BuildFax is now Verisk. If you are looking for BuildFax permit and property data, here is what changed, what Verisk offers today, and how a permit-first platform like Shovels compares.
We get a lot of questions about how Shovels stacks up to similar services and platforms. Here, we try to answer your questions as honestly as we can.
Verisk, which acquired BuildFax in 2019, and Shovels both work with building permit data, and both serve insurance customers. The similarity largely ends there.
Verisk combines permits with aerial imagery, assessor records, and other property data to produce risk analytics such as roof age estimates and property condition insights. Shovels delivers the construction record itself: standardized, searchable permits linked to properties, contractors, inspections, and the government decisions that precede construction.
The practical difference is what you receive. Verisk delivers a finished estimate or score. Shovels delivers the dated, jurisdiction-issued records behind the analysis: evidence an underwriter can inspect, a data science team can model, and a product team can build with.
Both can support underwriting. One gives you a conclusion, while the other delivers the underlying record.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Verisk's own announcements name three products: Roof Age, Property Condition Score, and Major Systems Insights. Verisk uses permits primarily as inputs to insurance and property risk products.
Its Roof Age product combines permit insights with aerial imagery, assessor records, and other data to estimate a roof's age and condition. Verisk has also marketed Property Condition Score and Major Systems Insights, which draw on permit activity to help insurers understand maintenance and upgrades to plumbing, electrical, and mechanical systems.
In these products, the permit is one signal inside a derived answer. A carrier receives an estimate, score, or indicator designed to support underwriting rather than a permit database built for record-level search and analysis.
That can be exactly what an underwriting workflow needs. But a modeled roof age and a dated roofing permit answer different questions. The first provides a conclusion; the second documents what work was filed, when it happened, and who performed it.
Shovels is the prediction engine for the built world. Shovels collects permit data first-party from jurisdictions nationwide, then uses AI and quality-control workflows to turn messy municipal records into standardized, searchable data. Each permit is enriched with categories, contractor intelligence, and parcel links, and delivered through an API, web application, or a direct data warehouse share. Shovels also includes Decisions, a dataset of zoning, planning, and entitlement records that surfaces projects before permits are filed.
| Dimension | Verisk (incl. BuildFax solutions) | Shovels |
|---|---|---|
| Core product | Insurance risk analytics informed by permits and other property data | Intelligence platform with permit, parcel, contractor, and land-use decisions data |
| Primary buyer | Insurance carriers, underwriting and actuarial teams | Insurance underwriting and data science teams, plus lending, contractors, software, and investors |
| Shape of the output | Scores, estimates, model outputs, and market trends | Record-level permits, properties, contractors, and government decisions |
| Underwriting use | Finished estimates and scores designed for underwriting workflows | Evidence layer for underwriting, model development, validation, and manual review |
| Auditability | Model outputs; inputs are published, but methodology is not | Records traceable to the jurisdiction that issued them |
| Sourcing model | Blends permit data with aerial imagery and assessor records; the origin of the permit data is not published | First-party collection from jurisdictions, including offline ones |
| Contractor intelligence | Not marketed as a standalone dataset | Full profiles: permit history, inspection pass rates, build speed, revenue estimates, contacts |
| Pre-permit signal | Not marketed | Decisions: zoning, planning, and entitlement records before permits are filed |
| Replacement cost estimation | Yes; 360Value is a dedicated Verisk replacement cost product | No. Shovels supplies the permit and renovation record, not the cost estimate |
| Delivery | Enterprise integrations and platform partnerships | REST API, web app (Shovels Online), Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks |
| Security | Established vendor with long-standing carrier relationships | SOC 2 Type II certified |
| Getting started | Contact sales | Self-serve signup, explore the data the same day, contact sales for custom solutions |
Shovels serves as the evidence layer rather than the score. Underwriting and data science teams use permit records wherever a filing can provide more certainty than an inference:
To be clear, Shovels is not a replacement cost estimator or a filed rating variable. We provide source records and structured features that teams can inspect directly or use to build and validate their own models.
These are workflows that insurance teams already run with Shovels: property intelligence for insurance providers.
Verisk turns permit and property signals into outputs designed for insurance decisions: roof age estimates, property condition indicators, risk scores, and market trends. These products reduce several inputs to an answer that can move directly into an underwriting or actuarial workflow.
