Every US county on PermitFocus gets a single 0 to 100 Growth Score. It's our proprietary methodology: six factors blended into one rating, calibrated by our team based on deep market knowledge. This page tells you exactly what goes in and how, from the public record to your dashboard.
Four stages. Every number below is a live count from the PermitFocus database as of October 9, 2026.
US Census Bureau Building Permits Survey for every county, plus per-permit feeds from county and city portals (ArcGIS, Socrata, CKAN, Carto) where they exist. Each pull is logged as an ingestion run.
Records are de-duplicated on source, permit number, and event (issued or certificate of occupancy), then classified residential vs. commercial and new construction vs. everything else. Addresses are geocoded where the portal didn't.
The contractor of record on each permit is matched to its state license number, normalized across regional entities, and grouped case-insensitively. Owner-builder and non-builder filings are excluded from rankings.
Trailing-12-month counts, builder rankings by 90-day momentum, recorded subdivision plats for the pipeline factor, and the six-factor Growth Score, recomputed for every county. Refreshed weekly.
Counts are from the PermitFocus database on October 9, 2026 and move with each weekly refresh. Per-permit builder detail is deepest in Florida (Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Broward) plus Davidson TN and Travis TX; everywhere else is covered at the county level by Census BPS.
Every county's score is a weighted average of six independent factors. Each is normalized to 0 to 100 first, then combined. Click any county on PermitFocus to see the per-factor breakdown live. We don't hide the math.
How many new single-family and 1-4 unit residential permits the county pulled in the last 12 months. Log-scaled so a small market with 400 starts isn't treated as "basically zero." It's treated as small but real.
Year-over-year change in permit volume. A county pulling more permits this year than last earns a high trajectory score; one shrinking earns a low one. Captures whether the market is accelerating or decelerating.
How steady the permit flow is month to month. Volatile counties (boom-then-quiet cycles) earn lower consistency scores than counties with predictable activity. Lumber yards and truss plants prefer predictable demand.
3-year compound annual growth rate of county population. New construction follows population growth. A county with 3%/yr CAGR is fundamentally a stronger market than one with 0.2%/yr.
Whether the county sits in a major metropolitan corridor (tier 0), an exurban or minor MSA (tier 1), or rural (tier 2). Reflects the infrastructure-driven advantage of being on a major growth axis. Currently classified for Florida; nationwide MSA-tier rollout is in development.
How much future housing is approved but not yet built, measured via recorded subdivision plats. A county with 5,000 platted lots not yet permitted is a market with locked-in future volume.
For each factor, the raw input value is normalized to a 0 to 100 sub-score. The six sub-scores are then weighted-averaged into a single 0 to 100 final score. When a factor's data isn't available for a county, the remaining weights redistribute proportionally. No county is penalized for missing one data source.
Every release of the scoring algorithm is run against an internal baseline our team established by hand-rating FL counties from deep market knowledge. We use that comparison to tune weights and verify the model captures the intuitions we'd apply manually. The calibration data lives in app/calibrate (admin-only).
The score is a starting point, not a recommendation. Every county detail page on PermitFocus shows the per-factor breakdown so you can interrogate which drivers are pulling the score up or down, and decide for yourself whether the factor weights match your business.
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