Methodology, sources, and limitations
How raw Seattle permit records become the searchable permits, properties, contractors, projects, neighborhoods, and analytical reports published on Building Seattle.
Primary source
The base feed is the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections public building-permit dataset published through Seattle Open Data. Building Seattle reads the official machine-readable feed at data.seattle.gov.
Where SDCI publishes a record-level detail URL, the corresponding permit page links directly to that official record.
Ingest and enrichment
A scheduled daily ingest upserts base permit fields. A separate enrichment job retrieves detail-page fields that are not consistently available in the open-data feed, including parcel number, review level, review milestones, contractor license details, housing-unit changes, and fuller descriptions.
Dates and statuses may change as SDCI reviewers update a record. Page-level “updated through” labels report the newest source-record timestamp included in that result, not the time a reader opened the page.
Derived entities and matching confidence
Permits are the evidence records. Address pages come from normalized street addresses. Projects group permits that share an address and have related timing and work signals. Contractor and participant pages use names and license information published on permits.
Entity grouping is deterministic but inferred. Similar names, shared addresses, incomplete licenses, or changed project descriptions can split one real-world entity into several pages or combine records that later need correction.
Values, units, and completion
Declared permit value is not verified project cost. It can omit land, design, financing, owner-provided work, later changes, or portions filed under related permits.
A permit record is not a completed project or dwelling. One property can have several related permits, and applied, issued, active, expired, and completed records represent different stages. Housing-unit fields are presented as reported and can be incomplete or revised.
Analytical classifications
Insight pages use documented, reproducible rules over public permit fields. ADU/DADU classifications look for explicit accessory-dwelling language. Commercial and tenant-improvement reports use the inclusion rules printed on each page. These are research views, not official SDCI classifications.
Corrections and reuse
Use the official SDCI detail link when a decision depends on a single permit. For bulk research, the dataset page and public API documentation describe reusable access paths.