The Files tab's Required here rail answers the question every California sale starts with: what does selling this exact property obligate us to do?
What you're looking at
Point-of-sale requirements are the disclosures and compliance items the property triggers, derived from the property itself:
- Jurisdiction — city and county ordinances (sewer lateral inspections, energy and water conservation rules, transfer taxes, seismic gas shut-off valves, …). Requirements differ street by street; LetterScript applies the rules that actually govern the exact address, including unincorporated pockets that look like they're in a neighboring city.
- Hazards — overlay zones for the property: fire hazard severity, FEMA flood zones, seismic zones, special districts like Mello-Roos.
A single chip in the card's header gives the package's headline state — Complete, In progress, Needs review, Not started, or, when the property itself isn't pinned down, Address not set or No POS data.
Link needs re-check is the one worth knowing: LetterScript keeps its property data current, and if a refresh leaves it unsure that this transaction still points at the same parcel, it withholds the requirements rather than show you another property's rules. The transaction's needs-you list says Property link needs re-checking, and the rail explains itself in place with a Correct the property address button — re-pick the address and the requirements come back. An empty requirements card in this state means "we won't guess", not "nothing is required".
The property's hazard profile, and what "Not determined" means
Below the requirements, the rail shows the overlay zones for the address as chips — jurisdiction, wildfire severity, FEMA flood zone, fault, liquefaction, landslide, dam inundation, sewer and fire district, and the FIRM panel the flood answer came from.
A chip you don't see is not a clean result. Some of these zones have never been determined for some California addresses, and that is a different fact from "determined, and the property is outside". Where that is the case you get an explicit dashed Not determined chip naming the topics involved, and a footnote explaining which one:
- FEMA flood — Zone D. Zone D is FEMA's own designation for areas where flood hazards exist but have not been analyzed. It is not a low-risk finding, and a lender may still require flood insurance.
- FEMA flood — unmapped. No effective Flood Insurance Rate Map covers the location at all.
- Liquefaction and landslide. The California Geological Survey only maps designated Seismic Hazard Zone quadrangles, which do not cover the whole state.
- Dam-failure inundation. Built from California DSOD, which by law covers only state-jurisdictional dams — federally operated dams such as Folsom, Shasta and Friant are excluded, so a clear result is not a guarantee.
Verify before close
Some obligations depend on facts no public dataset can settle. Those appear as Verify before close notes rather than as requirements, because treating them as either a yes or a no would be wrong:
- Special taxes (Mello-Roos / CFD). Where our data shows a likely district, the note names it. Where it doesn't, the note says which kind of "no" that is — we hold the county's assessment roll and found nothing on this parcel, our coverage in that county is incomplete, we don't carry the county yet, or this specific parcel is missing from the roll we hold, which is an unchecked parcel and not a clean result.
- Sewer lateral / on-site wastewater. An always-on backstop, so a jurisdiction we don't carry a rule for reads as "verify", never as "no sewer obligation".
- Federal lead paint when the year built is unknown, plus the age-triggered state disclosures (pre-1960 earthquake booklet, pre-1994 water-conserving fixtures, pre-2010 home hardening in a fire zone).
These are the same notes the public address lookup on letterscript.com shows, so what a client sees there and what you see here cannot disagree.
A By status / By phase toggle controls how items are grouped. By status (the default) sorts them into what's collected, what's outstanding, and what's not applicable; By phase arranges them from pre-listing through close, so the tab reads as a to-do list in the order the transaction will actually need things. Either way, the legal basis is cited on each item.
How it connects to the rest of the transaction
The same property data drives the POS disclosure checklist in that rail — requirements that take the form of a document show up there, matched against what you've uploaded in the table beside it. Select a requirement to filter the table to it, or drag a document row onto a requirement to say that's the one that satisfies it.
Informational only — not legal advice. Rules change and the list may be incomplete; confirm each requirement with the city or county before close.