Show HN: 100M building permits mapped across the U.S | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: 100M building permits mapped across the U.S

buildzoom.com

27 pointsthe_economist15 comments

So you are showing high level geographic density information and you choose to represent it as individual points? Tsk, tsk. How about some heatmaps, topos, anything else? As is the country level view is useless.

We are working on it: https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/san-francisco-remodeling-acti...

The contractor scoring is confusing to me. When I see scores in the high-90s, I assume it's out of 100, but then I found others above 100. I see there's an explanation page (although only on the contractor page, an extra click away from property-info), but it still doesn't doesn't let me know what the full range is. 120? 150? 200? No limit?

There is no limit to a contractor's BuildZoom score, although no one has achieved a score above 160. A single negative feedback from a homeowner can take a contractor below 60, if the review is bad enough, the property owner proves it to be true, and the contractor does not remedy the issue.

Any contractor over 100 is pretty safe in our book, although anytime you are hiring a contractor, you should do the following:

1) Check their license with the local licensing authority 2) Get at least 3 quotes 3) Speak to their last two clients 4) Pay in stages

BuildZoom is handling all of the above on projects we manage (other than payments), but if you are going to hire without using our "get a bid" tool, definitely do the above.

Seems cool, but it's missing a lot of listings. Compare the city's listing of permits at protlandmaps.com and buildzoom and you see lots of missing ones from BZ. It does have a nice UI and seems cool. Oh also you have to implement the zillow style grouping otherwise folks won't even zoom in enough to see the data you do have.

Can you give me an example of a couple missing addresses? Thanks! We should have all of them, but we are dealing with millions of addresses from ~1000 data sources so we are still ironing out the wrinkles in the normalization, etc.

What sort of data sources? I'd imagine it's not simply government interfaces/APIs. Scraping?

that's http://portlandmaps.com for those confused

This tool is still a bit beta-ish, but you can use it to browse neighborhoods, see your home's remodeling history (in about 1000 cities, not everywhere), and some other cool stuff.

If there is a particular restaurant buildout or home that you like, you can use this tool to figure out who built it.

Let me know what you think! david@buildzoom.com

Thanks.

How were you able to get data from NYC? I know the NYC BIS website enabled intelligent blockers to prevent web scraping. There is also no alternative for all of the permits data.

The map is very hard to see; there is almost no contrast. The color of rivers and roads are almost identical. Maybe it looks different on your monitor?

I see your point. We were mostly focused on dealing with the permit normalization / mapping problems. We'll tweak the colors. Thanks for the feedback!

Is your selection of cities driven by how accessible the cities permit data is? It doesn't look like it is driven by size of the metro area.

We are working on an economic index based on the building permit data, so a lot of it depends on where our economist tells us to go. He likes to dig deep in certain areas for his projects.

But we also pay attention to the size of an area (number of permits) versus how easy they make the data to get.

Cool! What did you use for geocoding 100M addresses?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com