An address is a decision — and most are made on a listing and a map. Aegilo assesses what neither shows: the immediate environment, access and egress, hidden hazards, and how a location behaves under stress. Desk analysis backed by discreet, lawful ground verification in Switzerland.
For private clients and family offices buying or relocating, and for organisations assessing a site or a portfolio. Swiss-based and founder-led — a redacted sample assessment goes out with the reply to your enquiry.
Neither tells you whether it's the right place for your family or your operations. We assess the location as it actually is — five layers, none of which appear in the particulars.
Every finding traces to a source. Where it matters, we don't rely on sources at all — we go and look.
On a CHF 2 million purchase, buyers routinely spend tens of thousands on transfer costs and a few thousand on a building expert — for the structure. Almost no one applies the same discipline to the location itself: the thing that can't be renovated.
The neighbourhood, access, exposure and dependencies behind one specific property — read while the decision is still open.
Districts or towns weighed against your family's actual requirements: schools, commutes, healthcare, privacy, security. The comparison, with the reasoning attached.
Discreet, lawful on-site observation in Switzerland: how the street behaves at night, whether the advertised characteristics are accurate, what the photographs were framed to exclude.
Continuous watch over the developments that affect your home — planned construction, zoning changes, emerging local risks — with a sourced note when something moves.
Aegilo Monitoring →Delivered discreetly — directly, or through your family office, bank or relocation adviser.
Organisations face the same question at scale: which locations expose us, and how much?
Location due diligence on a single address — the surroundings, the approach, the dependencies, and what changes at which hours.
Ranks exposure and identifies the sites that justify deeper investigation. Scoped individually.
Standing coverage of the sites you can least afford to be surprised at, with the triggers agreed in writing before it starts.
Aegilo Monitoring →Discreet, lawful on-site validation in Switzerland — the same observation standard as the private work, pointed at a site rather than a home.
The result is a defensible answer to “which of our locations should we worry about, and why” — with the documentation to show the work was done.
International risk vendors can score a country. They can't tell you how a Vaud street behaves on a Saturday night, whether the “quiet neighbourhood” borders a planned construction site, or whether the ten-minute drive to the hospital is ten minutes in winter.
Aegilo is Swiss-based. We combine open-source analysis with local knowledge and discreet, lawful observation on the ground — a level of verification no remote provider can offer here.
Outside Switzerland the desk work travels; the ground work usually doesn't. Which of the two you're buying is agreed in writing before anything starts.
The location, assessed and sourced — every finding traceable to the document or the observation it came from.
Findings from ground verification — what was seen on site, with photographs where they carry the point.
Exposure and hazards, rated — each with the confidence level attached, so you can weigh the weak ones differently.
Access, egress and dependency analysis — routes, times, and what the address leans on to work.
What we could not verify, declared — named as unverified rather than smoothed into a confident sentence.
A clear conclusion — proceed, proceed with conditions, or reconsider — and the reasoning behind it.
Fixed scope. Fixed price. Delivered on a committed date. A redacted sample goes out with the reply to your enquiry.
This is not a building survey and not legal due diligence — nothing here assesses the structure, the title or the deed, and we don't drive, escort, staff or coordinate anything on the ground. Use it to decide which addresses deserve a surveyor and a notary, not instead of them. Where you need operational capability, we say so and make introductions.
The core read on one address, including discreet, lawful ground verification in Switzerland.
Deeper investigation, extended observation, and comparison of alternatives where the decision is between addresses rather than about one.
Per location, continuous, with the triggers agreed before it starts.
Several addresses, or a standing programme across a portfolio — priced against the number of sites and how far the work goes.
Starting points, not a menu. Scope, turnaround and price are confirmed in writing before any work begins — and if a shorter piece of work answers your question, we say so.
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.
In Switzerland, yes — ground verification is included in the location assessment rather than quoted as an extra. It means discreet, lawful observation: walking the routes at the hours you would really use them, seeing how the street behaves after dark, and recording what the listing photographs were framed to exclude. It is observation of a place from where anyone may lawfully stand, not surveillance of individuals, and we do not enter a property without the owner's permission. Outside Switzerland, ground verification is fielded by engagement: where the assignment supports it, we brief an advance team on precisely the gaps our desk analysis needs closed, and their observations enter the deliverable as ground-confirmed findings. Where we cannot put someone on the ground, the deliverable says so rather than implying a visit happened.
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 is measured around the address, what is already scheduled to change, how it behaves under stress, 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.
A location assessment starts at CHF 2,500, including Swiss ground verification. A full assessment — deeper investigation, extended observation, comparison of alternatives — starts at CHF 4,500. Residence or site monitoring starts at CHF 350 per month per location. Portfolio screening and standing programmes are scoped individually. Those are starting points rather than a menu: the figure moves with how many addresses are in scope, how far the ground work goes, and how fast you need it. What is fixed is the sequence — we scope the question, then state the deliverable, the turnaround and the price in writing before any work begins. If a shorter piece of work answers what you came for, we say so rather than sell you the larger one.
The answers above describe how a location gets sourced and graded. 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. nineteen 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.
We come back within one working day with scope, price and a delivery date. Not ready to talk? The Location Dossier is free, and the method is on the record in this field note.
The property or site, the decision in front of you, and the timeline. We'll come back within one working day with scope, price and a delivery date.
→ Scope, price and a delivery date within one working day→ Discreet, lawful ground verification in Switzerland, included→ Strict discretion — clients and questions are never disclosed