PermitFocus
PermitFocus turns building-permit, builder, and demographic data into a single decision view for trades and operators whose business follows new construction — lumber, roofing, HVAC, concrete, doors, paint, flooring, and more. Score every market in the country. See who's pulling permits. Pick where to be.
The enterprise platforms — Zonda, BuildZoom, Construction Monitor — make you book a demo and sign a contract before you see a thing. PermitFocus, you just open.
Every county in the country, scored for new-construction activity. Drill in, find the builders pulling permits, and pick where to be — all in one view.
You're sizing a new location. Re-routing a fleet. Chasing a builder you've heard about. Today that means a stack of subscriptions, a Census Bureau spreadsheet, three browser tabs of county permit portals, and somebody's gut. PermitFocus replaces all of it with one dashboard that updates itself.
No data team required. We do the ingest, the cleanup, the scoring, and the QA. You log in and use it.
Email, password, your company name. 7-day trial starts immediately. No card on file.
Subscribe to one state, several, or every county in the US. Coverage is FIPS-driven so adding markets is instant.
Every county gets a 0-100 growth score with the qualitative signal explaining why. Top builders, permit trends, and forecasts on every page.
Drop pins on the map for candidate locations — yards, branches, service areas. Compare drive-time catchments. Build a watchlist of builders to chase. Export the deck. Move.
Zonda, BuildZoom, and Construction Monitor are real platforms — made for big builders and enterprise budgets, sold through demos and annual contracts. PermitFocus is built for the operator actually making the call, and you can be using it two minutes from now.
See the full breakdown: vs Zonda · vs BuildZoom · vs Construction Monitor
Each piece works on its own. Together they replace four or five tools you're paying for today.
Every US county scored 0-100 on permit volume, YoY momentum, migration, employment, and corridor positioning. Sortable, filterable, transparent in methodology.
140k+ licensed builders indexed from public license + permit feeds. Top builders in every county, license history, recent permits, normalized across regional entities (Lennar Tampa = Lennar Florida = Lennar national).
Drop pins anywhere in the US. Compute permit catchment by miles or drive-time isochrones. Compare candidate sites side by side. Drive-time accounts for water, traffic, and bridges — radius does not.
36 months of trailing permit data per county with Holt-linear forecasts. Year-over-year deltas surface where markets are heating up or cooling down before everyone else notices.
Save the counties and builders you care about. Get a weekly email digest with new permits, score changes, and builder activity for everything on your list.
Notes, calls, and follow-ups attached to any builder or county. Your sales team's working file lives next to the data they need to make the call. No separate Salesforce instance required.
Cross-builder activity layer over an interactive map. See clustering at a glance — where are 3+ builders all pulling permits? That's where the next location goes.
CSV downloads on every county and builder profile. Branded PDF reports for any county. Hand the deck to leadership, the bank, or the board without rebuilding it in PowerPoint.
⌘K from anywhere. Type a county or builder name, hit enter. Designed for sales reps who need a number on a phone call, not a 12-click menu tree.
Not generic real-estate analytics. Not generic CRM. Tools shaped to the actual decisions trade and supply operators make every week.
You're picking between three sites in a region. Each has different drive-time catchments, different builder mixes, different permit trajectories. Today that decision is gut feel. Tomorrow it's a number.
Reps have a list. The list is stale. Half the builders on it haven't pulled a permit in 18 months. Meanwhile someone new is doing 80 starts a year three counties over and nobody's heard of them.
Two acquisition targets. Different markets, different builder bases, different growth profiles. The diligence team needs hard numbers in two weeks, not two months.
The same data that helps an LBM operator pick a yard helps a roofer or HVAC contractor pick a service area. Anyone whose business follows new single-family construction has the same questions. We answer them.
No black-box vendor licensing. No data you can't audit. Every number you see ties back to a source you can verify yourself.
Those are real estate intelligence platforms priced for builder-developer customers — typically $15-30k per market per year. PermitFocus is built for the supply side (LBM, trades, building products) at a fraction of the cost, with location-decision tools (drive-time catchments, candidate-yard comparisons) those platforms don't ship.
Yes — every US county is scored from Census BPS data. Per-permit detail (individual addresses + builder names) is currently available for select Florida counties (Hillsborough, Tampa, Charlotte, Lee, Manatee, Sarasota, Miami-Dade) with new counties added quarterly. Where deep coverage isn't yet live, you still get accurate volume + score.
The PermitFocus Growth Score is our proprietary methodology — permit volume, trajectory, consistency, demographic tailwinds, and corridor positioning blended into a single 0-100 market rating. Calibrated by our team based on deep market knowledge and applied nationwide. Every county detail page shows the underlying factor breakdown so you can verify the call yourself.
Anyone with a login on your account. Each user gets their own watchlists, notes, and saved analyses. Pricing scales with seats so you only pay for the people who actually use it.
Yes. Pro and Enterprise plans get CSV downloads on every county and every builder, plus branded PDF reports for any county. Enterprise also gets API access for system integrations.
No. Your watchlists, notes, and saved analyses are private to your account. We don't share, resell, or aggregate customer activity. The underlying permit data is public records — your usage of it is yours.
Yes. The same permit/builder data powers analysis for roofing, HVAC, plumbing, concrete, doors/windows, paint, and flooring. Choose your trade focus during onboarding and the dashboard scopes to the permit types relevant to your business.
Full access to your subscribed plan's features for 7 days. Cancel anytime. After day 14 you choose a plan or your account pauses — we never charge a card on file unless you've explicitly added one.
Start the trial, log in, and read your first county dashboard before your coffee gets cold.