Searching by Address in Property or Business Data

How to Search by Address in Property or Business Data

One of the more common use cases we see is customers looking for a specific property or business using the address field.

The tricky thing about searching by an address is that addresses have multiple parts that can vary from site to site. Think about these examples:

These are just a few examples of parts of an address that can vary.

How Datafiniti Normalizes Addresses

Datafiniti runs an address normalization process across our entire property and business database. We normalize our addresses to variation 2 in the above chart ("Street" to "St"). This process is not instantaneous though and not every address in the database will reflect this normalization. In the event that you want to search for properties that have not yet been normalized by our processor, we will need to remove these variables to ensure you get the specific property or business we are querying.

You can do this in the Portal or with our API. Let's review both use cases.

1. Searching by Address in the API

In this example, we are going to search for this property:

4801 Yucca Hill Drive
Austin, TX 78744

When we format the query, we will remove any parts that can be abbreviated; in this case, the word Drive like this:

"query": "address:\"4801 Yucca Hill\"",

Now we will want to add additional parameters to ensure that we get the property in the right city and state. However, these values can also have variances in them. In some cases, a website may use a specific variation of a city or may omit the city altogether. To get the highest probability of success, we will add these parameters:

• AND province:TX to ensure that the address is in the correct state
• AND (city:Austin OR postalCode:78744) to ensure that not only is this address in TX, but it also has EITHER a city value of Austin or a postalCode value of 78744

When put together, your query will look like this:

"query": "address:\"4801 Yucca Hill\" AND province:TX AND (city:Austin OR postalCode:78744)",

For more information on postal code abbreviations please check out this link.

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Does this query not make sense to you?

If this query structure doesn't make sense to you, please check out either the Postman: Property Data or Postman: Business Data walkthrough to review query composition and then come back.

When I run this query in the API using Postman, I get the expected property back!

2. Searching by Address in the Portal

Using the techniques discussed in the Portal: Advanced Query tutorial, we can take the above query and translate it into a URL request on the portal.

https://portal.datafiniti.co/property?query=address:"4801 Yucca Hill" AND province:TX AND (city:Austin OR postalCode:78744)

https://portal.datafiniti.co/property?query=address:%224801%20Yucca%20Hill%22%20AND%20province:TX%20AND%20(city:Austin%20OR%20postalCode:78744)

You can copy and paste the text from the Text tab above into a new browser window or tab and it'll show you the same property. In order for the browser to understand it, it'll convert the query into HTML, like on the HTML tab.

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Property and Business Data

While this walkthrough has been using the Property database, you can do the exact same things with the Business database as well.