TycheDataGuide:BuildingPermitData

Forsyth County, GA Building Permits

What is Building Permit Data?

Building permit data provides insight on the construction activities within an area. Most jurisdictions require a building permit for any new construction, deconstruction, or modification of existing residential and commercial buildings and infrastructure. Jurisdictions want to understand and control construction to ensure that any modifications to a property's improvement can be reflected in any property taxes that need to be paid. Jurisdictions also use building permits to ensure safe construction that abides by codes, where local inspectors can validate safety and code compliance.

Building permit data becomes a great proxy for understanding the development activity at individual locations, and for understanding economic trends and happenings when the data is analyzed at scale. Building permit data, because it is used in workflows and many people touch and use the data, tends to have a high level of quality and conformity to the local building permit specification.

Where does it come from?

Building permit data and any associated workflows are typically managed by one of several departments within a government. The owner of the data may be the planning department, the buildings and codes department, the building deparment or any other department associated with property, construction and inspections.

Governments frequently have an online system or portal that is used to manage building permits from end-to-end. These software systems - developed by Accela, CitizenServe, PermitFlow and others - allow anyone from a citizen-property owner to a contractor to create and manage their building permits and any government interactions required.

As a function of the building permit data existing within an online system, data extracts may not be available or maintained on the local government's open data site. We suggest a four step process when you attempt to acquire building permit data - 1) look on any open data site, 2) look at the building permit portal to see if any building permit summary datasets are available, 3) email the building permit owner asking for the data, 4) file a FOIL.

What are the primary and secondary data elements?

The data elements that are found in building permit data can include:

• identifiers - one or more unique identifiers used for tracking the building permit
• dates - including the issue date, finalized data, and completion date
• location - the address(es) or parcel(s) associated with the permit
• costs - the total cost of work being done, the cost of the permit fees
• vendor / contractor - the contractor who is performing the work
• categorization - one or more codes or classes that describe the type of work, such as "New Construction", "Demolition", "Electrical"
• property and building type - one or more codes that describe the property at a high level (Residential, Commercial) and/or at a detailed level (Single family home, Duplex, Retail)
• work description - a longer-form description of the work which could include any data points associated with the installation, details of where the construction is happening, or what the objective is

As with other datasets we recommend requesting documentation which could include information about potential field values, their data types, adherence with state or other conventions, and more.

What are questions you can answer with building permit data?

Building permit data has a surprising number of analytical uses. Building permit data can be used to analyze individual properties and macro trends. Questions that you answer could include:

1. How has the quantity of building permits changed over time, has the rate gone up or down?
2. What vendors perform the most work of a particular type?
3. Where is new development happening within the city?
4. What are the median costs for particular activities such as demolitions or installations?
5. How quickly is construction execution coming to completion?
6. When large scale commercial construction is happening at a single location, how are various specialties brought to bear?
   

Tips and tricks for using building permit data

1. For any data element that is conveyed via a fixed code or definition, make sure that you have a complete list of all legitimate values and test for compliance with that set of values.
2. For all of the date fields within a building permit dataset, ensure that you have a good definition on what each date field means.