Trace · reads the paper trail
Permit intelligence for property underwriting
Trace reads two decades of municipal permit records to reconstruct a property's true story — roof age, renovations, occupancy changes, vacancy signals — and turns a Schedule of Values into a triaged, evidence-backed risk picture.
What it reads
Roof age, verified
Re-roof permits are the strongest single property-cat signal — 70–90% of insured residential catastrophe losses trace to roof damage. Trace finds the permit, not the broker's guess.
ITV drift detection
Additions and major renovations quietly stale your replacement-cost basis. Trace flags insured-to-value drift from the permit record itself.
Occupancy & vacancy signals
Certificate-of-occupancy changes, demolition permits, and permit dormancy expose occupancy mismatches and vacancy risk before the loss run does.
Honest coverage reporting
Every row carries match confidence, data age, and a coverage status. No permits found is never silently conflated with no permits exist.
How it works
- 1
Load the schedule
Drop in a Schedule of Values — CSV or spreadsheet, real-world column names welcome. Trace normalizes addresses USPS-style and geocodes them against the Census benchmark.
- 2
Pull the permit record
Connectors query municipal open-data systems (Socrata, ArcGIS) and aggregators, normalizing every permit into the BLDS schema: type, status, dates, valuation, location.
- 3
Match with confidence
Permits attach to properties via parcel ID, geocode proximity, and normalized address string scoring — every match carries an explicit confidence, never a silent guess.
- 4
Read the signals
Roof age, ITV drift, occupancy changes, vacancy, solar, sprinkler and violation signals roll up into a per-property triage — accept, refer, or decline, with reasons.
See Trace read a real schedule.
The live demo runs the production engine — instant showcase scenarios, plus your own addresses if you have demo credentials.
Open the live demo