CoreLogic is now Cotality. If you are evaluating Cotality for building permit data, here is what changed, what Cotality actually sells, 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.
Cotality and Shovels both sell building permit data. The difference is the role that data plays in each platform.
For Cotality, permits are one dataset in a broad property data catalogue. It spans mortgages, valuation, climate risk, demographics, ownership, and more. For Shovels, construction activity is the focus. Permits are collected directly from jurisdictions, standardized, deduplicated, and linked to contractors, properties, and the government decisions that precede construction.
That makes Cotality a strong choice if you are looking for permits along with a wide range of property and financial data, all from one provider. Shovels is designed for teams that need to search, analyze, or build products around the construction record itself.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
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.
Yes, Cotality lists building permits as a dataset covering residential and commercial properties, alongside building detail in its data library.
The broader catalogue is the more important context. Cotality also offers property characteristics, parcels, zoning, address intelligence, ownership and mortgage records, valuations, listings, climate risk, neighborhood demographics, liens, tax history, and other property and financial datasets.
Permits are one line in that expansive catalogue. They also contribute to Cotality's derived products. Its Age of Roof product, for example, combines aerial imagery and AI models with property, permit, and weather-risk data. The permit is an ingredient there, not the output. What a customer receives is an estimate of when a roof was replaced, rather than the dated filing that records the work.
This breadth is a strength when a team wants many property datasets from one provider. It also means Cotality and Shovels approach permit data from different starting points: Cotality as part of a larger property data ecosystem, and Shovels as the foundation of a construction intelligence platform.
| Dimension | Cotality (formerly CoreLogic) | Shovels |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Broad property data and analytics platform spanning mortgage, valuation, risk and marketing | Permit intelligence platform (permits are the core product) |
| Building permits | Yes, one dataset among many | Yes, the core dataset |
| Primary buyer | Mortgage lenders, insurers, real estate enterprises | Teams whose work depends on construction activity: insurance, lending, contractors, software, and investors |
| Contractor intelligence | Not marketed as a dataset | Full profiles: permit history, inspection pass rates, build speed, revenue estimates, contacts |
| Pre-permit signal | Parcel-level zoning data | Decisions: zoning, planning, and entitlement records tracked as they move |
| Sourcing model | Layered from many sources. Permit origins are not published | First-party collection from jurisdictions, including offline ones |
| Delivery | Araya platform, APIs, bulk files, and cloud marketplaces including Snowflake, Databricks, Google Cloud, AWS and Azure | REST API, web app (Shovels Online), Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks |
| Security | Established enterprise vendor with long-standing lender and carrier relationships | SOC 2 Type II certified |
| Getting started | Contact sales. No public trial or self-serve signup | Self-serve signup, explore the data the same day, contact sales for custom solutions |
Cotality brings a wide range of property, mortgage, valuation, and risk data together under one roof. That breadth can simplify procurement and data integration when permits are only one part of a larger property intelligence need.
Shovels goes deeper into the permit record. Shovels standardizes categories across jurisdictions, adds new booleans, deduplicates, and connects permits to contractors and their work history. We also retrieve permit data from jurisdictions that do not publish online.
The right choice ultimately depends on the job. If permits are one supporting input, breadth may matter more. If permits drive the product or workflow, depth is more important.
Shovels connects permit activity to contractor profiles. This way you can see where a contractor works, what they build, how many permits they have pulled, how quickly they complete projects, how often they pass inspections, and how to reach them. Teams use these profiles for lead scoring, contractor vetting, market analysis, and product enrichment.
Cotality does not market contractor intelligence as a standalone dataset. For teams trying to understand the companies behind construction activity, not just the properties being changed, the difference matters.
Cotality offers parcel-level zoning data, which helps answer what a property is legally allowed to become.
Shovels shows you what someone is actively trying to build or change. Shovels tracks rezonings, planning applications, entitlements, demolitions, environmental reviews, and other government actions as they move through local approval processes. These records show development activity months before a building permit appears.
Shovels collects permits first-party, directly from jurisdictions, including a dedicated team that files public records requests for areas that never publish data online. New jurisdictions can be added on request, and a questionable record can be traced back to the office that issued it.
Cotality describes its data as layered from many sources but does not publish where its permit records originate. That does not by itself indicate a difference in quality, but it makes sourcing an important evaluation question.
For permit-specific evaluations, testing a familiar market is the easiest way to judge coverage and consistency.
Cotality follows an enterprise sales process and does not offer self-serve signup. Shovels lets users create an account and begin exploring permits, contractors, properties, and Decisions the same day.
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.
Cotality is the better fit when the need extends well beyond construction activity. If you require automated valuations, home price indices, mortgage origination or servicing data, catastrophe modeling, fraud detection, portfolio monitoring, or marketing audiences, Cotality offers products that Shovels does not.
It also has an advantage when consolidation is what matters. A team that wants permits, ownership, mortgage, valuation, and risk data under one contract, and resolved within one property data ecosystem, probably benefits more from Cotality's breadth than from assembling several specialized providers.
Shovels is the stronger fit when the construction record is central to the job: analyzing property-level permit history, vetting or finding contractors, monitoring markets, identifying projects before permitting, or building a product whose value depends on detailed construction activity.
Start by deciding how central permits are to your use case. If they are one input among many and you want the surrounding property, financial, and risk data from the same provider, evaluate Cotality as a broad platform. If your workflow or product depends on permit activity, evaluate Shovels as a specialist.
Then compare both providers in a market you know. With Shovels, you can sign up and review the data directly. Ask Cotality for a sample of the same territory, then compare like for like:
A smaller set of current, clean, well-linked records may be more valuable than a larger count that carries duplicates and inactive jurisdictions.
Have questions about fit? Explore the Shovels permit database for free, or talk to us about your data needs.
In March 2025 CoreLogic announced its rebrand to Cotality. Corelogic.com now redirects to cotality.com, although the CoreLogic name still appears in some corporate and technical contexts. Buyers and industry professionals also continue to use both names.
A few practical things if you are evaluating today:
Sign up free, pull the permits and contractors in a market you already know, and judge the coverage, deduplication, and enrichment for yourself.
Yes. CoreLogic rebranded to Cotality in March 2025. It is the same company: corelogic.com now redirects to cotality.com, and Cotality's own website footer still carries the CoreLogic corporate name. Many people in the industry still say CoreLogic.
Cotality announced the rebrand in March 2025, describing the new name as a combination of collaboration and connectivity, totality, and vitality.
Cotality is a property data and analytics company. It sells property characteristics, parcels, ownership and mortgage records, valuation models, climate and hazard risk analytics, neighborhood data, market intelligence, and building permits, primarily to mortgage lenders, insurers, and real estate enterprises.
Yes. Cotality publishes Building Permits as a named dataset covering residential and commercial properties, and also uses permit data as an input to derived products such as its roof age estimates. Permits are one dataset within a much broader catalogue.
For building permit and construction activity data, yes. Shovels collects permits first-party, standardizes them into consistent categories, deduplicates filings, and links each permit to contractor and parcel data. For valuation models, mortgage data, catastrophe modeling, or marketing audiences, Shovels is not an alternative to Cotality.
Property data describes what a building is: size, age, ownership, assessed value, parcel boundaries. Permit data describes what has been done to it and by whom: the roof replaced, the panel upgraded, the addition built, the contractor who pulled the permit. Most property platforms lead with the former. A permit platform leads with the latter.
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-time jurisdictions rather than actively updated ones. 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.