Coverage Methodology
How we decide what counts as a tracked matter, how entries are researched and categorized, and how often coverage is refreshed. Written for readers who need to know how this data is built, not just what it says — risk and compliance teams, rating analysts, and anyone citing CREdocket in their own work.
Scope: what gets tracked
A matter is added to the tracker when it is a filed complaint, dispositive ruling, settlement, or regulatory/agency action in which a commercial real estate owner, manager, lender, developer, or REIT is a named party or direct target — and it falls within one of the nine practice areas this site covers: landlord-tenant, zoning & land use, REIT & securities, construction defect, lending & foreclosure, environmental, eminent domain, commercial lease disputes, and premises liability. Coverage spans all fifty states and federal court, and is not limited to any one property type, though individual entries are tagged by property type where it's identifiable.
What's excluded
We exclude residential-only disputes with no commercial-property nexus, routine non-precedential procedural filings (a scheduling order, a stipulated extension), and matters where a CRE company is merely mentioned for comparison or background rather than an actual named party. That last distinction — actual party versus incidental mention — is the same test the Companies & Parties directory's own matching logic applies, and it's the most common reason a search result you might expect to see doesn't appear.
Categorization
Every matter is tagged with a practice area (one of the nine listed above), a status (filed, pending, ruling issued, settled, or on appeal), a jurisdiction, and — where the underlying reporting supports it — a property type and named parties. Categorization is a judgment call in genuinely mixed cases (a construction-defect suit that's also a lending dispute, for instance); we tag by the dispute's primary legal theory, not every claim pleaded in the complaint.
Research & sourcing
Matters are identified through an ongoing research process that searches public court opinions, agency and regulator releases, and reported legal and trade-press news for developments meeting the scope above. Every entry is written as an original summary and links back to its real underlying source — we don't publish an entry we can't source, and we don't fabricate case facts, dollar figures, or procedural posture to fill in gaps the source reporting doesn't cover. Each entry also carries a "why it matters" note aimed at operators and investors, connecting the ruling or filing back to underwriting, leasing, or portfolio-strategy implications — that commentary is our own analysis, distinct from the sourced facts above it.
Update cadence
New matters are researched and added in two passes per day, run independently of each other. Rather than capping each pass at a single new entry, every run does a comprehensive sweep of that pass's window and adds every matter meeting the scope criteria above — some days that's a couple of entries, other days considerably more, depending on what was actually filed, decided, or reported. Each run also identifies the single most significant development from that sweep and highlights it as that day's featured story on the homepage, regardless of how far back the underlying event occurred — a major ruling on an older case can be that day's most important story even if the docket activity itself happened weeks earlier.
Accuracy & corrections
We aim for accuracy, but litigation moves quickly and entries reflect information available at the time of writing. If you spot an error — a wrong outcome, an outdated status, a misattributed party — contact us and we'll review and correct it. We are not obligated to update an entry after publication except as part of our ordinary editorial process, and an entry's absence from the tracker is not a representation that no such matter exists.
What this is not
CREdocket is a curated intelligence tracker, not a real-time docket-monitoring service or a comprehensive record of every court filing nationwide. We track matters that meet the scope above and that our research process actually surfaces; we do not guarantee completeness, and a matter directly affecting your portfolio can exist without appearing here. This page describes our process, not a warranty about any individual entry — see our Terms of Service for the governing disclaimers, and our About page for who the tracker is built for.