Ask a general contractor how they track permit status and most will describe one of two workflows: they check a city portal manually, or they have an admin person who checks a city portal manually. The difference between the two is who is doing the checking, not whether the checking is systematic.
Ask a GC in the top 10% of their market the same question and the answer is different. Their leads don’t come from portal checks, they come from relationships formed months before permits are issued.
A note on terminology: “tracking permit status” in this context means monitoring which permits have been issued and when, not tracking approval or rejection outcomes. Canadian municipal open data covers issued permits only. There is no public record of rejected or withdrawn applications, and SiteWire does not publish permit approval rates because that data does not exist publicly.
The two-tier problem
Most GCs operate in reactive mode: they find out about permits after the fact. The permit was issued last Tuesday. They found it Friday. The developer already called three subs Monday. One sub recommended a GC. That GC is already in conversation.
The top-performing GCs don’t discover permits. They discover projects. The distinction matters because a project first appears as a planning application or development permit application, weeks to months before the building permit is issued, depending on the project type and municipality.
By the time a building permit is issued, the sophisticated players often already know the project. The permit is confirmation, not discovery.
What the manual workflow actually looks like
Here is a composite of how the “standard” GC business development workflow runs, based on how most mid-size contractors in BC and Alberta operate:
Monday morning: Someone checks the Vancouver open data portal, downloads the week’s new permits as a CSV, pastes them into a master spreadsheet, and highlights anything over $500K that looks relevant.
Problem one: They’re only checking Vancouver. Surrey, Burnaby, Coquitlam, those are separate portals with separate formats and someone has to choose to check them.
Problem two: The CSV has 80 to 150 new rows. Scanning that manually for relevant projects takes 20 to 40 minutes. Attention quality at row 90 is not the same as attention quality at row 10.
Problem three: The spreadsheet is maintained by whoever does this on Mondays. When that person is on vacation, the Monday check doesn’t happen. Three weeks later, someone realizes the spreadsheet hasn’t been updated, and they do a catch-up review. Three weeks of permits in one session, even lower attention quality.
Problem four: There is no alert. If a large permit dropped on a Wednesday that the top client’s developer filed for a new project in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, no one knows until the next Monday.
What the systematic workflow looks like
The GCs who do this well have shifted from pull to push. Instead of going to look for data, they have data delivered to them, filtered to what they care about.
The workflow:
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Define criteria once. Work type categories relevant to their scope, minimum declared value (typically $500K to $2M for GC-level work), target cities or regions, specific developer names if available.
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Receive a morning digest. Each day, new permits matching their criteria arrive in an email. The digest is pre-filtered, no manual scanning of 150 rows. Five to fifteen relevant permits, already matched.
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Qualify and action within the digest. Someone reviews the daily digest in 10 minutes. Any permit worth acting on gets a contact assigned and a CRM entry created.
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Track pre-permit applications separately. Development applications still in review, projects that haven’t received their building permit yet, are a separate queue. These are the pre-competition opportunities. The GC who contacts a developer during the development permit review phase is having a different conversation than the GC who calls after the building permit drops.
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Log contact history against the permit address. If you contacted a developer for a project at 123 Main and they went with someone else, you want to know that in 18 months when a new permit appears at 125 Main, same developer, different building.
What manual checking costs in lost bids
The cost of the manual approach is not primarily the time, it’s the systematic gaps.
Latency. If you check Monday and the permit was issued Thursday, you’re 4 business days behind anyone checking daily. In a market where subs are contacted within the first week of permit issuance, that gap matters.
Coverage. Manual checkers optimize for what’s convenient, their primary city, their primary work type. Permits from secondary cities and secondary work types that still fall within their scope get missed because the portal check is skipped that day.
Recency bias. When you scan 150 rows manually, your brain weights recent rows differently than earlier ones. Projects that appear at the top of the filtered list get more attention than ones buried in the middle. This is not a deliberate decision, it’s human.
No history. A manual spreadsheet tells you what was issued this week. It doesn’t tell you whether this developer has been active in this neighbourhood, whether they typically use the same subs, or whether this project is an anomaly or part of a pattern.
The competitive asymmetry
The contractors who have built systematic permit monitoring have a compounding advantage over those who haven’t. They identify opportunities earlier, contact developers during phases where relationships can form, and build a track record of projects that attracts more of the same.
The contractors still doing manual checks are not lazy, they’re busy. The permit check is one task among dozens. It gets done when there’s time, skipped when there isn’t, and never quite achieves the consistency that makes the data useful.
The gap is not awareness that permit data exists. Most contractors know about the open data portals. The gap is having a system that makes the data useful without requiring daily discipline to maintain.
SiteWire automates the permit monitoring workflow for contractors across Canada. Set your criteria once, receive a daily digest of matching new permits, and access development permit applications as pre-permit signals for Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa, typically 60 to 90 days before the building permit is issued.