Sources & method
This page explains, in plain English, how ExitSignal reaches its conclusions from your entries, and where the framework's standards come from — so you don't have to take either on trust.
How your report is produced
- You describe your home. Everything starts with your completed workbook — your own answers about how your business runs. The report contains nothing about your business that you haven't provided.
- Your answers are scored against a fixed framework. The workbook's 96 checkpoints are scored across 8 areas using buyer-weighted priorities — built from the public UK care-sector due-diligence standards that buyers' advisers work from (sources below). The scoring is rule-based and identical for every report.
- AI writes the findings — checked, then checked again. An AI drafting system turns your scores and notes into the report's narrative, but it must tie every fact it states about your business to your workbook (the "ref" numbers throughout the report) and hedge anything it cannot tie. Every draft is then reviewed by a second, independent AI reviewer before release. Where a question needs professional judgement — legal, clinical, financial — the report names the professional and routes you to them rather than guessing.
- You can verify and question it. Because every claim about your business carries a report reference, you can check it against your own workbook. The optional Q&A service answers follow-up questions about your own report in the same grounded way — and the full sample at /sample shows the standard before you buy.
Which AI we use
Reports are generated by commercial AI models, accessed through a managed API gateway under commercial terms. We name the specific provider and model version to any customer or partner on request, and we keep a record of which model generated each report (every report we produce carries an internal generation record). No report is released without passing the independent review described above.
Where the framework comes from
The checklist your report scores against is our synthesis of the public sources below — built by studying the standards and due-diligence practices that buyers' advisers actually use. It is not endorsed by any of them, it is not a substitute for professional advice, and where a source and your professional disagree, your professional is the authority.
- CQC — the five key questions and the 34 quality statements under the Single Assessment Framework; the CQC guide Buy, sell or transfer a registered business; and the Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014 (including Regulations 12, 13, 17, 18 and 19).
- Public UK care-sector due-diligence guides — law-firm and sector guides on buying and selling a care home (including those of Bevan Brittan, Blacks Solicitors, Stephensons and Hempsons), plus sector publications such as Buyacarehome.com.
- Government & official guidance — GOV.UK and HMRC guidance relevant to employment, immigration and tax; ICO guidance under the UK GDPR / Data Protection Act 2018.
- Sector bodies — Skills for Care (workforce), SCIE (DoLS and safeguarding practice), and Home Office sponsor-licence guidance.
- Market benchmarks — published care-sector market reviews and benchmark data (including Knight Frank care-home reports and Christie & Co's Care Market Review), used for market context only — never for valuation.
The full calibration record — every source consulted and the change history of the framework — is maintained in our framework documentation and available on request.