Data disclaimer

PermitReady tracks public permit records so your team sees changes sooner. It is a monitoring layer, not the system of record — here is exactly where the data comes from and what that means for accuracy.

Where the data comes from

• Public agency portals. Permit status is read from the issuing authority's own public lookup — for example Contra Costa County's Accela Citizen Access portal, which covers unincorporated Contra Costa County plus the contract cities of Clayton, Hercules, Lafayette, Moraga and Orinda. No login, credentials, or non-public access is ever used.
• Notification emails you forward. The richest source: agency notification emails (status changes, plan-check comment letters, fee notices) that the applicant already receives and forwards to a PermitReady inbox. This is the only source that reliably carries correction text.
• Published open datasets. Where an agency publishes machine-readable data — such as San Francisco DBI's permits dataset on DataSF — that feed is used instead of reading the portal.

Caveats on correctness

• The agency's record is the truth. PermitReady mirrors it with a delay. Portals are typically checked on a schedule (not continuously), open datasets refresh on the agency's cadence (often nightly), and email arrives when the agency sends it. A status shown here can lag the counter by hours or days.
• Statuses are normalized. Every agency names its statuses differently ("Corrections Required" vs. "Information Requested"). PermitReady maps them onto one shared vocabulary, and keeps the agency's verbatim status alongside. When a status string is new to us it is flagged as unmapped rather than guessed.
• Derived numbers are derived. Ball-in-court, plan-check round counts, agency-held day counts, readiness levels and stall alerts are computed from observed status changes. They are working estimates for schedule management, not agency-certified figures.
• Coverage varies by jurisdiction. Some authorities are fully wired, some are registry entries awaiting a first live record, and incorporated cities with their own building departments are separate authorities entirely. A permit outside covered jurisdictions will not appear.
• Gaps happen. Portals rate-limit, change their markup, or go down; emails get filtered; datasets publish late. PermitReady is built to surface silence (that is what a STALLED alert is), but silence can also mean a data gap on our side.

Questions or corrections

Spotted a wrong status or a mapping that reads wrong? Email schlegelcrypto@gmail.com — the raw agency string is stored with every record, so miscategorizations are quick to fix.