Real Facts
The risk mitigation platform that helps contractors get paid.
Contractors do the work and then chase the money. Real Facts lets them check who they’re about to work for, and gives them the tools to secure payment when a job goes wrong.
Development 180 built the platform, the mobile apps, and the data pipeline underneath.
Tito FuentesFounder & CEOReal Facts
What they needed
Tito Fuentes started Real Facts after a property owner didn’t pay him. The idea was straightforward: give contractors a way to check a property and its owner before accepting a job, and a way to file a mechanics lien when they get burned.
The execution is not straightforward. Property title and lien records live in commercial data systems with their own schemas and their own quirks. Lien law is different in every state, with different deadlines and different filing documents. And the person who needs all of this is standing on a job site with a phone, not sitting at a desk.
What we built
- Property search that starts from a place, not a database key.A contractor types an address the way they’d say it out loud. The platform resolves it against location data, extracts the address components, and matches it to a property record. Recent searches persist, because contractors look at the same properties repeatedly.
- Title and lien reports on demand.Reports are pulled from a national property-data provider and delivered as a structured report rather than a raw dump. Because those pulls are slow and metered, the work happens as a background job after purchase, the status is visible to the user throughout, and results are cached so a repeat lookup doesn’t cost another call. Where one address resolves to several property records, the user chooses which one they meant instead of the system guessing.
- Legal descriptions, built rather than copied.A lien filing needs the property’s legal description, which is not the street address. The platform derives it from the underlying records — lot and block within a subdivision where that structure exists — so the contractor doesn’t have to know what a legal description is to file correctly.
- Mechanics lien filing, end to end.State-specific deadlines, the right document for the jurisdiction, and generated filings populated from data the contractor has already entered. The document templates were parsed field by field so the mapping is driven by the template rather than hardcoded per state.
- Owner reviews.The part of the product that gives it its name. Contractors review property owners, and the next contractor sees that history before accepting the job. Reviews attach to the property record, which is what makes them findable by the person who needs them.
- Two mobile apps and a web platform, one account.iOS is live, Android is in build. Sign-in works across Google and Microsoft accounts, and single sign-on carries a member into Squeeze Reviews without a second login.
- An admin console for the operators.Lien records, contacts, title checks, and payments in one place, with read state, filtering, and pagination that hold up as the tables grow.
- Payments and a partner economy.Subscriptions and per-report purchases run through Stripe. A separate commission layer pays sales reps and affiliates on the accounts they bring in, including ongoing residuals, which required connected accounts rather than a single merchant.
- A legal content division.More than fifteen sub-sites covering lien procedure by jurisdiction, built for search visibility and for authority with an audience that arrives with a legal question rather than a product question.
The part that’s harder than it looks
Property data is not clean. One address can map to several parcels. Records arrive with the fields you need missing and fields you didn’t ask for present. The description a lien filing requires often has to be assembled from parts rather than read off a single field.
Every one of those is a place where a system can quietly produce a document that looks right and is wrong. In lien filing that isn’t a cosmetic failure — a defective filing can miss a statutory deadline, and the deadline doesn’t come back.
So the platform is built to surface ambiguity to the user rather than resolve it silently. Multiple matches get shown, not picked. Missing data blocks a filing rather than filling a plausible guess. Paid lookups happen in the background with visible state, because the alternative is a user who doesn’t know whether their money bought anything.
Where it is now
Live on web and iOS, with Android in development. Serving contractors across multiple states, with a commission programme running for the partners who bring them in.
In their words
Real Facts started because one contractor didn’t get paid.