You should know exactly who you are dealing with at every stage, and which company is responsible for what. So here it is, plainly.
Two companies, and why
MF Project Solutions LLC is a Massachusetts research company. It compiles what public records say about a property — the state law, the town bylaw, the assessor data, the GIS layers — and writes it in language you can use. It is not an engineering firm and it does not offer engineering services.
Lebra Engineering & Design, LLC is a Massachusetts engineering firm. It provides the professional review behind everything published here, and it performs any engineering, design or permitting work that follows.
Marcelo Martins Ferreira owns MF Project Solutions and is a partner in Lebra alongside George Atallah, P.E. You should know that. It explains why the handoff between the two is quick, and why the research is worth reading. It also means you are never guessing which company you are dealing with: research is MFPS, anything with an engineer’s name on it is Lebra, and the price list says which on every line.
Why not just run it as one company?
Because Massachusetts regulates who may offer engineering services, and a research report is not engineering. Keeping the two separate is what lets the research be fast and inexpensive, and the engineering be properly licensed and insured.
A $150 report carrying an engineer’s seal would have to be priced like engineering, because it would carry the same professional liability. It would cost several times as much and take weeks instead of days. Most people asking “can I put a garage back here?” do not need that yet — they need to know whether the idea is alive before they spend real money on it.
So the research stands on its own, at a price that matches what it is. When the answer is yes and you want to proceed, the engineering is right there, and what you already paid comes off the price.
Where the line falls
This is not a marketing distinction. It is where informational research becomes the practice of engineering under 250 CMR, and it decides who signs.
| Work | Company | |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Compiling the public record for an address | MFPS |
| 02 | Explaining what a bylaw says, with the citation | MFPS |
| 03 | The permitting sequence and realistic timelines | MFPS |
| 04 | Telling you what you can build on your parcel | Lebra |
| 05 | Calculating setbacks, floor area ratio, buildable envelope | Lebra |
| 06 | Inspections, drawings, structural design | Lebra |
| 07 | Anything bearing a Professional Engineer’s seal | Lebra |
Three commitments
We do not sell your information. Not to contractors, not to lenders, not to anyone. Your address and contact details are stored encrypted and used to answer your question. Ask us to delete them and they are deleted.
We do not run ads or affiliate links. Nothing on this site is here because someone paid to put it there. If that ever changes — a contractor panel, for instance — it will be labelled as paid on the page it appears on.
We do not tell you what you want to hear. A fair number of our reports say the project is harder than the owner hoped. That is the useful answer, and it is much cheaper to receive now than after the drawings.