Property Risk Intelligence
Know what’s on a property, how it got there,
and what it means for risk.
1024 Elm St, Sacramento, CA 95814Property
ElementAgeDetail
Structure62 yrsWood frame · built 1964
Systems14 yrsHVAC 6 · electrical 3 · plumbing 14
Envelope6 yrsDual-pane retrofit · 8 openings
Roof3 yrsComp shingle · tear-off
Sacramento, CA · finaled 08/04/23
INSTL 6.9KW ROOF MT PV SOLAR SYS W/ 225A MPU PNL UPGRD & COMP SHNGL REROOF T/O 22SQ
Sacramento, CA · finaled 05/12/20
HVAC C/O 3T 16 SEER SPLIT SYS + REPL 8 WINDOWS DUAL PANE RETROFIT
Sacramento, CA · finaled 09/30/12
REPIPE WHOLE HOUSE COPPER
Condition
82
Cat Resilience
61
Fire Protection
22
155M+
U.S. properties in scope
All
Building elements, dated at the address
25+ yrs
Of history behind them
Backed by
The Problem
The property file is written once and never updated
What a carrier knows about a building is mostly its year built. Everything since then happened without reaching the file: the reroof, the panel upgrade, the repipe, the addition, the converted garage. The four-point inspection exists because nobody has that record. The permit office has had it the whole time.
Insurers feel it first, but everyone who prices, lends, or builds runs on the same blind spot.
The product
A living record of the property
Every building element at the address, its age, and the permit that set it: what’s there today, and the dated history of how it got there. Residential lines up with the four-point inspection and wind mitigation. Commercial lines up with COPE.
Structure & envelope
Build year from the authorizing permit, plus additions, conversions, opening protection, and permitted mitigation.
Roof
Covering, tear-off scope, and years since the last replacement. Dated from the roof permit itself, so a solar install never dates a roof.
Electrical
Panel capacity and the date it was last upgraded, service changes, and rewiring.
Plumbing
Repipe history and supply material, the variable behind polybutylene and galvanized exclusions.
HVAC
System type, capacity, and fuel, with the date of the last change-out per unit.
Fire protection
Sprinklers, alarms, standpipes, and suppression, with type and install date.
Where it lands
Three moments in the policy lifecycle
The same property record, entering the workflow at the points where a decision actually gets made.
Application validation
The property record checks the application. Occupancy is listed as retail, the record shows a commercial kitchen buildout: flagged before bind rather than at the claim.
Renewal change detection
Everything that changed at the address since last bind: occupancy, structural modification, new systems, new hazards. A delta report rather than a data dump.
Portfolio triage
Go or no-go from the top of the funnel. Filter a prospective book by per-peril resilience before a single manual review.
How it reads
Built to survive carrier diligence
Every attribute states how it was established, because an underwriter who cannot audit a number will not price on it.
Roof age, accurately dated
Dated from the latest roof-covering permit. Solar racking and rooftop HVAC are excluded, so a PV install never dates a roof. Where a reroof did not require a permit, we return a bounded “at least N years” rather than a date.
Beyond building permits
Fire protection is read from fire-review and fire-planning records: sprinkler systems and head counts, alarms, standpipes, fire doors, and suppression, with commercial coverage first.
Scored only where the record supports it
Every score carries the permits behind it, so an underwriter or a model can audit the evidence. Where the record is silent, the field comes back null.
Why Builty
The hard part isn't the permits. It's everything after.
Permits are public. Anyone can download them. Turning them into something a model or an adjuster can trust takes four steps, each years of engineering. Together, they're the moat.
Collected direct, including data no one else has
Builty collects permits straight from the source and builds specialty datasets, like fire-protection systems, that generic permit data doesn't carry.
Resolved to the right property
Permits rarely arrive with a clean address. Builty matches every record to a canonical property, deduped and geocoded, so a property's full history lines up in one place.
One schema across every jurisdiction
Every jurisdiction writes permits its own way. Builty maps them all to one consistent structure, analysis-ready the moment it lands.
Structured variables, parsed out of the text
A line like "RES HVAC CHANGEOUT - LIKE FOR LIKE" tells a model nothing. Builty parses it into unit count, capacity, efficiency, and project type.
Risk Scores
Property scores. Three levels of intelligence.
The market standard is a single "roof age" number. Builty distills a property's entire permit history into scores that span condition and change, catastrophe resilience across perils, and reconstruction value.
Score family ↓
Scale →
Scale →
Property
Single address
Neighborhood
Area patterns
Portfolio
Whole book
Condition & Change
How a building and its systems have aged, been maintained, and modified
Where building stock is aging, modernizing, or being reworked
Distribution of building age, condition & change across your book
Catastrophe Resilience
Permitted mitigation against flood, wildfire, wind, hail & freeze
Area-wide adoption of hazard mitigation, by peril
Aggregate preparedness & geographic concentration of cat exposure
Value & Reconstruction
Reconstruction value implied by permitted improvements
Neighborhood reconstruction cost & improvement patterns
Total reconstruction exposure & concentration across a book
Exact score definitions shared under NDA.
