Methodology

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We exclude residential-only disputes with no commercial-property nexus, routine non-precedential procedural filings (a scheduling order, a stipulated extension), and matters where a CRE company is merely mentioned for comparison or background rather than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.

Sourcing standards

These are the rules every entry is held to. They are specific so that you can check them.

  • A fact appears only if a source states it. Every matter links its source. Where the primary record exists (the opinion, the docket, the filed complaint, the agency release), we prefer it and link it; where a matter rests on news reporting, the report is linked, and the primary document too when we can find it. Gaps stay gaps: we do not infer a party, a judge, a date or an outcome the sources do not give.
  • Dollar amounts are the source's own figure. A structured amount is a single figure a source states, labeled with what it is (loan in default, damages sought, judgment, award, settlement, claim or purchase price). We never compute, estimate or round one up.
  • Docket links point to the specific case. We add one only after confirming it matches the matter: a CourtListener docket or opinion for federal cases, the index number for New York's NYSCEF (which has no per-case link), or Texas's appellate docket system. A general search page is never presented as a docket.
  • Judges are named only when a source names them for that matter, never from assignment patterns or court custom.
  • Parties are businesses and government bodies. The structured Parties field lists them by the legal name the source gives, with the source's own role label. Individuals are not recorded there.
  • Two dates, kept apart. A matter's date is the date of the filing, ruling or event; the date it was added to the tracker is recorded separately and never substitutes for it.
  • Court activity is shown as the court entered it. The "Latest court activity" section on a matter reproduces the docket's own short entry text from CourtListener, with dates and entry numbers. Some entries reach CourtListener late or not at all, and the section says so.
  • Market Signals figures are matched to the publisher's page. Since September 29, 2026, every figure in a new Market Signal must appear word for word in a sentence on the publisher's page before the item is published; an item whose figures cannot be matched is not published.
  • Analysis is labeled as analysis. "Why it matters" and "significance" notes are our commentary on the sourced facts, not additional facts.
  • Commercial real estate only. Residential tenancy, homeowner, consumer and debt-collection matters are excluded, and borderline matters are left out rather than stretched to fit.

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 picks the most significant development from the last seven days as the homepage's featured story. An older event can still be added when it is significant and newly reported, but it is never featured. For matters with a federal docket on CourtListener, new docket entries are checked every day and shown on the matter itself, and when a ruling, dismissal or settlement appears, the matter is updated once a source reports what the court decided. Market Signals, the market-data companion to the tracker, get new items at least weekly.

Portfolio monitoring: court and SEC filings

Separately from the curated tracker, the names you save in your portfolio are checked twice a day against new filings pulled from public records. This data is comprehensive within its stated scope, which the curated tracker is not, so the two should not be confused.

What is covered. (1) Every new Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition filed in a U.S. bankruptcy court, from federal court records as collected by CourtListener and the RECAP Archive, a project of the nonprofit Free Law Project. Every business petition is checked against your portfolio, because any business can be your tenant or borrower; the public Chapter 11 Watch page lists only debtors whose name indicates a real estate or construction business. (2) SEC Form 8-K filings under Item 1.03 (Bankruptcy or Receivership), Item 2.04 (triggering events that accelerate a financial obligation) and Item 3.01 (listing-standard notices), from SEC EDGAR. An item names the type of event, not its cause: 2.04 also covers a company redeeming its own notes early and 3.01 a voluntary transfer between exchanges, so these are used only for private portfolio alerts and are not listed publicly. (3) New federal civil lawsuits in which one of your saved names appears as a party. Because federal courts do not reliably label a new case's subject at filing, this search runs from your saved names, not from a real-estate category, and the number of names searched per day is limited; larger portfolios are covered on a rolling basis, oldest-checked first.

State trial courts: two counties so far, commercial matters only. Most state and county court portals sit behind a login or a CAPTCHA, charge per search, or prohibit automated or commercial use, and we do not work around any of those. Two official sources publish new filings with party names under none of those restrictions, and both are checked daily: the Hillsborough County (Tampa), Florida Clerk's daily civil filing files, and the Harris County (Houston), Texas justice courts' public eviction extracts. These files consist overwhelmingly of residential evictions, consumer debt suits and injury claims, none of which CREdocket covers. We keep a case only if its type is on a short commercial list — non-residential landlord-tenant, commercial mortgage foreclosure, commercial premises liability, eminent domain, and construction defect between two businesses — and only if a defendant is clearly a business. Anything that is not a commercial real estate matter on its face is excluded: residential matters, debt collection, general contract and business disputes, homestead and other residential foreclosures, negligence, insurance and small-claims cases, as is any case type not on that list. In Harris County, where evictions are not labeled commercial or residential, we keep only those against a business tenant and drop any brought by a housing operator. Only business names are recorded, never the case caption, so individuals are not tracked. State filings are used only for private portfolio alerts and are never listed publicly.

How names are matched. A match is "high confidence" when the party's name equals your saved name once corporate suffixes such as LLC or Inc. are ignored. It is "possible" when your saved name is only the leading part of the party's name, or when a one-word name matches but the suffixes differ. A single shared word is never treated as a match. Every alert states which kind it is. Save full legal names: "Acme Holdings LLC" will be matched far more reliably than "Acme".

What is not covered. State-court filings outside those two counties, which is nearly all of them, including most commercial evictions, rent suits, foreclosures and receiverships; within those two counties, any case outside the commercial types listed above, any case whose defendants are all individuals (many commercial tenants are sued in an individual's name), and any business whose name our business test does not recognize; Chapter 7 petitions; assignments for the benefit of creditors; and any entity that files under a name different from the one you saved. Court records can also reach the source hours or days after filing. A quiet portfolio is therefore not evidence that nothing was filed, and this monitoring supplements rather than replaces your own diligence.

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. Corrections are made in place on the entry and recorded, with what changed and the source checked, in our public corrections log. 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

The tracker itself is a curated intelligence product, not a real-time docket-monitoring service or a comprehensive record of every court filing nationwide; the portfolio monitoring described above is comprehensive only within the limits stated there. 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.