Shovels delivers the underlying records. A user can find which properties received roofing permits, what work was described, when it occurred, which contractor pulled the permit, and how that contractor has performed across other projects.
The choice is whether you want to buy a modeled answer or work from the evidence beneath it.
A permit is a dated public record. If a policyholder disputes a decision, a regulator asks what informed it, or a model needs to be validated against an external source, the filing provides something concrete to examine: the date, jurisdiction, project description, and contractor.
A modeled roof age is an inference assembled from several signals. It may be the more convenient input, but it is not the same as the original filing. When auditability matters, ask whether the result can be traced to its source records and whether those records are available for review.
Verisk says its Roof Age product combines permit insights with aerial imagery, assessor records, and other data. That blend can fill gaps and produce a single estimate, but the result is a model output rather than the municipal filing itself.
Shovels preserves the permit as the primary record, standardizing and enriching the filing while keeping it traceable to the jurisdiction that issued it. That makes the data useful when a team needs to inspect an individual record, build its own model, or understand why a property was flagged.
Recency can also matter. Verisk says Roof Age data is collected daily and updated monthly, while aerial imagery follows its own capture schedule. Work completed between image captures may appear in a permit before it is visible from above. Ask each provider how quickly recent work reaches the product and which source carries the update.
Shovels collects permit records directly from local jurisdictions. When a department does not publish data online, a dedicated team obtains the records through public-records requests. Each record can be traced back to the issuing office, and customers can request coverage of additional jurisdictions.
Verisk describes how permit insights contribute to its products but does not publicly detail where those permit records originate. That does not by itself indicate a difference in quality, but sourcing is an important question whenever permits contribute to a model or decision.
Ask any provider: Where did this record originate? How often is the jurisdiction refreshed? Can an estimate be traced back to a permit? What happens when source data is missing?
Verisk's 360Value is a mature product built specifically for replacement cost estimation. Shovels does not offer a replacement cost model and should not be evaluated as a substitute for one.
Shovels provides the construction and renovation history that shows what has actually changed at a property.
Shovels turns contractor names on permits into profiles showing where companies work, what they build, how many permits they have pulled, how quickly they complete projects, how often they pass inspections, estimated revenue, and available contact information.
Shovels Decisions extends the timeline in the other direction by tracking rezonings, planning applications, entitlements, demolitions, environmental reviews, and other government actions before a permit is filed.
These datasets support uses beyond property scoring, including contractor vetting, claims investigation, market analysis, prospecting, and early project identification. Verisk does not market comparable standalone contractor or pre-permit datasets.
Verisk follows an enterprise sales process. Buyers generally begin with a specific product and work with its team to understand coverage, methodology, integration, and pricing.
Shovels offers self-serve signup, allowing users to search permits, properties, contractors, and Decisions in a familiar market before committing to a larger plan or data delivery. An underwriter can look up a property's permit history in Shovels Online without writing code, while data teams can access the same records through the API or a warehouse.
How Shovels fits. Shovels applies AI cleaning, standardization, and enrichment to permit, contractor, and property data from jurisdictions nationwide. Explore it through the Shovels Online web application, the Shovels API, or Shovels Enterprise warehouse delivery.
Verisk is the stronger fit when a carrier wants finished insurance analytics rather than record-level construction data. If the requirement is replacement cost estimation, catastrophe modeling, claims workflow software, rating content, or a modeled roof age or property condition score delivered ready to use, Verisk offers purpose-built products that Shovels does not attempt to replace.
It is also the better option when a team wants permits combined with imagery, assessor records, and other signals in a model maintained by the vendor. That can be more useful than receiving the underlying records and building the analysis internally.
Shovels is the better fit when the construction record itself is the point: reviewing property-level permit history, finding renovation activity, validating claims, vetting contractors, monitoring markets, identifying projects before permitting, or building a product whose value depends on detailed construction data.
Start with the answer you need. If you need a number or score that can move directly into an underwriting decision, evaluate the relevant Verisk analytics product. If you need a list of permits, properties, projects, or contractors that you can search and act on, evaluate Shovels as a data platform.
Then compare the products on the questions that matter to your workflow:
For Shovels, you can create an account and inspect the underlying records directly. For Verisk, ask for documentation or a sample from the specific product you are considering, since Roof Age, 360Value, and other analytics solve different problems.
Have questions about fit? Explore the Shovels permit database for free, or talk to us about your data needs.
