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The Shovels Mission

Most construction-related data is publicly available in theory, but difficult to access in practice. Data like building permits unlock information regarding contractor activity, job fees, and project distributions. Census and tax assessor data provides demographics and economic data. Parcel and property data provides the underlying grid for connecting the dots, geo-spatially. Shovels takes all these disparate data streams and brings them into a single platform, making it more accessible than ever.

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Data Practices

As data fanatics, we care a lot about data quality and robust pipelines. We’ve built our architecture from the ground up to handle 100s of millions of records at a time, to be ingested, parsed, categorized, enriched, and delivered. We use advanced LLMs that are self-trained to permit data specifically, to ensure that we’re capturing all the varied nuance of permit data across the wide range of permit jurisdictions and requirements.

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Data vs Insights

Data is the easy (once you have it). Insights are the more complicated part that require understanding the data, the market(s) interested in the data, and the knowing which dots to connect where in order to derive them. We’ve never been purely interested in raw data. The key for us is combining multiple data streams, where each source builds upon the others organically. This is no easy task, as there isn’t always an obvious foreign key to join everything together. Nor is it so simple to simply access these data streams. But that’s the hard work you pay us to do for you. This is how we’re able to deliver not just the data, but the insights surrounding it. Data plus insights equals intelligence, and that is the Shovels mission.

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What’s Next?

We have a lot of good ideas, and therefore a ton of work to do to bring the Shovels platform to the next level. If it’s construction-related, then we’re interested in it. We won’t give away everything now, but stay tuned to our LinkedIn and Blog for those updated when they come.