Every New Jersey Permit Carries a Block and Lot

Every one of the 640,741 New Jersey permits in our file carries a block and lot reference inside its work description, and 640,574 of them carry a real one rather than a placeholder. That matters because New Jersey records no latitude or longitude at all, and 74,224 permits carry no street address either. For those records the block and lot is the only way to say where the job is.

TL;DR

• All 640,741 New Jersey permits carry a block and lot in the description text.
• 74,224 records have no street address. 74,057 of those still have a parcel key.
• Block and lot repeat across towns, so always key on municipality as well.
• New Jersey has zero coordinates, so there is no radius or map search here.

What is a block and lot, and why does New Jersey use one?

It is the parcel identifier from a municipality's official Tax Map, and in New Jersey it is the backbone of how property is recorded.

The state runs an assessment system called MOD-IV, maintained under rules set by the Director of the Division of Taxation. MOD-IV accounts for every parcel of real property as delineated and identified on each municipality's official Tax Map, along with taxable values and descriptive data for each one.

The identifier MOD-IV uses is a concatenation: a municipality code, then the block, then the lot, then a qualifier. Four parts, and the order of them is the whole lesson.

The qualifier exists because more than one independent property can occupy the same footprint. A condominium building sits on one block and one lot, and the qualifier is what separates unit 4B from unit 11A. If you work with residential multifamily in New Jersey, that fourth element is not a detail.

New Jersey publishes parcel and MOD-IV layers county by county through its open data portal, with a join key on each side, so the assessment record and the parcel geometry are designed to be lined up.

Why does this matter more in New Jersey than elsewhere?

Because New Jersey gives you nothing else to locate a job with.

Our New Jersey file carries zero latitude and longitude values across all 640,741 records. Not sparse. Zero. There is no radius search, no pin map, no drive-time filter available from this data directly.

That leaves the street address, and the street address is not complete either. 566,517 records carry one and 74,224 do not, which is 11.6% of the state file gone if your process keys on address alone.

Here is the part that changes the arithmetic. Of those 74,224 address-less permits, 74,057 carry a usable block and lot. The location was recorded. It was simply recorded in a different vocabulary, in a text field, where a spreadsheet filter will never find it.

New Jersey also carries no contractor name and no owner name anywhere in the file, which we have written about before and will keep saying. The parcel reference does not solve that. What it solves is the question of which property, which is the one the address field was supposed to answer.

Where are the missing addresses concentrated?

On the shore, at nearly triple the rate of the strongest county.

County	Permits	No street address	Rate	Recoverable by parcel
Atlantic	14,664	3,974	27.1%	3,969
Cape May	15,914	4,022	25.3%	4,010
Monmouth	66,895	10,195	15.2%	10,142
Mercer	38,645	5,401	14.0%	5,370
Morris	47,720	6,235	13.1%	6,235
Middlesex	61,975	8,033	13.0%	8,025
Somerset	33,687	3,620	10.7%	3,616
Ocean	60,359	5,761	9.5%	5,759
Burlington	35,719	3,413	9.6%	3,408
Bergen	66,767	4,301	6.4%	4,300

Read the rate column and the count column as two different stories. Monmouth loses the most records in absolute terms, 10,195 of them, which is a bigger list than most counties produce in a quarter. Atlantic and Cape May lose the largest share, better than one permit in four.

We are not going to tell you why. The shore concentration is suggestive and we have no evidence for a cause, so we will leave it as an observation rather than dress it up as a finding.

The recoverable column is the one that pays. In every county listed, the parcel key survives on more than 99% of the records the address field dropped. Morris recovers all 6,235.

How do you actually extract it?

One pattern match, run once, before anything else in your pipeline.

The block and lot sit at the end of the work description, in a consistent shape: a description of the work, then the words Block and Lot with their values. A record reads something like "Accessory buildings and miscellaneous structures - Block 0 Lot 0", which is also a useful reminder that the placeholder exists.

