← All posts · May 10, 2026 · 3 min read

Why we built PermitFocus

An LBM operator told us what they pay for vendor data. Then they told us what they actually use. The gap is what we're filling.

The problem

If you sell lumber, roofing, HVAC, plumbing, doors, paint, or flooring into new single-family construction, you're trying to answer a small set of questions every quarter:

• Where should the next location go?
• Which builders should the team be calling?
• Is this market heating up or cooling down?
• Should we acquire that yard or this one?

The data to answer those questions is, mostly, public. Census Bureau publishes monthly building-permit data for every county. State licensing registries list every contractor. County permit portals (some of them) publish per-permit detail. The IRS publishes county-to-county migration. The BEA publishes employment trends.

Stitching all that together into something an operator can use takes time, technical chops, and ongoing maintenance. So most operators do one of two things: they pay a real-estate intelligence vendor $15-30k per market per year, or they make decisions on gut feel.

"We pay $42,000 a year for a [vendor] license that's mostly used to look up one or two builder names per week. The catchment-analysis tools we actually need for picking new locations? They don't have those."

What we're building

PermitFocus turns that public-record data into a single decision view. Every US county gets a 0-100 growth score, color-coded against analyst ground truth. Builder directories built from license registries and permit attribution. Drive-time catchment analysis you can run in 10 seconds. CRM-lite to track who you've called.

Built for trade and supply operators specifically — which means the score weights tilt by trade (roofers care more about completions; LBM cares about issuance), the location analyzer accounts for water and traffic, and the price tag is something a regional operator can sign off on without pulling a board approval.

What we're not

We're not a builder-developer competitive intelligence tool. If you sell new homes to consumers, Zonda and Hanley Wood are going to serve you better — they have decades of MLS-integrated data, a network of builder relationships, and tooling shaped for that workflow.

We're for the people who sell into those builders. Different question, different tool.

Where we are

Today: 3,022 US counties scored, 760K single-family permits/yr tracked from Census BPS, 140K licensed builders indexed from FL DBPR with growing per-state coverage, drive-time catchment analysis live, CRM-lite live, weekly digest live. Score model accuracy is 72% within ±10 of analyst ground truth on the calibration set we built it against.

Per-permit detail (addresses + builders) is currently best in seven Florida counties — Hillsborough, Tampa, Charlotte, Lee, Manatee, Sarasota, Miami-Dade. We're adding more counties quarterly as we wire up additional permit portals.

What's next

More counties with deep coverage. More trade-specific scoring. Better forecasts. Eventually: integrations into the CRMs and ERPs you already use, so the data lands where decisions actually happen.

If you're an LBM, roofing, HVAC, or trade operator and you've got an opinion about what would be most useful — tell us. We're early enough that we'll listen.