The property record

Overview

Territory gives you a list. The property record is the page behind one row: the roof on the aerial photo (and as a 3D model where Setell has built one), the findings marked where they were seen, what changed between captures, and the county's record of who owns it.

Every number on the page is a claim with a source behind it. Where Setell doesn't know something, the page leaves it out: no line saying it is unknown, and nothing drawn on the picture that you might read as a measurement. The gap stays in the provenance of the claim, on the exported report, and in what Studio and MCP return.

The Territory list prints the same condition word as this record. The number in the Territory map drawer is different: it runs the opposite way to the record's grade. See Reading the Roof Health grade before you compare the two.

Before you start

• The Roof Intelligence add-on has to be active. See docs/roof/overview.
• The building needs to be in the corpus — that is, Setell has read the area. Run a Territory scan first if it isn't (docs/roof/territory).
• Nothing to set up beyond that. The record reads public imagery and public county records, not your job data.

Open a record

1. Open Territory and find the building — in the table, on the map, or by searching an address or owner name.
2. In the table, click the row. On the map, click the pin to open the drawer, then click Open the property record.

The page's web address carries what you're looking at — what the picture shows, the capture, the view, and any claim you've opened. Reload it, or come back to it later, and you get the same view rather than a reset page.

What's on the page

The record is one page, read top to bottom. Under the picture:

• The building — its sections, its structure, and its rooftop equipment. The equipment card appears only when something on the roof was counted.
• Condition now — the grade, the findings marked on the roof where they were seen (numbered so the panel and the picture refer to the same spot), and what an inspection should cover.

Beside the picture:

• Changes over time — the roof's scored captures year by year, and what this record can say about each year. See Reading the change timeline.
• Why this property was flagged — the owner and property record, hail exposure, the roof's reading, and the size class of the work (spot repair, section job, or whole-roof job) with the roof area in squares.

One switch on the picture chooses the view, and one Condition switch under it adds the findings. See The picture.

Below the cards, Nearby commercial lists the neighbouring buildings Setell has scored, each linking to its own record.

The picture

The record opens on Photo: the aerial photo at full strength, with this roof's outline drawn on it as a thin light line. Nearby buildings are drawn as faint outlines. Those are public building outlines only, with no owner or address; a building with no stored outline gets nothing drawn, never a guessed box.

The photo always shows one capture, never a patchwork of several. Tiles that capture doesn't have are hatched, and the line above the picture says the imagery is partial. Under the photo there is only a scale bar.

To move around the picture:

• Zoom in, Zoom out, and Recenter on roof sit on the right edge of the picture.
• Drag to move the picture. On a touch screen, use two fingers; one finger scrolls the page.
• Hold Ctrl (⌘ on Mac) and scroll, or pinch, to zoom. A plain scroll moves the page, not the picture.

Where Setell has built a model of the roof, a switch at the top right of the picture chooses the view: Photo, Plan, South-west or North-east. Plan draws the roof on the photo, or shows the 3D model from straight down where there is no photo. South-west and North-east show the 3D model from those corners. The switch shows only the views this roof can show: a roof with a model but no 3D shows Photo and Plan, and a roof with no model shows no switch at all. On a phone the switch is one row under the picture, labelled Photo, Plan, SW and NE. Switching views doesn't reload the page.

Where Setell has measured the building from its lidar survey and the photo, the roof's outline goes around the whole building. The part outside the older map outline is hatched and marked not read yet, because the condition reading has not covered it. One Condition switch under the picture works in every view and adds the condition layer: soft blue areas where water is most likely to pond (darker is more likely, a dark edge marks the likeliest areas), grey areas that were in shadow when the photo was taken, and the findings. A short key appears beside the button.

Photo year, under the picture, switches between the captures on file. It appears only when there are two or more captures. Where two captures share a year, the button names the provider too. Some captures are licensed for measuring only; pick one of those and the record says "The 2023 photo is licensed for measuring only, so it is not shown." rather than showing it.

