LD/SPEC.001 — The Ground Specification

Land Desk by Magaji Law — Governance, Verification Protocol & Folio Discipline

§1. Purpose

This Specification governs the Land Desk by Magaji Law: a chambers-operated inventory of landed property in Nasarawa State offered for sale only after surviving the Verification Protocol set out herein.

The Land Desk is not a listing marketplace. It does not aggregate third-party advertisements. It publishes a small, curated inventory in which every plot has been verified by the chambers before publication. The website is the storefront; the chambers is the product.

The governing doctrine, stated once and binding throughout:

A plot that has not survived the Protocol does not exist on this site.

§2. The Promise — Permitted and Prohibited Language

2.1 The Desk promises certainty on a schedule, never instantaneity of transfer. Land in Nigeria transfers under the Land Use Act 1978 and requires the consent of the Governor; no honest platform promises instant sale.

2.2 Permitted public commitments:

• (a) A verification verdict on the documents of any published plot within 48 hours of enquiry.
• (b) A transaction completion pathway of 14–21 days for inventory in VERIFIED status, measured from execution of the contract of sale to lodgment for consent and registration, subject to §2.3.

2.3 All timeline language must carry the qualification that steps within the exclusive control of NAGIS, the Ministry of Lands and Urban Development, or the Governor's office proceed on government timelines, which the chambers manages but does not control.

2.4 Prohibited language, without exception: "instant sale"; "guaranteed title"; "risk-free"; any percentage money-back guarantee; any statement that verification eliminates (rather than manages) risk; any comparison naming a competitor platform.

§3. The Folio System

3.1 Every plot is a canonical record called a folio, coded sequentially: LD-2026-001, LD-2026-002, … The year segment is the year of first publication. Folio codes are never reused, including for withdrawn plots.

3.2 Each folio carries five layers. No layer may be omitted from the canonical record; Layer II may be summarised on the public page but must exist in full in the record.

3.3 Prices are fixed and published. The Desk does not run auctions, "price on application," or negotiation theatre. A price change is a ledger event under §7.

§4. Status Lifecycle

4.1 A folio holds exactly one status at any time:

UNDER VERIFICATION → VERIFIED → RESERVED → SOLD, with WITHDRAWN reachable from any state.

4.2 Definitions:

• UNDER VERIFICATION — folio opened; one or more Gates outstanding. May appear publicly only as a coming-soon stub showing location, size, and status; no price, no commercial layer.
• VERIFIED — all seven Gates passed and signed off by the Verification Officer and countersigned by the Principal. Full folio public. Only VERIFIED folios may display the Mark (§11.3).
• RESERVED — offer accepted; contract in preparation or executed; transfer in progress. Public page remains visible, marked reserved, enquiries closed.
• SOLD — transfer completed to lodgment or registration. Folio remains published permanently as track record, with commercial terms redacted to a sale-completed notice.
• WITHDRAWN — removed from sale for any reason (vendor withdrawal, verification failure, supervening dispute). The folio page is replaced by a withdrawal notice stating the folio code and date only. Reasons are never published.

4.3 Every status transition is a ledger event under §7 and records the officer effecting it.

§5. The Verification Protocol — The Seven Gates

5.1 No folio reaches VERIFIED until every Gate below records a pass. Gates may run in parallel; sign-off is sequential and final (§5.9). Each Gate produces a dated entry in Layer II citing its documentary reference.

Gate V1 — Registry Search (NAGIS). Official search at the Nasarawa Geographic Information Service confirming the title's existence, the holder of record, the file status, and the absence of registered encumbrance. Record: search date, NAGIS reference, result. Where the plot lies outside Nasarawa State, the equivalent state registry applies and the folio must say so.

Gate V2 — Ground Inspection. Physical inspection by the chambers or its instructed surveyor. GPS capture of corner points; reconciliation of captured coordinates against the survey plan and the NAGIS orthophoto base. Photographic record. Confirmation of occupation status and any development on the land. Record: inspection date, inspector, coordinate reconciliation result.

