Shovels
Shovels - Building permit and contractor intelligence
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Pick smarter locations

Building permits tell you what’s changing nearby and how long it takes to put shovels in the ground. Shovels brings these insights to the surface so you can determine the best locations for your next development.

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Partners

We partner with leading geospatial companies to bring you the best data and tools for your site selection process.

Esri Regrid

Shovels data science

Neighborhood Vitality Index (NVI)

Through our partnerships with Esri and Regrid, Shovels calculates NVI by comparing the relative permit density of home improvement projects by census tract in every major metropolitan area in the country. Use NVI to find the most actively improving neighborhoods.

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Custom reports.
Create custom reports in the schema and file format your data team prefers.
Filter by property type.
We use tax assessor data to filter by property type, including commercial, residential, and industrial buildings.
Refreshed monthly.
We add millions of new building permits and dozens of new jurisdictions to our database every month.
Nationwide coverage.
We cover all 48 states and 85% of the US population. Coverage is highest in the populated areas with the most active construction activity.
Commercial and residential.
We cover both commercial and residential building permits. Use NVI to find the most actively improving neighborhoods for retail, office, and industrial development.
By parcel, census tract, or ZIP.
We roll up NVI by parcel, census tract, and ZIP code, giving you the most granular data possible.

Modern workflow

The latest tech

We use modern geospatial and data science techniques to bring you the most accurate and useful data possible.

Push anywhere.
We support all major cloud storage providers, including AWS, Azure, and GCP. We also push to Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks.
Transfer securely.
We use SFTP and HTTPS to transfer your data securely. Let us do the data appending so your team can focus on what matters most.
New models.
We use AI and modern data science to derive new insights from permit, parcel, and census tract data.
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Explore our building permit and contractor data now

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