How the photo is read

Every grade on the record comes from an aerial photo. What a photo can show depends on its resolution: how much roof one pixel covers. A smaller number is a sharper photo, and a sharper photo shows smaller defects.

• Small defects, such as patches and seams, show only in a sharp photo: about 10 cm per pixel or finer on asphalt shingle, and about 16 cm or finer on membrane, metal, gravel and modified bitumen roofs. In a coarser photo they are too small to see. Larger areas, such as ponding and widespread wear, still show.
• A coarse photo tends to rate a bad roof better than it is, because it loses the texture that shows wear. Setell still shows the grade. Beside it, the condition card says how far off a grade at that resolution typically is, for example "Grades from 8 cm photos are off by about 0.6 of a step on the scale."
• Setell checks the resolution a provider states against what it has measured for that imagery source, and uses the coarser of the two.
• Imagery coarser than about 15 cm (6 in) per pixel, such as 60 cm NAIP or 1 ft statewide imagery, is not used to grade a roof.

The 3D model

Where Setell has built a model of the roof, Plan, South-west and North-east show it, with the findings drawn over it where they can be. Where there's no model, there's no switch. On most roofs, the roof top of the model carries the same aerial photo as the Photo view; where a photo tile is missing, that part of the roof stays grey.

The model is drawn one of three ways, and the 3D twin card says which and why. Where the fitted roof planes match the lidar survey, the roof is drawn from those planes. A flat roof whose planes do not fit is drawn as its measured flat levels. Where neither is possible, for example a pitched roof the survey is too sparse to draw, there is no 3D and no 3D twin card. Setell never draws a shape the data cannot support.

The Where water ponds card says where water is most likely to sit, and how many places stand out. Places on parts of the roof that slope 10 degrees or more are left out, because water runs off a slope. Places that were in shadow when the photo was taken are counted separately, because they cannot be read.

Plan is the top-down view, and South-west and North-east are two angled views from opposite corners. The tilt is deliberately limited. The model is built from overhead imagery, so a steep side-on angle would be showing you geometry nobody measured. Where elevation data exists for the building, Setell has a true three-dimensional read and allows a little more tilt; without it the model is a flattened one built from the picture alone.

Reading the Roof Health grade

The record grades the roof on a five-band rubric, from 1 Critical to 5 Excellent, and higher is better:

Under the grade, 2. Condition now prints the band and its place on the scale, for example Poor 2 of 5. Below that, the five bands sit in a row from worst to best, numbered 1 Critical, 2 Poor, 3 Watch, 4 Good, 5 Excellent, with this roof's band marked. The number is the band's position in that row, so 5 is the best band. It is not a score, and it adds no precision to the band. Where the imagery can only separate bad from fine, the row and the time line below are not shown.

The Territory list prints this same word. A roof the twin graded Poor reads Poor on the list row and on the record. See docs/roof/territory.

The imagery number is a different scale. Where only the imagery engine has read a roof, Territory shows an imagery band, and the map drawer shows its number: 0 to 100 where higher means worse — a triage order for the map. The record grades the roof from 1 Critical to 5 Excellent, where higher means better, a judgement on the roof, and that number is the band's position, not a score. Poor and Critical mean roughly the same thing on both; Good does not. On the imagery scale, Good means little was found. On the record, Good is the second-best grade of five.

Setell often shows the band without a number. The number only appears when the read was precise enough to support one — a grade you can act on, rather than a decimal that invites you to invent a meaning. On some roofing materials the imagery can only separate bad from fine, and the record says that instead of picking a middle band.

Alongside the grade, Setell prints the sentence explaining it: what pulled it there, which section was worst, and whether the material or the capture limited what could be read.

Opening an unscored record

Some buildings are in the corpus with their shape measured but no condition read yet. Opening one of those can put it in the queue to be scored — the record says "Grading is queued. This page updates when it is done." and you come back to a graded record.

