Building Permit - United States

Overview

Structured building permit data for the municipalities in the United States.

Attributes include building geolocation information (CBSA, county, state, address, etc.), permit information (number, record type, status, etc.), timeline information (file date, permit date, final date, etc.) and project information (descriptions, contractors, owners, designers, etc.).

Schema

Create a Dewey Data login and navigate to the Table Structure view in the product for a description of each variable.
Building Permit - United States Table Structure

FAQs

What is a typical process of building permit filing?

• The permit filing process begins with contacting the local building department to determine the specific requirements for the project. The department will provide a list of necessary documents, which often include construction plans, property surveys, and proof of ownership. After gathering these documents, the applicant must submit the completed application along with any associated fees. The department will then schedule inspections throughout the construction phase to ensure compliance with building codes. Finally, upon successful completion of all inspections, final approval will be granted, allowing the project to be finished.

What is Builty's coverage of permit data? How representative is it of the entire market?

• Builty covers 70% of the top 30 MSAs across the country. The best coverage reflects the most active real estate markets, both urban and suburban, residential and commercial.

How is the data sourced?

• Building permits are issued by over 20,000 local jurisdictions. Builty has developed a system that automatically searches the websites of various cities and counties, downloads the building permits, and extracts useful information from them. It consists of hundreds of automated scrapers that can harvest data from public sources that are not readily accessible by most downloading tools.

How is the data standardized?

• Builty has developed multi-step data processing and machine learning pipelines that classify and deconvolute information otherwise confined within disordered text. The culmination of these efforts is a data product that offers an ordered taxonomy of permit categories, and a standardized repository of a vast multitude of attribute types.

How are Builty category flags populated?

• Oftentimes, building permits are not properly labeled by the original applicantsL for example, a project labeled as re-roofing also includes solar panel installation and electrical system upgrade. To provide more utility, Builty has developed language models in an attempt to correctly classify each permit. The algorithm is trained to generate a TRUE/FALSE outcome across many categories. In cases where the model confidence is below a certain threshold, those categories remain NULL. Due to the nature of construction projects with multiple work types, the categories are not mutually exclusive.