Most people buy the largest asset of their life on the thinnest intelligence — a listing, two viewings, and a feeling. We read a location the way we read any target, across the whole arc of a move: before you commit, while you're looking, and once your family has settled into a routine that someone else could learn.
Built for families relocating into Switzerland, cross-border buyers, and anyone whose purchase has to survive scrutiny later.
The layers a listing will never carry, read before you fall in love with a house: what the address costs you in tax, the commune's measured crime baseline and its direction, natural-hazard and major-accident perimeters parcel by parcel, the school picture, and the zoning revision already sitting in the public record.
Aegilo Report + Assessment →Viewing days are when a buyer is most visible and least prepared — a foreign family, a schedule, an agent's diary, several addresses in one afternoon. We plan the touring the way we'd plan any movement: sequenced, timed, with contingencies, and with the discretion a significant purchase deserves.
Aegilo Assessment →This is the layer nobody sells you, and the one that matters longest. A household settles into a rhythm within weeks — the same door at the same hour, the same walk to the same corner, the same car park on the same afternoons. We assess that rhythm the way an adversary would: where it's predictable, where it's observable, and where a single incident would trap all of it at once.
Aegilo Assessment → Monitoring →This is the case for Monitoring → — the baseline kept current, and a sourced note when something moves that changes the picture around your people.
Assessing a routine is intelligence. Running one is an operation — a different business, and not ours.
These are the things worth demanding in writing from any location analyst before you commit, including us. Where our answer is a limitation, it's written as one.
Public primary sources, read per engagement and named per claim in the deliverable. In Switzerland that means: federal police crime statistics at commune level rather than the cantonal aggregate, which averages a city and its villages into one number; cantonal natural-hazard maps grading flood, landslide, rockfall and debris flow; the cadastre of public-law restrictions (RDPPF), including consultation perimeters set under the ordinance on major-accident protection (OPAM); the commune's own zoning plan, revision schedule and public-inquiry notices; official school performance data with capacity and catchment rules; and the building's insurance claims history where it is available. Alongside that we run a maintained corpus of events and claims built from graded sources — ACLED, curated regional channels, news and official feeds — which supplies the surrounding picture rather than the parcel detail. Coverage is deepened for the geography you are actually asking about, as part of scoping: we would rather stand up the sources for one commune properly than claim a pre-built map of everywhere. Outside Switzerland the registers differ, and the deliverable says which we could reach and which we could not.
Both, and the deliverable says which is which for every claim. Hazard grading and RDPPF restrictions are read parcel by parcel. Crime baselines, fiscal load and school catchment are commune or sector level, because that is the granularity at which the data exists — reporting them as if they were parcel-specific would be inventing precision. Where a sector-level reading drives the conclusion, it is marked as a sector-level reading.
Not by default. The core assessment is documentary and cartographic, and a great deal is knowable from public sources before anyone visits a house. A visit — walking the routes at the hours you would actually run them, the doorstep conversation with neighbours, ground imagery and timed runs — is quoted separately, because it carries real cost and is not always warranted. Which of the two you are buying is agreed in writing before any work begins.
No, and it is not intended to be. Nothing in this work assesses the structure: no engineer, no technical inspection, no verification of title, servitudes or the deed. It assesses the location — what the address costs, what is measured around it, what is already scheduled to change, and what a routine there would expose. Use it to decide which addresses deserve a surveyor and a notary, not instead of them.
We separate who said something from where it appeared, and count independent named originators rather than articles — four outlets reprinting one wire story is one source, and it is counted as one. Support is then labelled: corroborated where independent originators agree, amplified where one originator has simply been repeated, single-source where there is only one, and contradicted where they disagree. A single-source finding ships labelled as single-source rather than smoothed into a confident sentence. One limitation worth stating plainly: where the decisive documents are cartographic, a desk read of a published map is an inference until the commune confirms it in writing. Any buyer can put that one-letter question to the urbanism service, and we say when it is the question that matters.
Because a citation here points at a document we hold, not at a model's recollection of one — the source is fetched and kept, so a claim can be checked against the thing it came from. Every model call is logged with the model used, the prompt, the response and its hash; a build test fails if any code path skips that log. And the system is not permitted to promote a publication into an originator or manufacture agreement between sources — those guards can only ever weaken an attribution, never invent one. What you should not accept from us, or anyone, is a probability: we don't publish invented odds, and a judgement arrives as words with the reasoning attached.
There is no fixed price list, because the work is scoped to the question — one address against a decision frame is not the same job as three communes compared, and a site visit changes both again. What is fixed is the sequence: we scope the question, then state the deliverable, the turnaround and the price in writing before any work starts. If a single Report answers what you came for, we say so rather than sell you an Assessment.
The answers above describe how we source and grade. The Brief has been doing it in public every week — the same attribution, and the same habit of recording what changed rather than restating what was already believed. seventeen editions are published and dated, each naming its sources and recording what changed since the last one. Read one before you write to us.
A Brief edition shows the method, not the deliverable — it is a weekly watch, not a client report. For a sample of the report itself, ask: we send one with the reply.
Most firms treat this as a legal appendix. For an intelligence firm it's part of the product: the question you asked us is itself confidential, before any answer exists.
Not ready to talk? Run it yourself first — The Location Dossier is free, and the method is on the record in this field note.
Whichever phase you're in — still looking, under offer, or already settled — tell us where you are and we'll scope what's worth knowing now rather than later.
→ A read on the layers a listing will never show you→ An honest turnaround and price before any work begins→ Strict discretion — clients and questions are never disclosed