DISCERN Announces Strategic Partnership With BuildFax, Creators of the Largest Commercial and Residential Permitting Database in the U.S.

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DISCERN is pleased to announce a ground-breaking partnership with BuildFax, the creators of the largest commercial and residential permitting database in the United States. The BuildFax partnership represents an expansion of offerings provided by DISCERN's Investment Research and Foresight departments.

“DISCERN's team of financial analysts and industry experts have already identified new applications for our database, applications which should dramatically expand our product’s target addressable market in the near term”

DISCERN’s partners at BuildFax have assembled a database of over 60% of the commercial and residential building stock with 1.1 billion data points based on data collected directly from city and county building and permitting authorities. Moreover, BuildFax has instituted an exhaustive quality assurance process to ensure that data is reliable, consistent and accurate across different jurisdictions.

"By providing our analysts and customers with the comprehensive, high-quality data from our partners at BuildFax, DISCERN will be able to bring actionable insights to our customers faster and with a higher level of conviction than before," said Harry Blount, Chief Executive Officer of DISCERN.

In testing the value of the BuildFax database, DISCERN found that the data provided a unique leading indicator of inflection points in commercial construction activity. By partnering with BuildFax, DISCERN is able to offer clients a proprietary U.S. commercial construction permit index providing insight into demand for certain material and industrial companies. For example, DISCERN believes non-residential construction will be the biggest swing factor in domestic steel demand over the next two years.

"DISCERN's team of financial analysts and industry experts have already identified new applications for our database, applications which should dramatically expand our product’s target addressable market in the near term," said Holly Tachovsky, President of BuildFax. "For investor clients, the increased value of our joint solutions and offerings mean greater access to untapped valuable retail and commercial building intelligence for making informed decisions.”

About DISCERN (www.discern.com):

Based in San Francisco, DISCERN is a leader in providing investors and decision makers with a persistent information advantage by uniquely blending investment research and contextual foresight. A company built on a fresh approach to investment research, DISCERN applies the collective knowledge of its team, including external experts, powerful information analytics tools and proprietary data streams, to dramatically increase the scope of DISCERN's individual analysts’ expertise. The result: better context, better decisions. DISCERN leverages its proprietary processes by partnering with leading data vendors, world-renowned experts, and financial technology providers to give its clients a sustainable information advantage. By "seeing" farther, faster and more accurately, DISCERN is quite literally changing the way research is done.

About BuildFax (www.buildfax.com):

BuildFax, a division of BUILDERadius, is the creator of the first and only national database of historical building permit data. Co-headquartered in Austin, Texas and Asheville, North Carolina, BuildFax has created a proprietary property intelligence engine that contains building and permitting information from 4,000+ cities and counties throughout the country. Local building departments in each of these towns across the country inspect construction to make sure it meets quality and safety standards; as such it is an absolutely critical part of the public safety infrastructure. BuildFax is then able to consolidate this information into the dataset, which is a tremendous asset to professionals in the insurance, financial services, inspection, and appraisal industries, as well as buyers and sellers of property. As the best and only source of a structure’s “life story,” the BuildFax database continues to grow, currently covering over 60% of the U.S. commercial and residential building stock with 1.1 billion data points.