# Florida CRE Public Records Friction Benchmark (2026): methodology

## Study design

This is a bounded source-system study of the official public portals documented for a repeatable commercial-property research checklist in five Florida counties. It is the first release in a national series.

The source frame is `public/data/public-record-sources.json`, version `2026-06-27`. The generator reads only that customer-display public registry. It does not read the internal entity-registry QA manifest.

## Unit of analysis

One row represents one documented official source portal. Statewide sources are counted once. County sources are counted once per county. URLs are required to be unique within this release.

## Reported measures

- 18 official source portals in the bounded source frame
- 4 statewide portals
- 14 county-level portals
- 5 sampled counties
- 8 source categories
- 6 to 8 portals in a documented county research path when the statewide checklist is combined with that county's listed sources

## Boundaries

This is not a measure of Acren product coverage. It does not estimate research time, portal usability, record completeness, source quality, or legal sufficiency. A researcher may need fewer or additional sources depending on the property, question, jurisdiction, and record history. Counts describe the published source frame, not every public record system in Florida.

## Reproduction

Run `npm run growth:research-benchmark`. The command rebuilds the website dataset, source ledger CSV, and this methodology note from the checked-in public source registry. Review the generated diff before publication.