How to read these records
Where the data comes from
Four public datasets from the City and County of San Francisco: Building Permits; Building Permits Contacts, which lists the contractor attached to each permit; the city’s address list; and the assessor’s property roll, which gives a property’s year built, size, units and zoning. The site reloads them every night. It covers permits filed since 1 January 2000, in San Francisco only.
Searching in your own words
Words typed into the search bar that are not a project type, an address or a number are compared with every permit description by meaning, not keywords, using a text embedding (OpenAI, text-embedding-3-small). The 256 closest permits are kept, weak matches are dropped, and the contractors are ranked from what remains; up to five contractors whose name contains every one of the words are listed too. Your words are sent to OpenAI to be compared and are not stored. With an address, only permits at buildings of the same class (single-family, two-family, apartments) count. A search in your own words offers the exact-words search instead, and back: permits whose description contains every word, read from the 1,024 permits the database matches best for any of those words. On a results page the search box holds the words that made it, to edit: there, “or” between terms finds permits with either, and “and” or nothing between them finds permits with all.
What a license number means here
It is the contractor license number written on the permit. This site does not check the license with the state. It cannot tell you whether a license is active, what work it covers, or whether the contractor is bonded and insured. Check that with the Contractors State License Board.
Permit outcomes
- Completed
- final inspection signed off
- In progress
- filed or issued within the last 3 years, no final yet
- Never finaled
- no final sign-off 3 years after it was issued (or filed, if never issued)
- Expired or cancelled
- expired, cancelled, withdrawn, revoked or denied
“Completed” means the city’s own status for the permit is “complete”. This site does not check inspection records itself. A permit is “never finaled” when it has no final sign-off and is not expired or cancelled, and its last step is more than 3 years old: the date it was issued, or the date it was filed if it was never issued. Anything newer is “in progress”.
About a quarter of permits are never finaled. Often the work was done and nobody called for the final inspection, so it is a weaker signal than an expired permit.
How contractors are ranked
By completed permits as a share of permits with an outcome, adjusted so that 9 of 9 ranks above 2 of 2. Permits still in progress do not count for or against.
What the record cannot show
A completed permit means the city signed off. It says nothing about workmanship, price or how the client felt. The contractor on a permit may be the general contractor for a larger job. Project types are matched by keywords in the permit description, so some permits are missed and some are wrongly included.