Back when this newsletter was all mine, I had a section called "Things to do with permits." It was fun to think about and fun to write. I'd go through company Slack messages and public LinkedIn posts from the previous month and pick something interesting. Inevitably there was a customer use case that stood out.
That section doesn't work anymore. We're no longer just a permit data company. The interesting things to do no longer involve our permits table alone.
The future is everything.
This month is a big deal for us.
We just launched a new website with a lot of new information and pages. It started as a small project and snowballed into "let's just redo the whole thing." The team worked for months on this and did a super job.
We also rebuilt Shovels Online. If you like tables, it looks and feels a lot better. It features our new trust layer that helps you understand how reliable the underlying sources are. It's super cool. The next big push on this product is maps. We're calling it Shovels Lens and it might just blow your mind. I'll save it for next time.
The other big news this month is that we now have all four of our major datasets completely sourced by Shovels. Permits, Contractors, Decisions, and now… Properties.
We just launched our Shovels-sourced Properties table! It replaces our final bastion of licensed data. As I've shared before, we used to license permit data. We also used to license the property data that we merged onto our permits.
In March, we removed all of our licensed permit data. We've since replaced nearly all of it with our own sourcing and our coverage continues to grow.
I said this on LinkedIn, but I believe we have the most active permit jurisdiction coverage in the market. We print from 2,750 permit jurisdictions every month now. (Ask our competitors what their number is!)
But I digress. Back to the story.
We still relied on a third-party to enhance the property attributes on the permits. Today, they're gone, replaced with our Shovels-sourced Properties table.
Now every bit of data on the Shovels Permits table is sourced by us. One-hundred percent.
Doing our own sourcing offers a bunch of benefits:
- We can trace every field back to its canonical source
- We can control the refresh cadence and coverage
- We can mix and mash and price it however we want
- And I sleep better knowing we're not a data broker
So this is the interesting thing about our datasets now, and why I say "the future is everything."
Permits is not just permits. It's also properties. When you get our permit data, it's enriched, improved, enhanced by our properties data.
The same is (and will be even more) true the other way around: our properties and their parcels will be enriched by our permit data. So when a new addition gets added to a home, we don't wait for the tax assessor to add the square feet to the record. We do it as soon as that permit is finaled.
When a rezone decision gets approved, we update the use code on that parcel, which flows to the property address, which updates the permit table.
The interesting work we're doing now is connecting all of these datasets together and understanding how, where, and when to update, join, and merge them. It's unique to Shovels. I haven't heard of anyone else doing this.
Things to do with permits? No.
Things to do with Shovels.
P.S. We are on another hiring binge. Take a look!