BuildFax was an Austin-based building permit data company. Verisk acquired it in 2019, and in January 2022 the BuildFax company brand transitioned to Verisk. The name did not disappear. It still appears on individual solutions and in older announcements and collateral. What changed is that you buy from Verisk.
Verisk announcements have associated BuildFax with three solutions: Roof Age, Property Condition Score, and Major Systems Insights. Roof Age has a current Verisk product page, though that page no longer uses the BuildFax name. Other BuildFax-era names are less visible in today's catalogue. If you are evaluating a product you previously knew as BuildFax, ask Verisk which current offering covers that use case.
The BuildFax site is still online at www.buildfax.com, but it is dormant: most of its content dates to the period around the 2022 transition, and its blog stopped publishing in June 2022. Treat claims on the older site as historical context rather than current product specifications.
Sign up free, pull the permits and contractors in a market you already know, and judge the coverage, deduplication, and enrichment for yourself.
BuildFax is now part of Verisk. Per BuildFax's own January 2022 announcement, the company brand transitioned to Verisk while the BuildFax name continues to appear on individual solutions. The permit-derived capability is still sold; it is sold as Verisk.
Verisk's own announcements name three BuildFax solutions: Roof Age, Property Condition Score, and Major Systems Insights, described by Verisk as "rooted in ground-truth permit data." Roof Age has a current Verisk product page, though that page no longer uses the BuildFax name. Confirm with Verisk which names are current before building an evaluation around one.
Verisk acquired BuildFax in 2019. In January 2022 BuildFax announced that its company brand would transition to Verisk, describing the change as making it easier for customers to recognize the products and services Verisk provides. The BuildFax site still resolves at www.buildfax.com but its content dates from that period.
Effectively yes, as a purchasing matter. BuildFax describes itself as a Verisk business. You buy from Verisk; BuildFax is a name that appears on certain solutions.
Historically, BuildFax reports provided property-level building permit histories and condition indicators, including the BuildFax Condition Score, primarily for use in insurance underwriting. Confirm current availability and contents with Verisk directly.
Permits are public records filed with local building departments, so you can request them from the jurisdiction directly. For nationwide, standardized, and queryable permit history, a permit data platform is faster. Shovels offers self-serve signup and covers jurisdictions nationwide, including rural areas reached through public records requests.
For building permit and property renovation records, yes. Shovels collects permits first-party, standardizes them into consistent categories, deduplicates filings, and links each permit to contractor and parcel data. For replacement cost estimation and filed rating content, Shovels is not an alternative to Verisk.
Yes. A building permit is a dated public record filed with the local building department before work begins, which makes it a direct source for the roof work, systems work, additions, and renovations that change a property's risk profile. Underwriting teams use it to verify roof age, catch undisclosed or unpermitted work before binding, confirm contractor licensing, and reunderwrite after a catastrophe. It is an underwriting input rather than a filed rating variable, and it does not produce a replacement cost estimate.
There are three common approaches: ask the policyholder, send an inspector, or buy aerial imagery. Self-reported dates are unreliable, inspections do not scale across a book, and imagery is captured on a flight schedule that can miss work done between passes. A roofing permit is filed with the jurisdiction within days of the job and describes what was done, so it gives a dated record rather than an estimate. Many teams use both and treat disagreement between the permit and the imagery-derived estimate as a flag.
Shovels supplies the permit history those reports were built from: the permits filed against a property, standardized, categorized, and linked to the contractor who pulled them. It does not output a condition score. If you need the underlying record and want to score it yourself, Shovels is the direct route. If you need a finished score, that is Verisk's product.
Yes. Verisk describes its BuildFax solutions as "rooted in ground-truth permit data," and its Roof Age product page lists "permit insights" among the inputs alongside aerial imagery and assessor records. The output is generally a score or an estimate rather than raw records. Ask Verisk what the permit component of a given product contains and how it is delivered.
Mostly methodology, not coverage. Some providers create a new record every time a permit's status changes, which multiplies the same permit into several records and inflates totals. Others count all jurisdictions ever covered rather than those that are actively updated. Shovels deduplicates so each permit is one record with a unique ID that gets updated in place. When comparing providers, ask whether counts are deduplicated and how many jurisdictions are actively refreshed.
Building permits are public records filed with local building departments. Every provider starts from the same municipal sources. The differences are coverage, refresh cadence, and how much cleaning, standardization, and enrichment happens before the data reaches you.