How we verify

Every answer says where it came from

Each line in a playbook carries a source, and the source is labelled as one of three kinds — because they are not equally strong and you deserve to know which one you're leaning on:

• Official page — the provider's own published page, with the URL.
• Community — a forum or community post. Useful, often the only place something is written down, and flagged as unverified at the top of the list so you don't mistake it for policy.
• First-hand — someone actually did it and told us what happened, with the date.

Alongside the kind we show who and the date we checked it.

Answers expire, and say so

Every item has a shelf life. Past it, the card doesn't hide the answer and doesn't quietly keep showing it as current — it says "this has gone N days without a re-check (over the M-day limit); confirm before you rely on it." Old information beats no information, but only if you're told it's old.

Where we inferred, we say we inferred

Sometimes a provider's page doesn't state the thing you need in so many words, and the answer is a reading of what it does say. When that happens the answer tells you it's a reading, and quotes the part it's reading from, so you can judge it yourself instead of taking our word for it.

"We don't know" is an answer we're willing to give

Most rental listings simply don't state their requirements. We measured it: across the listing set the product currently shows, only about one in ten has any requirement we could compare against your profile — and the word "SSN" appears essentially nowhere in listing text at all.

So for the rest, the card says the landlord didn't write it. It would be trivial to fill that silence with a guess and show a confident-looking answer on every listing. We don't, because a guess dressed as a fact is how you end up paying a $50 application fee for an apartment you were never eligible for. Where we can't know, the useful thing we can give you is the question to ask before you pay.

If we're wrong, there's a button

Any supply line can be corrected: this changed / this is wrong / here's my first-hand experience. Corrections are private by default — only you see yours — and a person reads them before anything changes. We don't auto-apply them to the knowledge base: a bad edit shouldn't be able to break the answers everyone else sees.

Retired entries can be corrected too. "That card you dropped is actually available again" is exactly the kind of thing we want to hear, and refusing it would mean you can only correct the things we still believe.

What we will not do to make an answer look better

• No paid ranking. Providers can't buy a position, and none of them pay us anything.
• No invented numbers. If we can't trace a figure to a source, it doesn't go on the page.
• No promises about outcomes. We'll tell you what a landlord or a bank has published; whether they say yes is theirs to decide.
• No structuring of who a landlord "prefers". Some listings state a preference about the kind of person they want — women only, students, office workers. We deliberately do not turn those into a field: they stay in the listing text where you can read them yourself, and they never filter or score anything. Extracting them would make us the thing that spreads a possibly unlawful screen at scale, tidily and automatically. Reading the post is your call; building the machine isn't.