Data Sources & Methodology

Where the data comes from

ViolationNet aggregates building and housing code-violation records published by official municipal and county code-enforcement agencies — the same public records you could request from each city, consolidated and standardized in one place. We currently cover 167 cities and track 1,175,187 violation records.

Each city's data is pulled directly from that jurisdiction's open-data portal or code-enforcement system (for example Socrata, ArcGIS, or CKAN feeds). We do not buy data from brokers and we do not scrape behind logins.

How often it's updated

We refresh each city on an automated daily cycle. Every city and address page shows a "last updated" date so you always know how current the records are. Our target is that no covered city is more than 7 days behind its source.

How we standardize addresses

Raw government records format addresses inconsistently ("123 N. Main Street, Apt 4" vs "123 MAIN ST"). We normalize every address to a single canonical form and, where possible, geocode it — so a violation filed under any spelling still matches the right property. This is also how our monitoring alerts reliably catch a new violation the moment it's published.

Known limitations

• Coverage depends on what each jurisdiction publishes. Some cities expose more fields (and more history) than others.
• Where a source publishes an owner-of-record rather than a responsible contractor, we label it as such rather than guess.
• Records reflect what the agency has published; newly filed violations may take a few days to appear in the source feed before we can surface them.
• ViolationNet is an information service, not a legal or compliance authority. Always confirm a specific record with the issuing agency before acting on it.

Corrections

If you believe a record is inaccurate or out of date, email [email protected] and we'll review it against the source.