How to Pull Property Details for Quoting in 10 seconds...

You have a prospect on the phone. They want a homeowners quote. You ask when the house was built and they say "I think the eighties?" You ask the square footage and they guess. You ask what the roof is made of and they go quiet.

Every agent who quotes personal lines knows this call. The carrier wants a dozen facts about the structure before it will rate, and the person who lives in it knows maybe four of them. So you open a second tab, then a third, and start hunting.

This post covers what an underwriter actually needs to know about a house, where agents usually go to find it, and a faster way to get all of it from one street address.

What the carrier wants to know before it rates a home

Whether you are keying into a carrier portal, a comparative rater, or an ACORD 80, the property questions are roughly the same:

  • Year built. Drives eligibility, wiring and plumbing assumptions, and pricing on older homes.
  • Living area in square feet. The single biggest input to replacement cost.
  • Stories, bedrooms and bathrooms. Feed the replacement cost estimator and sanity-check the square footage.
  • Construction and exterior. Frame, masonry, brick veneer, siding. Changes the rate class.
  • Roof type. Composition shingle, metal, tile, flat. Some carriers will not write certain roofs without an inspection.
  • Foundation, heating and cooling. Slab, crawl space, basement. Central, heat pump, wood stove.
  • Pool, garage and outbuildings. Liability exposure and other-structures coverage.
  • Lot size, zoning and land use. Acreage, agricultural use, and anything that makes a "house" actually a farm.
  • Who owns it and whether they live there. An LLC on title or an owner mailing address in another state is a landlord policy, not an HO-3.
  • Last sale date and price. Confirms a recent purchase, which is usually the reason you are quoting.

Get any of these wrong and the best case is a re-rate at binding. The worse cases are a policy issued on bad information, a claim dispute, or a cancellation notice when the inspection report comes back.

Where agents usually look, and why it takes ten minutes

There is no shortage of places to find property data. The problem is that each one has a piece of it.

Source What it is good for Where it falls down
County assessor site Year built, square footage, parcel number, owner of record Every county has a different site, some are not online, and searches are by owner or parcel rather than address
Consumer listing sites Beds, baths, photos, recent sale Data is self-reported by listing agents and often stale once a house is off market
MLS Detailed listing sheets Requires a real estate license or a friendly agent, and only covers homes that were listed
Asking the client Occupancy, updates, and anything not in a public record Clients guess, and the guesses skew optimistic
Carrier prefill Some carriers pull year built and square footage for you Only inside that carrier's portal, and you still have to check it

The usual workflow is to bounce between two or three of these, copy the numbers into the quote, and hope they agree. When the assessor says 2,140 square feet and the listing says 2,400, you pick one and move on. That is the moment a future claim problem is born.

A faster way: one address in, a property profile out

The Property Data Lookup skill in the Agency Skills Library was built to replace that tab-hopping. You give it a street address and it returns a property profile with every field an underwriter cares about, pulled from multiple independent property record sources and cross-checked against each other.

You ask for it the way you would ask a producer sitting next to you:

Look up 2210 Hollow Oak Ct, Murfreesboro TN. I need year built, square footage, roof, construction and lot size before I quote the home.

And you get back something like this (example output, values illustrative):

PROPERTY PROFILE
==============================================================
Query:   2210 Hollow Oak Ct, Murfreesboro TN
Matched: 2210 Hollow Oak Ct, Murfreesboro, TN 37128
County:  Rutherford County (47149), TN

STRUCTURE
--------------------------------------------------------------
  Year built:          2004   [confirmed by 3 records]
  Living area (sq ft): 2,318   [confirmed by 2 records]
  Bedrooms:            4   [confirmed by 3 records]
  Bathrooms:           2.5   [confirmed by 2 records]
  Stories/floors:      2   [confirmed by 2 records]
  Property type:       Single family
  Construction:        Frame
  Exterior:            Brick veneer
  Roof:                Composition shingle
  Foundation:          Crawl space
  Garage:              Attached, 2 car

SYSTEMS & FEATURES
--------------------------------------------------------------
  Heating:             Central, gas
  Cooling:             Central
  Pool:                No

LOT, LAND & OWNER
--------------------------------------------------------------
  Lot size (acres):    0.34   [confirmed by 2 records]
  Zoning:              RS-10
  Land use:            Residential
  Parcel / APN:        093K-A-021.00
  Owner:               MARTIN, DANIEL & KAREN
  Owner type:          Individual
  Owner mailing addr:  2210 Hollow Oak Ct, Murfreesboro, TN 37128

VALUATION
--------------------------------------------------------------
  Last sale price:     $412,000
  Last sale date:      2023-06-14   [confirmed by 2 records]
  Assessed value:      $103,000
  Annual taxes:        $2,214

That is the whole underwriting picture for the house in one place, with nothing to sign up for. The data cost is included in the library subscription, so there is no county account, no data vendor contract, and no API key to paste anywhere.

It works for any US address. There is no per-state setup and nothing changes when you quote a home two states over.

Confirmed versus unconfirmed

The most useful thing on that profile is not any single number. It is the marker next to it.

