Superior building
permit data

High quality, clean, comprehensive, and intelligent data for better analytic results.

Kukun has a large team who pull building permits from all the largest cities in America, via daily automated systems, monthly semi-automated, and manual methods, depending on the city. The team also pulls county records and assessor records.

One of the core capabilities is the ability to transform unformatted and inconsistent data into standardized, structured formats. This ensures data reliability and facilitates seamless analysis. Given that the data on permits uses different abbreviations by region and by contractor, extracting the actual building activity expressed in the permit is far more challenging than using simple techniques like natural language processing.

Kukun establishes a universal permit taxonomy for both residential and commercial permits, standardizing permit categories for the nation. This enables data comparison and cross-city analysis. The Kukun taxonomy is flexible with several layers for easy roll-ups or deep dives.

We categorize permits based on the size and community impact of the associated projects. Projects that have scale and importance to the surrounding neighborhood are identified, like new hospitals, restaurants, retail, etc.

Identifying the most important activities and assigning the Kukun taxonomies is a major part of the extracting deeper intelligence from permits. Permits are designed to describe a functional component of the process, and very often the larger project description does not require a permit.

Geo-driven analytics provide information on how new projects impact their surrounding communities. This feature aids in urban planning, zoning decisions, and infrastructure development. Kukun can provide maps of the more significant permits that impact any give property or community, for easier visualization for analysts, developers, and consumers.

The system categorizes commercial permits into three main types: new construction, building conversions, and demolitions. New construction must meet a minimum size and/or budget to qualify as a meaningful permit for city impact. For example, a 160 square foot outbuilding in an industrial zone is new construction, but its unimportant for the businesses and people in the city. On the other hand, building conversions are interesting as from a “local services” perspective, a conversion has the same impact on a community as a new building. For example, when an office building converts to a restaurant and a fitness center, it has an impact on the local population. Demolitions are almost always fascinating for people, and it typically means something new is coming in the same location.

Building permits are classified by business type, allowing for the identification of specific types of businesses associated with the permits. The business type taxonomy is extensive, allowing for most commercial buildings to be identified, and includes, but not limited to, schools, universities, churches, municipal buildings, shopping centers, restaurants, auto dealerships, grocery stores, drug stores, hardware stores, industrial buildings, warehouses, and scores more.Building permits are classified by business type, allowing for the identification of specific types of businesses associated with the permits. The business type taxonomy is extensive, allowing for most commercial buildings to be identified, and includes, but not limited to, schools, universities, churches, municipal buildings, shopping centers, restaurants, auto dealerships, grocery stores, drug stores, hardware stores, industrial buildings, warehouses, and scores more.

The system enables detailed analytics based on specific company names, providing insights into the activities of individual organizations within the dataset. This is particularly interesting for retail, where banks, restaurant chains, and a great many other highly recognized brands are growing or shrinking.

All commercial elements, including building activity, business type, and company name, can be seamlessly combined into a unified report. These various layers of analytics, when combined with geographic differences and captured over time, offer almost endless analytics and learning, previously not possible.