There are many sources that can help reporters break news stories or research a project of interest. While building permits may not be an obvious place to look for news tips, we’ve found that they can be a useful resource for generating stories about new or interesting commercial developments.
BuildZoom’s National Building Permit Database
BuildZoom is a remodeling and construction marketplace powered by a database that spans 3.7 million contractor license records and hundreds of millions of building permits from thousands of jurisdictions across the nation. Building permits often include rich detail, such as descriptions of projects’ scope and valuation, as well as contractors’ names, and job locations. These and other details enable us to identify and recommend the best contractors, and to offer insight into construction projects happening across the country.
Over the years, we have made our building permit data available for reporters, and developed relationships with many who regularly use our data to write stories – whether it be to highlight a new development, or learn more about an ongoing or past construction project. Our data have informed a wide range of national publications, including CNBC, Fortune, Yahoo News, Geek Wire, and Business Journals to name a few.
BuildZoom’s National Building Permit Database can help reporters write stories in these categories:
- Discover And Learn More About New Developments
- Stay Updated with Companies of Interest
- Examine Corporate Campuses and Facilities
Commercial Building Permit Data: Discover and Learn More About New Developments
Because we’ve developed strong relationships with many building departments across the country, we’ve been able to consistently add new permits to our database. The recency of our permits has helped alert reporters to new developments that have not yet been reported, and discover additional information about an existing project. These can include large commercial and real estate projects including residential complexes and health facilities, or consumer-interest developments such as openings for new food & drink establishments or retail stores.
Large-Scale Construction Permits
While a future large-scale development such as an apartment high-rise, medical facility, or data center can be publicly disclosed before a permit is filed, building permits can offer a different set of insights that were not previously known, such as the construction valuation, contractor name, or timeline of the project. The following articles are a few examples of news stories generated by BuildZoom’s National Building Permit Database.
New Restaurants, Breweries, and Retail Stores
Unlike large-scale developments, smaller projects such as new restaurants, breweries, or retail stores often do not entail public hearings held by local councils and are not the first projects to be discussed within the real estate community. Nonetheless, news relating to consumer-facing establishments can be of high public interest, and building permits can help alert reporters to those projects.
Search Building Permits for Companies of Interest
One of the advantages of BuildZoom’s National Building Permit Database is that it compiles messy data from disparate sources and standardizes them into one clean, structured format. This makes it much more manageable to search for a company’s construction activity across hundreds of jurisdictions nationwide.
Whether it be the start of a new Frank Gehry building for Facebook’s campus expansion (Left), a WeWork expansion in Boston (Center), or a major renovation at Adidas’ headquarters in Portland (Right), BuildZoom’s database can help reporters keep track of the companies relating to their beats.
Building Permit Data Analyses for Corporate Campuses and Facilities
In addition to being alerted of new building permits, the database also allows us to look back at the permits filed at a particular location. Through a property’s history of building permits, we are able to learn more about how long it took to build, the project’s estimated total job valuation, start and end dates, or the contractors who worked on it. Our latest permit-based stories including laying out the cost for Apple Park and exploring the scale of Amazon’s Seattle Headquarters have been reported in dozens of news publications.
The Cost of Apple Park
Few construction projects have been the focus of as much public discussion and speculation as Apple’s new multi-billion dollar headquarters in Cupertino, known as Apple Park. As the project reached completion in late 2017, we aggregated all the building permits filed for each of the 15 major structures – from the most expensive ‘spaceship’ building to the $360K reassembly of a historic barn. The entire project shows building permit costs exceeding $1 billion.
This compilation of information from building permits drew huge public attention, including the following outlets.
Amazon’s Seattle Headquarters
Amazon has made quite a splash in the news last year with its declaration to open a second headquarters – dubbed HQ2 – in a North American city. Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos claimed the new headquarters would be “a full equal” to its current headquarters in Seattle, begging the question: what can we learn about the scale and costs of the future HQ2 by examining the original headquarters?
Using building permit data, we mapped out all of the construction costs that went into each of the Amazon-owned buildings and the Amazon-leased office spaces across the Seattle metro area. We found that Amazon’s offices spanned 13.6 million square feet over 45+ structures costing over $1.9 billion in construction permit valuations.
This study was covered by many publications, including the following articles.
Make Reporting Easier By Using BuildZoom’s Data
There are myriad ways of leveraging building permits to generate news stories, and we are always happy to make our data available to help reporters with their next story or to supplement their research. We offer three ways of accessing our data:
1) Browse known addresses or neighborhoods in our Property Map
If you would like to explore properties yourself, let us know and we can provide login credentials to our Property Map. From the map, you are able to view permit histories of locations across the nation.
2) Individual research requests
If you do not know the location but are interested in looking at all permits that mention a specific keyword in the last weeks or months, let us know and we will send you the results in an excel spreadsheet. Search terms can be any keyword that would show up in a permit – from “Google Fiber” to “High School” to “solar panels”. We are also able to restrict to permits above certain job valuations, or search for specific contractors or business names.
3) Automated permit alerts
If you are interested in staying up to date with a particular type of development or a particular company, we are happy to set up a Permit Alert which will automatically notify you when a permit that matches your criteria enters our database. For example, if the criteria was set to flag any permit that mentioned “apartment” and has a job valuation over “5 million,” those permits would be sent in an email. Permit alerts are helpful for passively discovering new developments and for catching permits that we expect to be filed in the future.
If any of these services sound useful, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us by emailing [email protected].
For other media highlights, please visit our Press Page here.
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