01What goes into a TradeSafeJobs report
Every TradeSafeJobs report is a four-source roll-up read on the same address and the same client name at the same moment: federal civil docket, state civil-judgment filings, mechanic’s-lien recordings, and bankruptcy court records. Federal sources update weekly; the county-level sources — where most of the lien and judgment signal actually lives — update on a real-time pull from the recorder. The full cadence and what we DO surface rules are spelled out on the Trust page; the short version is that the rolling picture is current within days on liens and within a week on civil judgments, and the report surfaces them as a single verdict rather than a stack of separate reports.
A single $35 lookup is the price to read all four sources for one client at one address, with the line items you can actually act on. The verdict chip at the top — Go / Caution / No-Go — is the roll-up; the line items underneath are the bid-day math. A great pre-bid read on the Bid Walk is the same report a quarter of the line items came from being unpaid on a prior one.
What the report is NOT is a credit check. There is no FICO, no soft-pull, no permission form to send to the homeowner, no waiting period for a credit bureau to deliver. The four sources are public at the county recorder and at PACER; we collapse them into a single read against the name and address your crew already wrote on the bid sheet.
02Mechanic’s liens — active vs. satisfied or released
A mechanic’s lien is a contractor’s or supplier’s recorded claim against a property for unpaid labor or materials. The status field on the report is the part that matters: “active” means the lien is unpaid and enforceable; “satisfied” means it was paid off and the underlying debt is closed; “released” means the claimant formally canceled the recording — common when a settlement is paid, a lien is bonded off, or a lien is withdrawn after the underlying dispute is settled out of court. Each status corresponds to a different bid-day posture on the next project.
An active mechanic’s lien naming the homeowner is a direct prior-payment conflict. The new contractor’s draw can be subordinated to the prior claimant unless the new team structures around it: a larger deposit, joint-check arrangements on the first draw, or a written release recorded alongside the next payment milestone. The TradeSafeJobs line item names the recording jurisdiction and a date for every active filing so the GC can map it onto the next draw. The full surface of what we DO surface is on the Trust page.
A drywall sub on a kitchen addition pulled the bid and missed two active mechanic’s liens naming the homeowner — recorded eight and fourteen months earlier over a prior addition that never closed out. The first draw on the new addition went straight to the prior lien claimant before a shovel hit the ground, and the sub ended up fronting materials to keep the crew moving while the homeowner “got around” to disputing the prior lien rights. An hour of public-record read before the bid would have surfaced both.
A satisfied or released lien is a much weaker signal — usually it means the homeowner resolved the underlying dispute, and the contractor’s bid should treat it as a historical footnote rather than a current risk. The age of the lien, the dollar amount, and whether the project that triggered the lien is the same one the new bid is on are the three filters that decide whether the lien is bid-day relevant or background noise.
03State civil judgments — what the entry communicates
A civil judgment is the public-record signal that a prior creditor won a court fight against the homeowner. The status field tells you whether the judgment is open or satisfied — the difference between an unpaid judgment that the creditor can still enforce and a closed one that no longer affects the homeowner’s books. The county of record is the surrounding jurisdiction; the dollar amount is what the prior creditor was awarded; the date is when the judgment was entered, not when it was satisfied. The date stamped alongside a satisfied status is the difference between a judgment satisfied in 2014 and a freshly recorded civil case from last quarter.
For the bidder, the line item is a payment-history X-ray. A two-year-old civil judgment naming the homeowner, partially satisfied, is a different bid than a six-month-old open judgment in the same case. The first is often a vendor dispute that has been put to bed; the second is a current creditor with collection rights on the next draw. The TradeSafeJobs report surfaces both as “judgment in [county] status: [open or satisfied] recorded [date],” so the bid-day math is the difference between the date-stamp and the new project’s draw schedule.
The pain hits when the contractor skips the read. A painter who pulled the check post-mobilization and saw a six-month-old civil judgment on the homeowner’s books — without a corresponding flag in the pre-bid read — would have shifted the deposit and the retainage at contract time and pinned retainage to a milestone the homeowner could clear. The “what does a civil judgment search show” question is exactly the one a public-record check answers: which judgment, in which county, with what amount, in what status. The verdict chip is the roll-up, and the line item is the math.