Gate V3 — Vendor Identity & Capacity. Verification of the vendor's identity (government-issued ID; corporate searches at CAC where the vendor is a company) and of capacity to sell: that the vendor is the holder of record, or holds a complete and provable chain from the holder of record. Where the vendor acts under a power of attorney, the instrument is examined and its registration confirmed.

Gate V4 — Root of Title & Customary Consent. Tracing of the root of title. Where the root is customary or family land: identification of the family head and principal members; written consent of the persons whose consent Nigerian law requires for a valid alienation of family land; interview record. This Gate is where Nasarawa transactions die, and it is examined with corresponding severity. A folio whose customary consents cannot be completely evidenced fails, whatever the state of its paper.

Gate V5 — Encumbrance & Litigation. Search for pending litigation touching the land or the vendor in the relevant High Court registries; enquiry as to pending disputes known in the locality; check against any government acquisition, road setback, or planning restriction affecting the parcel (per the planning authority and the NAGIS record). Record: courts searched, dates, results.

Gate V6 — Consent Pathway. Mapping, before publication, of the exact route this parcel takes to a completed transfer: governor's consent requirements, applicable fees and charges as gazetted, registration steps, and a realistic timeline consistent with §2.3. This Gate exists so that Layer V is written from knowledge, not template.

Gate V7 — Chambers Sign-off. Review of Gates V1–V6 by the Verification Officer; written sign-off; countersignature by the Principal. The countersignature is the act that moves the folio to VERIFIED.

5.2 A Gate failure at any point moves the folio to WITHDRAWN or holds it at UNDER VERIFICATION, at the Principal's direction. Failure reasons live in the internal record only.

5.3 Verification evidence (search results, consents, photographs, survey files) is stored against the folio in the document store and referenced by ledger hash under §7.

5.4 Gates V1, V2 and V5 expire 90 days after their pass date. A folio still unsold at expiry re-runs the expired Gates before retaining VERIFIED status. Re-runs are ledger events.

5.9 Sign-off is final in this sense: once countersigned, the Layer II record is frozen; any later change is a new, appended entry, never an edit.

§6. Publication Discipline

The rules, numbered and absolute:

1. No folio publishes with an incomplete Layer II.
2. No price publishes before VERIFIED status.
3. No photograph publishes that was not taken at Gate V2 or later by the chambers or its instructed agent.
4. No superlative ("best," "hottest," "fastest-selling") appears anywhere on the platform.
5. No third party may list on the platform. Nothing a vendor sends the chambers is published, indexed, or displayed in any form; there is no listing form and no vendor-facing page on which a parcel may appear before it is a folio. Vendors approach the chambers through the private channel governed by LD/SPEC.005 — The Approach Specification; the chambers, and only the chambers, opens a folio.
6. No folio page is ever deleted. Withdrawal and sale are statuses, not erasures.
7. Every public claim on a folio page must trace to a Layer II entry or a Layer III artefact.

§7. The Trust Ledger

7.1 Every folio event — Gate pass, Gate failure, status transition, price change, Gate re-run, document addition — is appended to a hash-chained ledger inherited from the Nasarawa Trade Desk pattern: each entry carries seq, timestamp, event, actor, payload hash, and prevHash; the chain root is published.

7.2 The public folio page displays the ledger in human-readable form as the "Verification Trail," with hashes available on expansion. This is the platform's answer to blockchain theatre: tamper-evidence without token nonsense.

§8. Payments & Client Money

8.1 The platform holds no purchase funds. No wallet, no platform escrow, no "pay online" for land.

8.2 Purchase monies move through the chambers' client account under the Rules of Professional Conduct for Legal Practitioners, or through a licensed escrow/financial-institution partner where the parties so elect. The platform may display account instructions on a RESERVED folio to the contracted purchaser only.

8.3 The enquiry-to-offer flow may collect the verification/legal fee by standard invoice. Fee schedule lives in Layer IV language, never in pop-ups or checkout patterns.

