The listing says it’s a great business.
The public record has opinions.
Paste a business-for-sale listing. Within 24 hours you get a red-flag memo built from outside evidence — hiring trajectory, review decay, state filings, court records, website history, local market risk — before you sign an NDA or spend $40k on a QoE.
Founding price. 24-hour turnaround. Full refund if the target is too data-thin to analyze — we tell you instead of padding.
Every buyer finds it eventually. Most find it after the LOI.
The vanished partnership. The quietly shrinking staff. The reviews that turned 18 months ago. Brokers don’t volunteer it and sellers forget to mention it — but it’s sitting in public data, findable before you commit a dollar. Our job is one sentence: nothing in the public record should ever surprise you after you’ve paid for diligence.
Paste the listing
A listing URL, the listing text, or just a business name and address. Confidential listing? Send what you have — we work from fragments.
We run the record
Eight sweeps across reviews, hiring data, state registries, courts, federal loan data, website archives, and the neighborhood itself. Every claim in the listing gets checked against outside evidence.
You get the memo
Severity-tiered flags, each with dated evidence. A list of questions to put to the broker. And a coverage table showing everything we checked — including what came back clean.
Memo #001: a “$700k landmark diner” in a resort town
Asking $225k against $80k claimed cash flow — a fair-looking multiple. The listing called it a long-standing community landmark. Here’s what the public record said, eight days before we looked:
Operations sharply curtailed right now, at peak season: a customer review posted 8 days before our research date reports the restaurant has dropped to four days a week, to-go orders only — while marketed on a ~$700k gross narrative.
Evidence: dated review, corroborated by a service-delay review 4 days earlier. A 4-day to-go operation is not a $700k run-rate — a buyer would be purchasing a turnaround, not a going concern.
The flagship rating flatters: 4.3★ across 1,100+ reviews on one platform vs 3.6★ on the platform tourists actually use — and tourists are the growth market the location depends on.
Evidence: platform-by-platform review pull with dates and recurring complaint themes.
The founding-year claim checks out — state registry shows the assumed business name active and continuously filed since 1998. Estimated health score 98/100. The local market is a genuine tailwind: a nearby resort is expanding and outside capital is entering the town.
Evidence: Secretary of State filing, health-score data, local press and housing data.
Two more flags, ten broker questions, and the full coverage table are in the memo. Read the whole thing →
Eight sweeps. Nulls reported, not hidden.
You’re not just paying for flags — you’re paying for the confidence that the search was exhaustive. Clean results are listed alongside problems, and anything we couldn’t verify is labeled as exactly that.
- Review trajectory across every major platform
- Hiring history, incl. pulled & expired job postings
- State registry & corporate footprint
- Litigation & lien search
- Federal loan data cross-checks (PPP headcount vs. claims)
- Website archaeology (what the old site said)
- Workforce voice (employee reviews)
- The block itself: rents, permits, crime trend, anchors
- 24-hour turnaround
- Human-reviewed before delivery
- Refunded if the target is too data-thin
- Not a valuation — the skeptic before your QoE