Two judgment filings in five years is meaningfully different from twenty-three small-claims referrals in three. One judgment may have been a vendor dispute unrelated to construction. A run of small-claims referrals to contractors and suppliers is a history of contested payment, and that is exactly the population of counterparties whose names will never reach a phone-call reference.
04Bankruptcy filings — discharged vs. dismissed, and why both matter
A bankruptcy filing on the homeowner is the single line item most often misread at bid time. There are three real dispositions a Chapter 7, 11, or 13 case can land in: “discharged,” “dismissed,” or “pending.” Each one says something different about the debt profile and about the next contractor’s collection risk. Discharged means the court wiped the debts out and the slate is clean going forward; dismissed means the case was thrown out without a discharge and the debts still exist; pending means the automatic stay is in force and most collection activity — including most judgment enforcement — is frozen for the duration.
For the bidder, the meaningful split is between a discharged case that closed years ago and a pending or recently dismissed one. The four-year-old discharged Chapter 7 is a footnote. A pending or open bankruptcy is a flag that the next draw is not a short-term obligation the homeowner can clear — and that the GC or homeowner may have a court-supervised payment plan that no longer matches the bid’s draw schedule. The line item on the report names the chapter, the filing date, the disposition, and any flag-and-dismissed or reaffirmed debts the court has noted.
The pain hits when the contractor doesn’t read the disposition. An HVAC sub on a GC team with a four-year-old satisfied judgment on a homeowner’s record would have negotiated joint checks up front at contract time — and the difference between bidding at standard draw terms and structuring the contract to short-circuit the prior judgment is most of a season’s margin on a single job. The bankruptcy disposition is the same shape of read: it tells you whether the next draw is bid-day money or money the homeowner can’t pay for the next thirty months.
The verdict chip at the top of the report rolls the four sources into a single Go / Caution / No-Go posture and the underlying line items are the math that produces it. A Caution tag with a four-year-old satisfied judgment is different from a Caution tag with a pending bankruptcy — and the bid-day response should be different too. The FAQ walks how each line item maps onto payment terms.
05Age and jurisdiction — how to read them together
The filing date next to the status is the difference between a 2012 judgment satisfied in 2014 and last week’s freshly recorded civil case. Two judgments on the same name from different counties read differently — one may be a vendor dispute in a county where the homeowner no longer owns property; the other may be a current creditor in the county where the new project lives. Jurisdiction is in the line item and the date is the second filter the bidder needs to read alongside it.
The full surface of what we DO surface — including jurisdiction and date for every line item — is spelled out on the Trust page. The short version for most line items is: read the status, read the date, read the jurisdiction, and the bid-day math follows.
06The verdict chip — Go / Caution / No-Go
The verdict chip at the top of every report is a roll-up of the line-item reads above it. “Go” means a clean payment + property risk profile: no active liens, no unsatisfied civil judgments, no current bankruptcy, and a clean permit profile on the address. “Caution” means the line items are not zero — they may include an active lien, a recent civil judgment, or a prior bankruptcy — but the read is adjustments to terms rather than a refusal to bid. “No-Go” means the bid is on with eyes open, and not at the contract terms the GC arrived with.
The line items behind the chip are what the GC needs to structure the next contract at. A Caution tag on a single active mechanic’s lien in a prior project means the GC should bid a larger deposit and pin the first draw to the existing lien being resolved. The pricing page is where the cheapest route to that read lives — Solo runs at $99 per month for ten lookups, GC / Team at $299 per month for unlimited. Objections and what each verdict means in practice are answered on the FAQ page; the Pricing page lays the line items out by plan.
The verdict chip is the single number the GC can ask the field for before walking the bid. The four line items behind it — mechanic’s lien, civil judgment, bankruptcy, address-level permit + record profile — are the math behind the chip and the half of the report where the bid-day response lives.
Whether the verdict is Go, Caution, or No-Go, the contract is shaped by what the line items actually say. A pre-bid read is not a refusal to bid — it is an adjustment to terms the bid was already walking into.