About Building Seattle
Construction permit intelligence for the Seattle metro area — tracking who's building what, where, and with whom.
What Building Seattle does
Building Seattle collects, organizes, and publishes construction permit data from the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections. Every permit — from tenant improvements and residential additions to major commercial projects — is ingested, enriched, and made searchable through a fast, modern web interface.
The site connects permits to their addresses, contractors, projects, and neighborhoods, turning raw city records into structured, linkable pages that help you understand Seattle's construction market at a glance.
How the data works
Permit records are ingested from public SDCI data feeds and enriched through an automated pipeline that:
- Normalizes addresses and links permits to property pages
- Identifies contractors and builds contractor profile pages with project histories
- Groups related permits into inferred projects
- Maps permits to Seattle neighborhoods
- Tracks permit timelines, review cycles, and status changes
Data is refreshed regularly to reflect new permit applications, issuances, and status updates from SDCI. The methodology and sources page documents refresh timing, entity matching, classifications, and known limitations.
What you can do here
- Search permits — Browse live permits by address, neighborhood, type, status, contractor, and project value
- Research properties — See every permit filed at a specific address, with total values and active projects
- Track contractors — View contractor profiles with permit histories, active projects, and review cycle data
- Follow neighborhoods — See which neighborhoods have the most permit activity and which contractors are working there
- Monitor the market — Use the Insights pages for plan review timelines, permit pipelines, and housing activity
- Access the API — Pull permit data programmatically via the public API
Coverage
Building Seattle covers construction permits within the city of Seattle, Washington, sourced from the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections public records. The data includes permits across all permit types — commercial, residential, industrial, demolition, and more — spanning from historical records to the most recently filed applications.
Get in touch
Building Seattle is an independent project. For questions, corrections, or data inquiries, reach out via the site or file an issue on the project repository.