The recipe is short:

1. Pull the text following the word Block, and separately the text following the word Lot. Allow for letters and punctuation, not just digits, because New Jersey block and lot values are not always purely numeric.
2. Drop the 117 records where both values come back as zero. Keep the rest. 640,574 records return something real.
3. Build your key as municipality plus block plus lot. Never block plus lot alone.
4. Where you are working multifamily, carry the qualifier if the description offers one, since without it every unit in a condominium collapses into a single parcel.

Step three is where people go wrong, and it fails quietly. Block and lot are unique within a municipality and nowhere wider, because the MOD-IV identifier starts with the municipality code. Key on block and lot alone across the state file and you will merge a property in one town with an unrelated property in another, then wonder why a quiet street appears to have eleven permits on it.

Being straight about the product: there is no block or lot filter on permits.llc today. These values live in the description text, not in a structured column, so this is a recipe you run on a download rather than a search you run on the site. We would rather tell you that than let you discover it after buying.

What can this actually get you?

Three things, in rising order of usefulness.

The first is recovery. 74,057 records that your address filter was dropping come back into the working set. On a shore territory that is a quarter of the county.

The second is deduplication that reflects reality. New Jersey issues a construction permit per application, with technical sections reviewed by discipline, so a single renovation can surface as several records. Grouped by municipality, block and lot, those collapse into one project with a sequence to it. A property that pulled a permit in March and two more in June is not three leads. It is one job, further along than you thought, and the subcode structure behind that pattern is worth understanding before you build the grouping.

The third is the join. Because this is the same key MOD-IV uses, and because New Jersey publishes parcel and assessment layers county by county, a permit record can in principle be lined up against the public assessment record for the same parcel. We have not done that join and we are not going to describe what it returns, because what each county's published layer exposes is a question you should answer against the county's own data rather than take from us.

A permit is a signal about the homeowner, not about the contractor who filed it, and in New Jersey it is a signal that arrives with no names attached at all. The parcel reference is what lets you attach the signal to a specific property, which is the necessary first step before any of the rest of it is worth doing.

What to say in your outreach

Nothing about block and lot. This is a targeting technique, not a talking point.

The reason is worth stating plainly, because the temptation runs the other way. Opening a conversation with a stranger by reciting their parcel identifier reads as surveillance, not as service, and it is the fastest way to lose a shore homeowner who already gets three of these letters a month.

Use the parcel key to decide who to contact and to understand what stage their project is at. Then write to them about the project.

For an address-less permit you have located by parcel, the property is knowable but your mailing options are limited. Door-knocking a specific parcel in a Cape May or Atlantic County territory is a legitimate use. So is checking whether the property is one you already have a relationship with.

For a parcel showing several filings across a few months, the useful line is about sequence: "I saw the framing work went in this spring." That is a contractor who has done their homework, and it lands very differently from a mail merge.

Keep the honest limit in view. New Jersey gives you the property and the work, not the person. Anyone selling you New Jersey permit data as contact records is selling you something the state file does not contain.

How permits.llc fits in

We index 640,741 New Jersey permits across all 21 counties and 496 municipalities, with project cost on effectively every record and application dates you can filter directly. It is the largest file we hold, and its shape is unusual enough that knowing the shape is most of the skill.

That shape, briefly: complete project cost, complete parcel references, 88.4% street addresses, no coordinates, no contractor names, no owner names. Strong on what and where, silent on who. We have written up how the 21 counties compare and what a New Jersey square footage figure actually signals if you want the fuller picture before committing.

To run the recipe above, download the New Jersey permit data and extract the block and lot from the work description in your first pass, before you filter on anything else. To see the coverage county by county first, browse New Jersey permits by county, or set up permit alerts so new filings reach you while the job is still at the stage you sell into.

74,057 records is not a rounding error. It is a mid-sized county's worth of work, sitting in plain sight in a text field, invisible to everyone filtering on the address column.