Buildings change every day, in every part of the world. Anyone reading this can probably think of multiple examples in their own town of buildings currently under construction, whether being created, demolished, or modified. It’s an inevitable part of our evolving landscape, as humans migrate and change how they interact with the world. 

Despite this inevitability, keeping databases up-to-date with constant real-world change is virtually impossible. There is no technology that enables us to have a truly real-time representation of every building across a large geography, but there are some that can get us incredibly close.

At Ecopia AI (Ecopia), our artificial intelligence (AI)-based mapping systems regularly ingest high-resolution geospatial imagery, extract vector features, and detect change that has occurred since the previous set of imagery was analyzed. We’ve been doing this for over a decade across various geographies around the world, extracting continental-scale insights to power in-depth analysis and mapping of our physical world. In 2018, we leveraged this technology to create the first and only complete map of buildings in the contiguous US, which now serves as the foundation for a wide range of analytics in the insurance, telecommunications, government, and nonprofit sectors.

Quantifying building change year over year

Since creating this map, we’ve captured a more than 4.3M net increase in buildings. However, this number must be analyzed further to understand how that net increase occurred, account for other relevant changes to buildings, and reveal regional differences.

To dive deeper and commemorate the fifth year anniversary of this major milestone, we recently analyzed building change year over year for counties across the United States. Using the high-precision feature extraction and change detection capabilities of our AI-powered systems, we are able to quantify how many buildings have been created, destroyed, and modified in each county of the contiguous US and Hawaii.

Here's what we found.

To see how we calculated these numbers and understand building change from 2018-2023 at individual county levels, check out this new interactive map.

These statistics and visualizations showcase how important it is to understand all aspects of building change over time, rather than just net differences in overall building count. 

For example, an insurer using an outdated database may consider a net increase of roughly 4.3M buildings to be inconsequential to their book of business (it’s not - more on that here); after all, they know where their portfolio properties are located. However, without updated building data that accurately reflects the real world, they will not be able to factor tens of millions of other relevant building changes into their risk profiling. Even if the carrier has a record of building changes to a property in their book of business, they likely do not have knowledge of the building next door that was recently constructed, is insured by a different company, and increases the risks of the adjacent building.

Additionally, understanding these changes at an individual level can identify structure changes at policy renewal to ensure there is no premium leakage. Given a carrier’s threshold for change, plus or minus 10%, Ecopia can highlight those structures to ensure proper pricing of policies for these structures.

While technology still has a long way to go to produce these types of insights in true real-time, Ecopia can help you maintain an accurate building footprint database with more frequent updates than were ever possible before. At a minimum, we update our address and building footprint data yearly, but can work with you to figure out the right update schedule for your specific needs.

To learn more about Ecopia’s AI-based building footprint extraction and change detection, get in touch with our team of experts.

Note that Ecopia AI started capturing building footprints in Hawaii in 2020, and has not captured county-based building footprint statistics for Connecticut for 2023 due to impending county boundary changes. Additionally, we introduced new filtering in 2022 to remove building footprints of less than 100 square feet.

To learn more about building footprint data for Alaska, click here.