Inspectify is an industry-leader in home inspection insights, who’s mission is to make every angle of the home inspection process as easy as possible. Whether it’s the home inspectors using Inspectify to build their in-depth reports, or lender institutions doing their risk analysis diligence, data quality is central to their platform.
"With our platform, we help enterprise clients underwrite properties at scale and have always seen permit data as a missing piece to the overall risk of a property. When we were evaluating providers in this space, we were impressed with Shovel’s ability to iterate quickly and continue to make improvements to their platform. We are excited to grow both of our businesses together through this partnership." - Josh Jensen, CEO & Co-founder of Inspectify
That’s where Shovels comes in — Inspectify integrated with our API to bring in property permit history and complete the home inspection picture. Shovel’s API is easy to use, making it easy for the Inspectify engineering team to enrich their inspection reports with the permit data that sets their inspection reports above the rest.
Inspectify and Permit Data
The Inspectify team always had their eye on permit data, but struggled to find the right source or integration fit. That is, until they met Shovels. The insights that can be gleaned from the Shovels dataset — things like permit or connected contractor history — is crucial for the wholesale assessment that’s central to the Inspectify report workflow.
"We started Shovels because there wasn’t a clear and easy way to programmatically access building permit data. There wasn’t an easy to use, well-documented, nationwide building permit API. So we set out to build it, and we’re very happy to have partners like Inspectify use our API to put our permit data to work." - Ryan, CEO & Co-Founder
Not only do these extra data points set them apart from other home inspection platforms, but it gives them a material leg up on leveraging their holistic insights across the board. They look great on the inspection reports themselves, but are also key for lending institutions and risk assessment brokers.
It’s important to have the full picture, and Shovels’s seamless API integration allows Inspectify to do just that.
The Shovels Integration
Shovels has a simple yet powerful API, which gave the Inspectify Product and Engineering teams an easy way to design their product around our data offering. Between the API docs themselves, the Data Dictionary for additional clarity, and live support sessions from the Shovels team, Inspectify was able to easily connect the Shovels data to their existing home inspection report generation pipeline.
Within the Inspectify report itself, Shovels provides the data for their handy “Summary” section, which aggregates and counts available permits for this address, some general classification of the types of projects being done, with the option to drill down into the direct permits themselves. This drill down shows a granular view into the individual permits themselves, including the contractor business name if available. All of these are pulled as individual colors within the wider picture being painted for an individual address. And if we say so ourselves, really tie it all together.
"I want to thank [the Shovels team] for the communication, flexibility, and back and forth. We have a lot of projects and the ability to get quick answers from you has really helped us develop this integration." - Alex Mathieu, VP of Engineering
A hallmark of the collaboration between Shovels and Inspectify on this product integration was the high quality of communication between the teams. Their Product team worked with us over multiple calls to ensure that their designs made sense with the Shovels data structures. Once the design was done, Engineering had some requests too: we added some functionality to our existing endpoints to better handle the bulk requests that made more sense for everyone.
Spotlights-R-Us
Every project needs a shovel and a spotlight (well, at least a work lamp).
At our core, we’re data people. We love to see cool projects doing even cooler things with publicly available data, especially in the real-estate and construction space. It makes our sweat and tears thus far spent making this data “shovel-ready” completely worth it. When that happens, we want to shine a spotlight on the great work and collaboration between Shovels and Inspectify: something less than a full-blown case study, but more than a shout out on LinkedIn.
These kinds of collaborations are happening with most of our customers, so expect more of this content monthly. Hopefully you’ll find either a cool new proptech company to check out, or get inspiration for how your own product might integrate with the Shovels dataset. If you’re the latter, then check out our API in a Free Trial, or contact Sales to get a data sample and platform demo.
Happy Digging!