Case Study: BuildFax achieves scalable, rapid aggregation and delivery of building-permit data with Amazon Web Services

BuildFax - Customer Case Study

BuildFax provides a nationwide database of building and permit information that helps lenders, insurers, home inspectors, appraisers, and other housing professionals understand a property’s construction history. The company faced a scalability and data‑processing challenge: ingesting thousands of different file formats from municipalities, running complex address‑correction routines (cycling through some 750 million combinations), and mapping many datasets that require human intervention — all of which overwhelmed its previous infrastructure.

BuildFax moved to AWS and built a stack using Amazon EC2, EBS, Elastic Load Balancing, S3, EMR, Solr, MySQL, and RightScale to process datasets in isolated instances, run large-scale address correction with Amazon EMR (up to ~80 instances per dataset), and launch hundreds of parallel mappings (as many as 100 at once). The result is fast, reliable processing—most jobs complete in 2–3 hours—secure delivery of property profiles, and the ability to aggregate previously locked municipal permit data at scale for customers.

BuildFax

Joe Masters Emison

VP of Research and Development