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New hyper-accurate US Rooftop Geocoding and US Reverse Geocoding

New hyper-accurate US Rooftop Geocoding and US Reverse Geocoding main image
Updated October 29, 2025
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New hyper-accurate US Rooftop Geocoding and US Reverse Geocoding main image

September 22, 2020 - PROVO, UTAH - SmartyStreets, the leader in location data intelligence, announces the release of their US Rooftop Geocoding and US Reverse Geocoding. These new products will provide customers with the highest precision geocodes available in the market today.

Most other geocoding providers provide “parcel-centroid” geocodes. That means that the geocodes are approximations of the center of a property or parcel. While providers in the past have called their geocodes “rooftop accurate,” in reality, their geocodes are often quite far from the actual rooftop of a property. Customers who rely on these geocodes have had to make business decisions on inaccurate or incomplete geocoding data.

“The SmartyStreets US Rooftop Geocoder represents a new generation of geocoding accuracy. We’re talking about true rooftop geocodes.

You’ll see huge improvements in accuracy compared to less sophisticated services.” stated Berk Charlton, Director of Geolocation Intelligence at SmartyStreets. “For example, other geocoders struggle with providing detailed geocodes for individual units in strip malls or mobile home communities.

Less accurate geocoding technology tends to clump these geocodes together. They don't know the real location of each structure or suite. And in the case of rural parcels, geocodes may be hundreds of feet from the rooftop. Parcel-centroid geocodes aren't precise enough for many use cases."

In contrast, the SmartyStreets US Rooftop Geocoding service can provide true rooftop geocodes for individual unit numbers. And, for rural properties, SmartyStreets’ geocodes are for the actual roof of the structure, not the center of the parcel.

The new product is a cloud-based API that is significantly faster than most onsite solutions. The cloud license allows SmartyStreets to scale up computing power based on server load. As a result, the SmartyStreets API can comfortably process hundreds of millions of records per hour. All while eliminating the expense and time associated with configuring and maintaining local software and hardware.

“Our cloud solution has an almost unlimited capacity for speed.” continued Berk. “For example, large telecom companies may need to reverse-geocode billions of coordinates weekly.

Older technologies will struggle under this kind of load. With SmartyStreets’ new reverse geocoder, that is a problem of the past.”

The US Rooftop Geocoding API is provided as a component of the flagship US Street Address API and seamlessly integrates with several application platforms. SmartyStreets provides SDK packages, including .NET, Go, iOS/Swift, JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, and Ruby. A command-line interface is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The raw API responds using both JSON and XML formats.

SmartyStreets provides a guaranteed 99.98% uptime service level agreement. Test the US Rooftop Geocoding live or the US Reverse Geocoding API live now.

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