Our data

Data Sources & Methodology

We are a mirror of the public record, not an authority. This page explains where the record comes from, how we handle it, and how to check our work.

Last updated: October 17, 2026

Where the data comes from

Every report is built from official public records published by the jurisdiction itself. We onboard sources in a strict order of preference:

• Official open-data APIs (for example, city open-data portals on the Socrata platform) — structured, dated, and updated by the jurisdiction.
• Official bulk files published by the jurisdiction (CSV and similar formats).
• Official public portals, only where the portal's terms allow the use.

A source whose terms do not allow use does not get used. We never bypass paywalls, logins, or access controls.

What every record carries

Each permit record is stored with its source jurisdiction, the jurisdiction's own identifier for the permit, the dates the jurisdiction reports, and two freshness stamps we add: the date the source last updated and the date we collected it. Both dates appear on live reports. If a source runs behind — some jurisdictions publish months late — the report says so. Freshness honesty is a feature, not an embarrassment.

The original record is kept exactly as the source published it before any cleaning, so any normalized figure can be traced back to what the source actually said.

Quality gates before anything publishes

• Schema check — required fields present and correctly typed.
• Duplicate check — a permit may appear once; repeat pulls update the record, never duplicate it.
• Sanity check — dates, statuses, and values outside plausible ranges are flagged, not published.
• Volume check — a feed that suddenly sends far more or far fewer records than its norm is held for review.
• Freshness check — a feed silent past its normal cadence is labeled stale on its pages automatically.
• Manual review — every new jurisdiction gets a full human review before its first report goes live.

Anything that fails a gate is held, not published.

Coverage and status

Wave 1 onboarding follows the highest-volume, cleanest-feed jurisdictions first: Texas metros, then Florida metros, then Maricopa County (Arizona), North Carolina metros, and Cook County (Illinois). The first feeds in onboarding are official open-data feeds, including those published by Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Now live: Cook County, Illinois — the City of Chicago feed passed every gate above and its report published on October 17, 2026: Building Permits in Cook County — 31,746 permits issued in the trailing 12 months, as reported by the City of Chicago.

Now live: Travis County, Texas — the City of Austin feed passed every gate above and its report published on October 17, 2026: Building Permits in Travis County (Austin) — 55,575 permits issued in the trailing 12 months, as reported by the City of Austin. The report covers permits issued by the City of Austin (whose permitting jurisdiction reaches into its extraterritorial jurisdiction and a few neighboring communities); it is not a blend of every jurisdiction in Travis County.

About project values in Travis County: we do not publish a dollar total for Austin yet, because the source's valuation field failed our sanity validation. Most Austin permits carry no valuation at all (about 91% are blank or zero); of the rest, most carry a $1 placeholder, and the largest project's full value ($830 million) is stamped identically on 77 sibling permits, so adding the field up as published would report roughly $71.8 billion — a number the underlying records do not support. Rather than publish a figure we cannot stand behind, the Travis County report publishes permit counts, trades, categories, and monthly volumes only, until a de-duplicated valuation passes validation. Counts are unaffected: they were verified against the source's own totals (September 2026 matched exactly, 5,129 permits).

The San Francisco and Seattle feeds have passed their source audits and are in onboarding. Until a county's feed passes every gate above, its pages are labeled planned and any example report is labeled a sample with illustrative figures.

How to cite our figures

Every published figure carries its county, period, and source. Please cite it the same way: "PermitsByCounty data, [County], [Month Year] — as reported by [source jurisdiction]." That chain is what makes a number checkable, and checkable is the whole point.