It doesn't queue every time, and it never goes and fetches new imagery on your behalf. A building is only queued where Setell already holds cached imagery for that metro and a scoring run is open for it. Where those don't hold, the record stays not yet read and a Territory scan is the way to get it read (docs/roof/territory).

A geometry-only record says what it is. The caption reads "3D from the … laser survey" rather than naming a grade, there's no roof line under Why this property was flagged, and there's no "Graded from the …" line — because nothing graded it. A capture is not a verdict, and the page won't imply one.

Reading the change timeline

Changes over time appears when the roof has graded photos from two or more years. The first line says how many there are, for example "4 graded photos, 2018 to 2024." Each year gets a row: the source, the grade with its value and range, a low-confidence tag where it applies, and the change from the year before, for example "Down 12 points since 2020", marked within the margin of error or beyond the margin of error depending on whether the two ranges overlap, or "Can't compare with 2020". With fewer than two graded years there is no change to show, and the section does not appear.

Where the record holds photos from two or more years, a time line comes first: one dot per year a photo was flown. The large dot at the end is the roof's condition now, in its band colour. Every date is a year.

Below that is the timeline — one row per year this record read. Each row says what the reading found, in plain words:

• A grade where the roof was read that year, and how it moved — "Watch in 2020 → Poor in 2022; surface asphalt shingle → modified bitumen."
• No grade, with the reason, where the record read that year but got no grade from it: every photo that year is too coarse, a photo was withdrawn and no other was graded, or no photo that year gave a grade. The row never borrows a grade from another year or another photo.
• Can't compare, with the reason. Usually one of the two photos is too coarse to measure a change against, or the data is not a photo at all (a lidar point cloud, an elevation model).
• A year the record did not read is not listed. That says nothing about whether anybody flew the building that year.

Years are compared with their neighbour, not all against the newest one. Two captures can only be compared down to the coarser of the two, so pairing each year with the one next to it is what makes an older, coarser capture sayable at all — against the newest capture it would just fail.

A capture the record can't date gets no year and no invented one.

The timeline also prints on the exported report, under Changes over time. Long records are capped there and the PDF says how many years it left out.

Where every number came from

Click any line on the page and the Sources panel shows where it came from: the value, its status, the source, and when it was retrieved. Sources are named plainly: an imagery observation, a building outline, a county, municipal, federal or hazard record, a weather station record, the model, a derivation, or a person.

Claims come back in three states, and the difference matters:

• Known — measured or published, with the source named.
• Unknown — the check ran and could not resolve it, with the reason given in words ("not measurable at this resolution", "roof shape not resolved from lidar").
• Absent — checked for and genuinely not there.

An unknown is never drawn. It is text in a panel, never a line on the model.

What's in the rails

• Roof Health — the grade, the explanation, and the capture it was read from.
• Sections / material — the roof broken into sections where Setell could separate them, each with its material and rating.
• Structure — roof planes, parapet, height, where those resolved.
• Evidence — the per-capture rows behind the condition read, including the rows that record what was not visible.
• Sources — where the line you clicked came from.

The owner and the hail exposure print once, under Why this property was flagged. The hail line counts the days radar showed severe hail within 5 km (3 miles), and how many of them had hail 2 inches or larger. A note under it says the grade comes from the photo, not the hail count. The findings print one line per kind, with how many there are and the largest one, for example "Ponding footprint in 2 places, largest 37 squares (West field)". A finding smaller than half a roofing square prints its area in m² only. The rest of the county's public record — mailing address, acquisition, land use, assessed and market value, year built and building area — and the weather counts for the location (wind, precipitation, freeze–thaw) are not a separate panel any more. You reach them through the provenance of a claim, and on the exported report. All of it only where the county publishes it.

Where the county record names an owner but that county's terms don't let Setell show it, the record says Owner: Withheld under county data rules. Where the county never published an owner, nothing is shown.

Export the report

Export report sits at the top of the record, and again under Why this property was flagged. It prints a one-page PDF: the building as drawn, the sentence saying why it was flagged, the numbered areas, what an inspection should cover, the capture-year timeline, and the imagery licence notices.

