EDR will soon be starting a phased roll-out of a national building permit database that will include a property specific building permit report.  This new service was made possible by a recent investment EDR made in BuildFax (located in Asheville, NC and Austin, TX).  At the moment, the BuildFax database includes:

·     14.4 million unique addresses

·     48 million building permits

·     3,300 cities, towns and villages across the U.S.

There are multiple reasons for EDR's investment in BuildFax, not the least of which is that Building Department Records are a Standard Historical Source cited in ASTM E-1527.  Adding this information to our suite of historical research products means that EDR will now be able to provide 6 of the 8 Standard Historical Sources to environmental professionals who chose to outsource a portion of their historical research.

The service will work similar to how the Sanborn service has worked over the years.  Environmental professionals can voluntarily elect to search the database for a particular address.  If no permits are identified, EDR will deliver a "no permit" letter documenting that a search was conducted.  When building permit records are found, EDR will deliver the permit history to the EP electronically.

Our long term intentions are to continue aggressively investing in BuildFax so that the database grows to include more properties, more permits and more geographies. 

I hope that over the coming weeks and months environmental professionals will check out the BuildFax database and evaluate the usefullness of the building permit report.  As with all of our products and services, we're eager to hear what you think so please, please, please let us know!