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. 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 market intelligence waiting to be used.

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.

A rich public-record ecosystem

Florida’s construction-licensing and property-records framework creates an extensive public footprint around every significant builder operating in the state. Permits, regulatory filings, complaint histories, and court dockets together constitute years of documented builder behavior, available in the public domain but scattered across dozens of agencies and jurisdictions.

Assembled and analyzed across a builder’s full portfolio of activity, that record reveals patterns that are invisible at the level of any individual matter. How a builder has conducted itself across hundreds of projects and thousands of transactions tells a story that no single case file can. That is the intelligence DAIS assembles, built from public and licensed data, delivered in aggregate anonymized form, and engineered specifically for the attorneys who represent injured homeowners.

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, whether 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. That is the problem that DAIS Analytics is built to solve.

Seeing through the corporate structure

Large homebuilders deliberately fragment their operations across subsidiary entities, a corporate structure that has historically made it difficult to see any builder’s full conduct in the public record. A builder that appears under dozens of legal names across the state’s databases is hard to track. That fragmentation has worked in builders’ favor for a long time, because the plaintiff attorneys on the other side were working case by case, name by name.

DAIS has built the advanced AI infrastructure to solve that problem at scale. The methodology is available to Founding Members. The result is a unified view of the builder’s full Florida footprint, not a snapshot of one subsidiary, but the complete institutional picture. For the first time, that picture is available to the attorneys representing the homeowners on the other side.

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.