What the county already knows about your insured's building
Folio, year built, roof year, open permits and wind design are public record in every Florida county. Here is why prefilling a submission from them changes the conversation with an underwriter.
The insured does not remember. The county does.
Ask a restaurant owner what year the building was built, what the roof is, or whether there is an open permit on the property, and you will get a shrug and a guess. Ask the county property appraiser and you will get a folio number, a year built, a construction class, a square footage and a sale history.
That information is public, it is authoritative, and in Florida the underwriter already trusts it. What nobody has done is put it in front of the producer at the moment the submission is being filled in.
Permits are the part everyone skips
A roof replaced in 2019 is a different risk from a roof replaced in 2004, and in Florida that difference decides whether a property gets quoted at all. The permit record says which one it is. An open permit says something else again — that work is unfinished, which is a question an underwriter would rather ask before binding than after a claim.
Pulling that record takes a person several minutes per property across two or three county websites, which is exactly why it is skipped on small accounts and exactly why small accounts get surprised.
Prefilled is only useful if it is checkable
A prefilled field with no source is worse than a blank one: it looks decided. So every value we prefill from public record carries the source it came from and the date it was fetched, and it stays marked as machine-produced until a person accepts it.
The crawler that fetches it cannot write to a policy or a certificate at all. It stages what it found, and a human decides whether it becomes part of the record.