

Show HN: 100M building permits mapped across the U.S - the_economist
https://www.buildzoom.com/map/nation-wide

======
astazangasta
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.

~~~
the_economist
We are working on it: [https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/san-francisco-
remodeling-acti...](https://www.buildzoom.com/blog/san-francisco-remodeling-
activity)

------
pimlottc
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?

~~~
the_economist
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.

------
rabble
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.

~~~
the_economist
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.

~~~
zo1
What sort of data sources? I'd imagine it's not simply government
interfaces/APIs. Scraping?

------
the_economist
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.

~~~
lifeformed
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?

~~~
the_economist
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!

------
mswen
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.

~~~
the_economist
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.

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