This is your working sheet, not the owner's document. It carries the owner's name, the acquisition record, and the hail history — the things you use to decide whether to knock, not things to hand back to the person who owns the roof. The owner-facing document is a different one, generated from a different button: see docs/roof/recommendation-report. Neither contains a price.

Ask Setell instead

In Studio: "What does the record say about that building on Oak Street?" Setell returns the same claims, with the same unknowns intact.

Over MCP, the hosted connector can summarise one Territory roof — its condition, the recommended action, every capture with its provider, year, resolution and licence, and links to this page and the roof report PDF. The full property record, claim by claim, is not published as an agent tool yet; Studio and this page are the ways to read all of it. See docs/mcp/capabilities.

What happens next

• The record is live. When a newer capture is processed for the building, the page reflects it.
• Start a quote, beside Export report, turns this roof into a job after you confirm a preview. See docs/roof/start-a-quote.
• Nothing here contacts anyone.
• What you do with the record is yours. Setell reports the property; the outreach is outside the product.

Troubleshooting

• I see an offer instead of the record. The add-on isn't active on your account. See docs/roof/overview.
• The record has no grade and no findings. The building is in the corpus but nothing has scored it, and opening it didn't queue one — see Opening an unscored record. Run a scan over that area (docs/roof/territory).
• "Grading is queued." Opening the record put the building in line to be read. Nothing more to do; come back and the grade will be there. See Opening an unscored record.
• "N saved items could not be read and are left out." Some of the stored rows behind the record were malformed and were left out. The rest of the record is served as normal — Setell prints the count rather than dropping the page or quietly showing you less than it has.
• There is no Changes over time section. This building has graded photos from fewer than two years. Change compares two; it can't run on one.
• A year I know was flown is not in the timeline. The timeline lists the years this record read, not every year a capture exists. The capture may not be on file here, or be on file without a readable date.
• A year says "can't compare." The two captures either side of it can't be measured against each other — usually one is too coarse, or it's lidar or an elevation model rather than a picture. The row stays visible rather than disappearing.
• A year says "no grade". The record holds a photo for that year but can't grade the roof from it, and the row says why. Imagery coarser than about 15 cm (6 in) per pixel, such as 60 cm NAIP or 1 ft statewide imagery, can't be scored. A withdrawn capture leaves the year without a condition unless another capture fine enough to score covers it. Setell shows the gap rather than a grade from a neighbouring year.
• There is no Structure card, or it has fewer lines than another record. There's no elevation data for the building, or too little of it. A parapet, a height or a set of roof planes the lidar could not settle is left out rather than drawn as a shape nobody measured.
• No owner, no values, no year built. Setell doesn't cover that county's assessor yet, or the county doesn't publish that field.
• The grade disagrees with the list. It doesn't — they're two different scales running opposite directions. See Reading the Roof Health grade.
• Still stuck → docs/reference/troubleshooting.

FAQ

• Does this give me a phone number or an email? No. The record reports property and roof facts from public records and public imagery. It doesn't build contact lists.
• Does it say how old the roof is? No. Setell doesn't claim roof age from imagery anywhere in the product, and the record is no exception.
• Can I show this to the owner? Not this page, and not the exported report either — both are your working view, and both name the owner and their acquisition record back at them. The owner-facing document is a separate report with its own button (docs/roof/recommendation-report).
• Does opening a record use a quote credit? No. Nothing in Roof Intelligence is metered against AI quotes or AI messages.
• Why is the model flat-looking on some buildings? Because no elevation data was available and it was built from the overhead picture alone. Setell tells you which read you got rather than styling both the same.

Related

docs/roof/overview · docs/roof/territory · docs/roof/start-a-quote · docs/roof/recommendation-report · docs/roof/report · docs/mcp/capabilities

Ready to try it on your own quotes?

Start free — no credit card. 14 days of unlimited Pro, then 3 free quotes a month.