A year ago, this felt like a pipe dream…
Getting our geodatabase live. Learning the Esri ecosystem. Working our way through their rigorous curation process. Now we can officially say it: Shovels is in the Esri Living Atlas of the World.
For anyone unfamiliar, the Living Atlas is the largest digital repository of spatial content in the world—built directly into ArcGIS and trusted by GIS professionals from NASA and NOAA to state and local governments, utilities, and major enterprises. It's where organizations go to find reliable, well-documented geospatial data without having to hunt through millions of potentially unreliable layers.
And now, our building permit data is part of it.
What This Actually Means
If you're an Esri ArcGIS user, you can now add Shovels' permit data to your maps with just a few clicks. No API integration. No data pipelines to set up. It just works.
Our latest feature layer focuses on electrical permits—EV chargers, solar installations, battery storage, panel upgrades—so users can immediately visualize where electrification is happening across the country. This is particularly powerful for utilities trying to stay ahead of load changes, telecom companies planning network deployments, and real estate professionals identifying emerging growth areas.
The Living Atlas nomination process is heavily reviewed. Esri curators investigate the account, the source of the data, and the quality of the content. Items need a completeness score of 80 or higher just to be nominated. Being accepted means Esri looked at our data and gave it their stamp of approval.
That's a big deal for us.
One Use Case: The Utility Problem We're Solving
Pat Hohl, who spent years as a distribution engineering manager before joining Esri, recently sat down with our CEO Ryan Buckley to discuss exactly why this matters. As Pat put it in a recent Energy Central interview:
"As a distribution engineering manager, I had a problem that kept me up at night: we were frequently playing catch-up with customer load additions. A homeowner would install a Level 2 EV charger, upgrade from gas heat to a heat pump, or add an electric water heater, adding load we were simply unaware of."
Each of those changes requires a permit. And now, utilities using ArcGIS can see those permits directly in their mapping environment—before the equipment fails, before the transformer gives up, before the costly emergency overtime call.
How We Got Here
Esri is a relationship-driven company. Everything is built on trust and credibility. We're fortunate to have built strong relationships inside Esri over the past year, and those connections helped us navigate the nomination and curation process.
Here's how it works for those curious about the path:
Step 1: Preparation. Your content has to exist as an item in ArcGIS Online, shared publicly, with well-documented metadata so others understand what they've found.
Step 2: Nomination. You visit the Living Atlas website, sign in, and nominate your content. Each item gets a completeness score—you need 80 or higher.
Step 3: Curation. An Esri staff member reviews everything: the account, the data source, the quality, the documentation. They work with you to make the item ready for widespread use.
We went through all of it. And we passed.
What's Next
Our commercial partners within the Esri ecosystem can now use our Living Atlas layers to introduce Shovels to their clients—some of the biggest companies in the US. For utilities, telecom providers, real estate firms, and climate tech companies already using ArcGIS, this is the easiest possible way to start working with our data.
And this is just the beginning. We're already planning to expand our Living Atlas offerings with additional permit categories and contractor data.
If you're an ArcGIS user, check out all of our feature layers here, including: electrical permits, roofing and new construction. You can add them to your maps and start seeing where real construction is happening across your service territory.
For everyone else, this is proof of what we've been building: permit data that's clean enough, standardized enough, and reliable enough to earn a place in the world's most trusted spatial data library.
We're beyond excited about this milestone.
Also note: we'll have booths at both Esri FedGIS in Washington DC on Feb 10-11 and Esri User Conference in San Diego on July 11-13. Swing by and map it up with us!
Ready to explore Shovels permit data in ArcGIS? Contact our team to learn more, or check out our GIS solutions page for additional resources.