selection needed. Matching is order-insensitive, so "first last" and "last, first" both work. Results appear as pins statewide, and selecting one jumps to the parcel and loads its town.

How do I get started?

tract.earth is invite-only. Request access from the sign-in page — if we open a seat, you get a magic link. There is no self-serve signup. Once you are in, the desk opens on the Tract Agent; you can ask it about a parcel or staff Scouts in the background. Developers on engine.earth can still mint a playground key from the developer portal.

All frequently asked questions

Where does this data come from?