The United States has roughly 20,000 building permit jurisdictions — the city, county, or other government office (formally, the Authority Having Jurisdiction, or AHJ) with the legal power to approve construction and issue permits on a property. The Department of Housing and Urban Development's SOCDS Building Permits Database tracks about 21,000 permit-issuing places, and the Census Bureau's Building Permits Survey — the dataset HUD's is built on — counted 19,945 in its unive

Most property data starts with a static snapshot: year built, square footage, construction type, number of units. Those characteristics drive major decisions, from valuation to lending to insurance. But buildings don’t stay static after construction. Roofs get replaced, electrical systems get rewired, spaces get reconfigured, occupancies change. The challenge isn’t that this information doesn’t exist. It does, scattered across thousands of local building permit systems. The c

Why insurance claims lack verified property history and how permit intelligence changes outcomes The property and casualty insurance industry is facing a paradox. Claim volume has been falling - homeowners claims dropped 19% year-over-year to 5.27 million in 2025, and commercial property claims fell from 910,000 to 710,000 over the same period. Yet individual claim severity has never been higher, with per-claim costs projected between $17,258 and $18,431. The average claim cy

Loudoun County, Virginia, stands as the undisputed global epicenter of the digital economy. It is home to the world's densest concentration of data centers, the physical backbone of the cloud, processin g an estimated 70% of the world's internet traffic. For the property and casualty insurance industry, this unprecedented construction boom pres ents a landscape of seemingly obvious risk and opportunity: new, high-value commercial properties to underwrite, complex constructio