Risk Level
Low
Moderate
Elevated
123 Main St, Anytown USA
Condition & Change84/100
Cat Resilience88/100
Reconstruction62/100
Well-kept home; consistent upkeep and storm mitigation on record.
500 Oak Ave, Anytown USA
Condition & Change66/100
Cat Resilience29/100
Reconstruction78/100
Sound condition, but little catastrophe mitigation on record: elevated exposure.
42 Cedar Ln, Anytown USA
Condition & Change58/100
Cat Resilience61/100
Reconstruction55/100
Moderate across the board; some hazard mitigation on record.
All scores derived from permit history alone: no third-party data, no satellite imagery, no self-reported surveys.
Other Industries
The same record, other markets
Delivery
Your workflow. Your format.
A REST API for address lookups, bulk files, a subscription feed scoped to your book, or a no-code portal. No forced migration. Here's what a single lookup returns:
GET /v1/property?address=1024+Elm+St,+Sacramento,+CA
{
"address": "1024 Elm St, Sacramento, CA 95814",
"apn": "006-0123-004",
"property_type": "residential",
"elements": {
"structure": { "age_years": 62, "built": 1964, "frame": "wood" },
"envelope": { "age_years": 6, "glazing": "dual-pane retrofit", "openings": 8 },
"roof": { "age_years": 3, "material": "comp shingle", "scope": "tear-off", "area_sq": 22 },
"electrical": { "age_years": 3, "service_amps": 225 },
"plumbing": { "age_years": 14, "supply": "copper repipe" },
"hvac": { "age_years": 6, "tons": 3, "seer": 16 }
},
"scores": { "condition": 82, "cat_resilience": 61, "fire_protection": 22 }
}Insights Lab
Permit data reveals what loss data can't
Original research from the Builty team: how permit-based intelligence translates into competitive advantage.
Fundamentals
Why Is Building Permit Data So Hard to Understand? (And How We Make It Readable)
Building permit records are written in trade shorthand no standard decodes: T/O, E/C/O, SFD. What the codes mean, why records from 20,000 jurisdictions don’t line up, and what it takes to make them readable.
Claims
Was That Roof Ever Replaced? How Permit Records Decide Prior-Damage Disputes
Loss histories, aerial imagery, and weather data can't answer the one question that decides a prior-damage claim. A permit record can.
Fundamentals
How Many Building Permit Jurisdictions Are There in the US? (Way More Than You Think)
The US has roughly 20,000 building permit jurisdictions, each writing its own rules and keeping its own records. Here's who they are, where they are, and how to find the one that governs any address.
FAQ
Building permit data, answered
The questions carriers, lenders, and analysts ask most, written to be quotable by search and answer engines.
What is building permit data?
Building permits are the public records a city or county issues whenever a property is built, altered, or repaired: roofs, additions, electrical and plumbing work, solar, pools, and more. Each one is a dated, government-issued record of a physical change. Aggregated nationally, permits are the most complete public record of what has actually been built across the U.S. property stock.
What does Builty do?
Builty collects raw municipal building-permit records from thousands of U.S. jurisdictions and structures them into clean, analysis-ready property intelligence: an insurance-native schema plus property risk scores. Instead of unreadable text like "REROOF W/ TEAR OFF 18 SQ," you get structured fields: project type, material, scope, status, and derived risk.
Where does Builty's permit data come from?
Directly from the source: public building-permit records collected from thousands of individual U.S. municipal jurisdictions. Builty is the source of record, not a reseller of another vendor's feed, which is what lets carriers rely on it inside their own systems.
How does permit data help claims teams?
It gives adjusters a pre-loss condition baseline: the permitted history of a property before the loss. That establishes roof age and prior repairs, supports scope and pre-existing-damage discussions, and helps resolve claims faster and more consistently.
How does permit data help underwriting?
At quote, bind, and renewal, permit history supplies verified property variables (roof age, fire protection, electrical and plumbing condition, occupancy change, and structural modification), so pricing reflects what has actually been built rather than what an applicant disclosed.
What property risk scores does Builty provide?
A library of 0-100 property risk scores, derived entirely from permit history and delivered at the property, neighborhood, and portfolio level. Rather than a single roof-age number, they span a property's condition and change, catastrophe resilience across perils, and reconstruction value: the dimensions that move property risk. Exact score definitions are shared under NDA.
How much of the U.S. does Builty cover?
Every property in the United States is in scope. Each address returns one of three statuses: observed, meaning permits are on record at that address; not observed, meaning Builty collects that jurisdiction and found nothing at the address; or not covered, meaning Builty does not collect that jurisdiction yet. Coverage is stated per property rather than as a national average, because a percentage says nothing about the address in front of you.
How is Builty data delivered?
However fits your stack: a REST API for address-level lookups, bulk files for a geography or property set, an ongoing subscription feed scoped to your book, and a no-code web portal for analysts. No forced migration.
See it on your own book
Send us a set of addresses or an active book, and we'll return structured permit data and scores.
Request Data Access