Florida’s §558 data trail.

Florida’s construction-defect pre-suit process is one of the most data-rich legal frameworks in the country for plaintiff attorneys willing to look carefully at the public record. The statute itself — Chapter 558 of the Florida Statutes — creates a mandated pre-suit process that, when combined with the broader regulatory ecosystem around construction licensing and permitting, generates years of exploitable market intelligence.

What Chapter 558 requires

Florida Statutes Chapter 558 governs construction-defect claims and requires property owners to serve pre-suit written notice on contractors, subcontractors, suppliers, and design professionals before filing suit. The notice must describe the claimed defects in reasonable detail. Upon receiving notice, the contractor has the right to inspect the property. After inspection, the contractor may make a settlement offer; the claimant may accept, reject, or propose alternatives.

The notice periods under §558.004 vary by property type. For single-family homes and duplexes, the contractor has 45 days to respond after receiving the notice of claim. For multi-family residential and commercial construction, the period extends to 75 days. For associations serving multiple structures, a separate timeline applies.

What matters for intelligence purposes is not the private content of those pre-suit exchanges — which remain between the parties — but what the §558 process triggers in the broader public record ecosystem around it. That is where the data trail begins.

The permit record layer

Every residential and commercial construction project in Florida requires building permits issued at the county or municipal level. Those permits are public records under Florida’s broad Sunshine Law, and most jurisdictions make them available through online portals or bulk data exports.

Permit records are a foundational layer for construction-defect intelligence because they document the geographic footprint of every permitted builder, the scope and timing of every project, the subcontractors of record, and — in many jurisdictions — inspection outcomes and noted deficiencies. When permits are examined in aggregate across a builder’s portfolio, patterns emerge that would be invisible at the level of any individual matter: the jurisdictions where defect rates concentrate, the project types where issues recur, the periods of activity that correlate with elevated complaints.

Permit data is, in this sense, the foundation of builder-portfolio intelligence. It defines the universe of a builder’s output and anchors everything that follows to specific projects, locations, and timeframes.

The DBPR licensing layer

The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation (DBPR) licenses and regulates contractors statewide. That licensing database is a public record, and it contains something invaluable for litigation intelligence: the complaint and discipline history of every licensed contractor in the state.

When homeowners or associations file complaints about construction defects with DBPR, those complaints enter the public record. Adverse outcomes — citations, fines, license restrictions, revocations — are documented in the database and retrievable by license holder. Examined across a builder’s roster of licensed entities, the DBPR record reveals a pattern of regulatory engagement that supplements what the permit records show.

For plaintiff attorneys, the DBPR data has a specific use: it documents the builder’s regulatory history in a form that is independently verifiable and pre-authenticated as a public record. Combined with permit data, it begins to constitute a documented pattern of conduct — the kind of pattern that moves a case from “isolated defect” to “systemic builder behavior.”

The court docket layer

When §558 pre-suit proceedings do not resolve a dispute, claims proceed to court or arbitration. Florida’s civil court records are public, and the statewide court portal (MyFlorida Courts) makes docket information accessible at scale. Those dockets document the full litigation history of every builder: the matters filed, the jurisdictions involved, the case dispositions, and — where they are filed as court records — the agreed judgments and settlement terms.

In aggregate, the docket record supplements what permits and DBPR licensing reveal: it shows how a builder responds when disputes reach the courthouse, which jurisdictions have seen elevated litigation activity, and how the litigation profile of a builder has evolved over time.

What the combined record reveals

The intelligence value of these layers is not in any single record. It is in the combination, assembled across the full portfolio of a builder’s activity and interpreted at the market level.

A plaintiff attorney preparing for a pre-suit demand under §558 benefits from knowing:

• How the builder has responded to similar notices historically, as reflected in the pattern of disputes that proceeded to litigation versus those that resolved pre-suit.
• The geographic distribution of the builder’s complaint and regulatory history, and whether the current matter sits in a concentration of prior issues.
• The builder’s litigation posture — aggressive, responsive, or somewhere between — as revealed by aggregate docket patterns.
• How this builder’s profile compares to the broader market of defendants operating in the same jurisdiction and project type.

None of that intelligence requires access to privileged information. It is all derivable from public records. What it requires is the engineering to assemble, link, and analyze those records at a scale that surfaces the patterns — which is precisely the problem that DAIS Analytics is built to solve.

The entity resolution problem

One complexity is that large builders — particularly national and regional homebuilders operating in Florida — typically organize their operations through networks of subsidiary entities, often structured by county or project type. The same economic actor may appear in public records under dozens of different legal names. Analyzing builder behavior requires first solving this entity fragmentation problem: linking all the subsidiary records back to the parent portfolio.

This is an ML problem, not a research problem. The solution lies in probabilistic record linkage — using name similarity, registered agent overlap, address clustering, and DBPR license relationships to identify which legal entities constitute the same economic actor. That is the technical foundation of DAIS’s entity resolution layer, and it is what transforms fragmented public records into coherent builder-portfolio intelligence.

Once the portfolio is constructed, the data becomes genuinely useful: not a set of records about forty different companies, but a unified view of one builder’s activity across its full Florida footprint.

The intelligence in the pre-suit context

For plaintiff CD attorneys, the most immediate application is pre-suit: understanding the defendant before the §558 notice goes out, so the demand is calibrated to the builder’s actual posture rather than a generic expectation. A builder with an extensive history of pre-suit resolution may warrant a different demand strategy than one with a pattern of stonewalling and litigating. The public record can surface that difference — if it is assembled and read correctly.

That is the premise of Builder Intelligence: aggregate, anonymized intelligence on builder behavior and market posture, derived from the public-record ecosystem that §558 and Florida’s construction licensing framework generate.