AddressIntel Reviews and Details

Questions & Answers

1. What makes AddressIntel unique?

   AddressIntel goes deep on one region instead of thin across the whole country. It parses building permits every day from each San Mateo County and Peninsula city portal, then joins them to parcel, zoning, and hazard data so you can see teardown and spec-build potential for a specific address. Most property-data platforms are national and treat permits as a footnote, so Peninsula coverage is stale or missing the smaller city systems entirely. Here the permit record is the core signal: refreshed daily, searchable by city, address, architect, or contractor, and scored for development upside.

2. Why should a person choose AddressIntel over its competitors?

   Depth and recency in one market. National platforms cover the whole country, but their Peninsula permit data is often stale, incomplete, or missing the smaller city portals altogether. AddressIntel pulls directly from each municipal system on the Peninsula, so permits surface within a day of being issued. It also does the underwriting math rather than handing you raw records: teardown versus rebuild, projected developer ROI, and comparable sales. There is a free tier, so you can test the data quality against your own market knowledge before paying anything. If you work outside the SF Peninsula, a national tool is the better fit, and we would say so.

3. How would you describe the primary audience of AddressIntel?

   Spec builders, developers, flippers, and listing agents working the San Francisco Peninsula, roughly from Daly City down through Palo Alto plus adjacent Silicon Valley cities. The typical user is sourcing off-market teardown or rebuild opportunities and wants to see a permit or a zoning change before it becomes common knowledge. A secondary audience is analysts and investors who want clean, structured Peninsula permit data through an API instead of a dashboard. It is deliberately a niche tool: if you need national coverage, this is not the right product.

4. What's the story behind AddressIntel?

   It started as a personal frustration. Tracking building permits on the Peninsula meant checking a dozen separate city portals, each with its own search form, export quirks, and refresh schedule, and none of them talk to each other. There was no single place to ask a simple question like which properties pulled demolition permits in Menlo Park this month. AddressIntel began as a set of scrapers and normalizers for those municipal systems, then grew into parcel scoring, zoning and SB9 analysis, and daily market tracking once it became clear the permit record is the earliest reliable signal that a property is about to change hands or change shape.

5. Which are the primary technologies used for building AddressIntel?

   The web app is Next.js 16 and React 19 in TypeScript, styled with Tailwind CSS and deployed on Firebase App Hosting. Data lives in PostgreSQL behind Firebase Data Connect, with Firebase Auth for accounts and Stripe for billing. Maps are Leaflet and react-leaflet over OpenStreetMap tiles, and charts use Recharts. The permit ingestion pipeline is Python, scraping and normalizing each municipal permit system (Accela, eTRAKiT, EnerGov, and open-data APIs) on a daily schedule, with building footprints from OpenStreetMap and the Overture Maps Foundation under ODbL.