About this data ×

Note: This project is still in beta and the data is still being cleaned up.

BuildZoom's data is based on building permit records from 1423 cities, 613 counties, and 8 states.

Our data represents a significant portion of the building activity across the United States, and can be used for some interesting analysis. For example, you can see the real estate crash of 2006 and following recovery. You can see the rise of the solar industry. You can see Solar City grow from 0 permits in 2009 to one of the biggest contractors in the world by 2014. You can see the biggest projects in San Francisco between 2006 and 2014. The highest value single project in San Francisco was the Police Headquarters, built by Charles Pankow Builders.

Each municipality makes different data available. Some areas, such as the city of Los Angeles, do not make project values available to the public. Other areas do not make contractor names available to the public. As a whole the data set is fascinating, despite these issues.

Assembling a mishmash of data from hundreds of sources presents many challenges. For example, data in New York City goes back to 2000, but data in Cincinnati only goes back to 2000. We also deal with naming problems. We have matched KB Homes, one of the nations biggest homebuilders, to over 180 names, including KB Home, KB Homes, KB Homes of Raleigh, KB Home Coast, KB Home Indiana, and 175 others.

Clearly, there is a lot to be learned from analyzing the nation's building data. If you have any suggestions or questions, please email [email protected].

Some points of clarification
We currently show 106,378,810 permits between 2006 and 2014. Going back to 1990, we have indexed 212,107,779 permits, but we are not yet including these in our analysis because most areas do not go back that far. Of these 106 Million permits, only about 45.2 Million give us value data. Therefore you cannot think of the 485 billion dollars worth of permits we are showing as an accurate summary of the amount spent on building and remodeling over the past 8 years.

Thanks!