When two or more independent records agree on a field, the skill labels it confirmed. Those are the numbers you can quote to an underwriter with confidence. When the records disagree, the field is labeled unconfirmed and shows you the competing values instead of silently picking one:

  Living area (sq ft): 2,318   [UNCONFIRMED: records disagree — also seen: 2,640]

That is your cue to ask the client one specific question ("did you finish the bonus room over the garage?") rather than a vague one. It turns a guess into a verified answer, and it leaves a paper trail showing you checked.

An agent who quotes on a confirmed square footage and asks about the unconfirmed one is doing exactly what the underwriter wants. An agent who copies the first number they found is not.

Owner records: spotting rentals, LLCs and non-owner-occupied risks

The owner section is where a lot of misquoted policies get caught early.

  • Owner name is an LLC or a trust. This is probably not an owner-occupied HO-3. Ask before you quote it as one.
  • Owner mailing address is different from the property address. The owner lives somewhere else. That is a tenant-occupied dwelling, a second home, or a house that just changed hands. Each one is a different policy form.
  • Last sale date is last month. The prospect just bought it, which is why they are calling. Confirm the closing date and whether the previous owner had any updates permitted.
  • Owner type says individual and the mailing address matches. You are most likely looking at a straightforward primary residence.

Owner coverage depends on what the public record carries, so some profiles come back without a name. When that happens the rest of the profile still stands. It is not an error, just a record that does not publish ownership.

Working it into your quoting workflow

The lookup is most useful right before you key a quote, and right before you re-rate a renewal. Some of the ways agencies use it:

  • Before you rate a new home. Pull the profile, confirm the structure fields, and ask the client only about what came back unconfirmed. If you use the Personal Lines Rater, the verified fields drop straight into the intake.
  • Filling an ACORD application. Year built, square footage, construction, roof, stories and the parcel number map directly onto the property section of an ACORD 80 or 125. The ACORD Form Filler can take them from there.
  • Verifying what is already in your management system. Compare the profile against the dwelling details on file in Momentum, HawkSoft, AgencyZoom or QQ Catalyst. A 20-year-old year-built entry that does not match public record is a coverage gap waiting to be found by an adjuster.
  • Reviewing a renewal. A house that sold last year, added a pool, or moved into an LLC has a different risk profile than the one you wrote. The owner and valuation sections surface that in seconds.
  • Screening a referral. A quick "what do public records show for this address" before you invest an hour in a quote tells you whether it is a 1920 farmhouse on 40 acres or a 2019 build in a subdivision.

A few of the prompts our own team uses word for word:

Get underwriting facts for this address before I quote the home.

What do public records show for the property at 118 Cherry St? Is it owner-occupied?

Pull the property at 4012 Elkins Ave, Nashville. I need year built, square footage, roof and construction for the ACORD.

What it does not do

It is worth being clear about the limits, because they are deliberate.

  • It is not a bulk data tool. It looks up one property at a time for a real business reason. Any area search is capped at 20 properties, and lookups are limited to 25 per day per machine as a fair-use safeguard on the shared data plan. If you need to build a marketing list, this is the wrong tool.
  • It is not an inspection. Public records tell you what the house was when it was last assessed or listed. They do not tell you the roof has three layers or the wiring is knob and tube. Use it to ask better questions, not to skip the inspection.
  • Roof type is not roof age. Records reliably carry the roof material, and sometimes a year renovated. The year the roof was last replaced usually comes from a permit or the client, and this skill does not guess at it.
  • Brand-new construction may not match. A house that closed last month can be missing from the record indexes. When nothing matches, the skill says so instead of returning someone else's parcel.
  • Flood zone is off by default. A FEMA flood zone lookup exists behind a flag, but the FEMA service is frequently blocked from office networks, so the skill leaves it alone unless you ask.

Frequently asked questions

How do I find the year a house was built for an insurance quote?

The year built is a public record held by the county assessor. Most counties post it online, but every site is different, and many search by parcel or owner rather than address. The Property Data Lookup skill returns it from multiple record sources for any US address and tells you whether they agree.

Can I look up who owns a property before I quote it?

Yes. The profile includes the owner name, owner type (individual, LLC, trust) and owner mailing address where the public record carries them. That is usually enough to tell an owner-occupied home from a rental or a second home before you pick a policy form.

Does the property lookup work in every state?

Yes. It uses national property record sources that cover all 50 states, so there is no per-state or per-county setup. The same prompt works in Tennessee, Texas and Ohio.

Does it cost extra, or do I need a data account?

No. Property lookups are included in the Agency Skills Library subscription. There is no data account to open and no API key to configure. It works the moment the skill is installed.

Does it show roof age?

It shows the roof type (composition shingle, metal, tile, and so on) and a year renovated when the record has one. Roof age itself is rarely in public property records. For that, you still need a permit search or the client.

How is this different from a carrier's prefill?

Carrier prefill only works inside that carrier's portal, and it gives you one number with no indication of where it came from. This lookup runs before you pick a carrier, works for every quote, and labels each field as confirmed or unconfirmed so you know which numbers to trust.

Try it on your next quote

Property Data Lookup is one of the skills in the Agency Skills Library, a set of Claude skills built by working insurance agents for the tasks that eat an agency's day: property lookups, ACORD forms, comparative rating, proposals, VIN decoding, management system connectors and more. One flat subscription covers your whole agency and every skill in the library, including the property data itself.

See the full field list and sample prompts on the Property Data Lookup skill page, or browse everything in the library.