§9. Revenue Model (Internal)

Professional fees for verification and conveyancing; a disclosed success fee on completion, agreed with the vendor at folio opening. The Desk sells legal certainty; it does not sell advertising, placement, or data.

§10. Roles

• Principal — final sign-off (Gate V7 countersignature); status authority; amendment authority under §14.
• Verification Officer — conducts or supervises Gates V1–V6; drafts Layer II.
• Desk Editor — prepares Layers III–V public copy under §6; no authority over Layer II content.

One person may hold multiple roles, but V7 always requires two signatures unless the Principal personally conducted every Gate, in which case the sign-off recites that fact.

§11. Identity Governance

11.1 The Desk inherits the Magaji Law identity in full: void-black, brass, Cinzel display. It must read as a desk inside a chambers, never as proptech. No gradients, no illustration systems, no startup vernacular.

11.2 Strict firewall: no naijaOS tokens, no Scholar in Chambers typography, no cross-linking into the personal or civic estates. The Desk links upward to magajilaw.com only.

11.3 The Mark. A single new element is registered: the VERIFIED mark — a seal-form device in survey-green (#1F7A4D) or brass, carrying the folio code and the V7 sign-off date. The Mark appears only on VERIFIED folios and in no promotional context detached from a folio. The Mark's geometry is fixed at first issue and may not be redrawn without amendment under §14.

11.4 Naming: the platform launches as Land Desk by Magaji Law. Any consumer brand above it (e.g. "Certain Ground") requires a separate identity specification and does not amend this document.

§12. Platform & Data

12.1 Stack: Next.js 14, TypeScript, Prisma/Neon; folio pages statically generated; admin console on the Mobility Desk pattern (scrypt-hashed auth, OWNER/STAFF roles, audit log); Vercel Blob for survey documents and photography; Resend for enquiry flow. Pipeline: Termux → GitHub → Vercel; all builds on Vercel.

12.2 Each folio is a canonical JSON record conforming to the schema in folio.template.json (companion document to this Specification). The JSON record is the source of truth; the page renders from it.

12.3 Personal data in Gates V3–V4 (IDs, consents, family interviews) is processed under the NDPR: collected for the verification purpose only, stored in the document store, never rendered on public pages beyond the vendor's name as holder of record where the public registry already discloses it.

12.4 Schema.org: folio pages emit Product is avoided; use Offer within RealEstateListing context plus LegalService on the chambers pages. FAQ schema on the pathway explainer only.

§13. Launch Discipline

13.1 The Desk launches with no fewer than three and no more than seven VERIFIED folios. A desk with one plot is a classified ad; a desk with thirty unverified plots is the thing this Specification exists to prevent.

13.2 Geographic scope at first issue: Nasarawa State, with the Karu–Mararaba–Keffi corridor and Lafia as priority zones. Expansion beyond Nasarawa requires amendment under §14.

§14. Amendment

This Specification is amended only by a successor version (LD/SPEC.001 v1.1, v2.0, …) issued under the Principal's hand, with a change log. No silent edits. The version in force is recited in the footer of every folio page.

§15. Change Log

v1.1 — July 2026. Amendment of §6.5 (Publication Discipline). The clause previously read: "No third party may list on the platform. There is no 'submit your property' form. Vendors approach the chambers; the chambers opens a folio."

The prohibition on listing is retained in full and strengthened. What is added is the channel the clause always presupposed and never provided: the private Approach, governed by the new LD/SPEC.005, by which a vendor may reach the chambers without any parcel appearing anywhere. The Desk had Gates and no door; a rule against listing had been doing the work of a rule against receiving, and the two are not the same rule.

No other clause is amended. The Gates of §5, the statuses of §4, the ledger of §7, and the launch discipline of §13 stand as first issued.

Land Desk by Magaji Law · LD/SPEC.001 v1.1 · The plot that has not survived the Protocol does not exist on this site.