Why Clarity
Why not just paste the report into ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude?
You can. Many people do, it is like asking your brother-in-law, and for a one-off question it is more than enough. Deciding on a $500,000 purchase from 80 pages is something else. Clarity is not a chat with a good prompt: it is a seven-pass analysis engine, built on more than a year of work with building inspectors, on their report-writing software. Here is what changes.
- 01
Clarity is an engine, not a conversation.
A general assistant receives your PDF, reads part of it, summarizes the rest and answers with great confidence. Clarity chains seven specialized passes, each with its own rules and its own model: identifying the report and its severity legend, reading a few pages at a time in parallel, mechanically verifying quotes, classifying, matching against a bank of findings, consolidating, then writing. Reproducing that in a chat means dozens of prompts, manual checking page by page, and expertise you would already need to have.
- 02
Clarity reads everything, and proves it without AI.
Every inspector finding is captured with its page and its exact sentence. A deterministic verifier, with no AI model at all, then checks every quote against the text of the stated page. What cannot be found in the report is dropped before it ever enters your analysis. A chat cannot make that promise: it has no mechanism to keep it.
- 03
Clarity speaks the inspectors’ language.
Every finding is classified on PRISM, Lumos’s building taxonomy (160 categories across 28 domains, from foundation to ventilation), then qualified under the BNQ 3009-500 grid: observed apparent defect, sign of deficiency to confirm, safety risk, limitation, information. A chat pours all of that into one list of “issues”. Clarity keeps those distinctions and carries the severity label set by your inspector, never contradicting it.
- 04
Clarity draws on a bank of real findings.
Every finding is matched, by semantic search, against a bank of more than 1,150 findings written by Québec building inspectors: what the defect is, the component’s role, consequences, the usual recommendation. It is the result of more than a year of work with the inspectors who use Lumos Inspector to write their reports. A general assistant has nothing of the kind; it guesses from what it read on the internet.
- 05
Clarity knows your market.
Estimates are produced with cost grids per region (Québec, Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, rest of Canada, United States), in your currency, with the vocabulary of the trades here: master electrician, master plumber, licensed roofer, the inspection condition of the purchase agreement, the syndicate’s records for a condo. When the report first calls for an expert, Clarity does not price it and tells you.
- 06
Clarity does not answer a question, it prepares you for a decision.
A chat gives you an answer, then you prompt twenty more times to get the rest. Clarity delivers the whole analysis at once: a justified rating out of ten, what is serious, what to have checked, what can wait, the repair estimate, the negotiation strategy, the first-year roadmap and the questions to ask your inspector.
- 07
Clarity is measured, then guaranteed.
We measure the engine on a corpus of real reports: recall of deficiencies, quotes found, stability from one run to the next. And if you show us, with evidence, that Clarity got it wrong or that the analysis is not relevant to your report, we refund 100%. No general assistant measures or guarantees what it tells you.
Depending on your situation
| Criterion | Clarity | ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude | Reading it yourself | Building consultant |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reads the whole report | Yes, page by page, verified | Partially, without saying so | Yes, over several hours | Yes |
| Every finding quoted with its page | Yes, verified without AI | No | n/a | No |
| Tells defect, sign and limitation apart | Yes, BNQ 3009-500 grid | No | Hard without training | Yes |
| Classification on a building taxonomy | PRISM, 160 categories | No | No | In their head |
| Bank of inspector findings | More than 1,150 findings | No | No | Their experience |
| Keeps the inspector’s label | Always | Sometimes | Yes | Yes |
| Repair estimate | Regional grids, orders of magnitude | Figures with no local anchor | No | Yes, from quotes |
| Negotiation and maintenance plan | Included | To ask for, then prompt again | No | Sometimes |
| Result measured and guaranteed | Yes, 100% refund | No | n/a | Per contract |
| Turnaround | 3 to 6 minutes | Immediate | An evening | 2 to 5 days |
| Cost | $29 | Monthly subscription | Your time | $300 to $600 |
When a chat is enough
To understand a term, rephrase a paragraph or check a hunch, ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude do the job well. Clarity is for something else: reading a whole report without letting anything through, running it through the inspectors’ grid, and handing you a plan to decide.
What Clarity does not do
- Clarity does not visit the house and does not replace your inspector.
- Clarity does not produce a quote: amounts remain orders of magnitude.
- Clarity gives no legal opinion on latent defects or warranty.
- Clarity does not guess what is not in the report. Limitations remain unknowns, but you will know how to close them.
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