Address Normalization

Datafiniti normalizes all street addresses in our property database by converting common street designations to 2-3 character abbreviations (shown below). However, because the address field defaults to fuzzy matching, you do not need to abbreviate your query to match our normalized format — exact, full, or partial addresses will all return results.

Property Search API Example

Let's say you want to search for the following address:

• 3407 Pennsylvania Avenue, Austin, TX 78721

Because the address field defaults to fuzzy matching, you could query this address using either the full term Avenue or its abbreviated form Ave — both are acceptable. The example below uses the abbreviated form Ave, which matches how the address is stored in our database. For a full list of the abbreviations Datafiniti uses, see Possible Values for Property Fields.

{
  "query":"address:"3407 Pennsylvania Ave" AND city:Austin AND province:TX AND postalCode:78721",
  "num_records":1
}

Normalized Terms for Street Addresses Code

While fuzzy matching means abbreviating your queries is optional, standardizing addresses before querying can still improve match quality and consistency — particularly for bulk processing and deduplication workflows.

The Datafiniti GitHub Repo provides tools to standardize addresses by abbreviating street suffixes (e.g., "Street" → "ST", "Avenue" → "AVE"), directional terms (e.g., "North" → "N"), and regions, improving data consistency and API query performance (especially when combined with Datafiniti's fuzzy matching).

Code Implementations

Features & Usage

• Dictionaries: Covers US/Canada street suffixes, directions; extensible.

• Datafiniti Tie-in: Queries like address:"123 Main ST" AND postalCode:"12345*" benefit from fuzzy matching, with standardized terms further improving match rates and deduplication.

Street address abbreviations

Fuzzy matching on the address field accepts both the full address term and its abbreviated form. The table below shows how each term is stored in the Datafiniti database.