Evidence first.
Interpretation labelled.
Construction Brief monitors Calgary public records, conservatively links related records into projects, and explains which early opportunities may deserve commercial follow-up.
Coverage and cadence
Current coverage is Calgary only. The pipeline checks public building permits, development permits, and council or committee planning agendas daily. The free brief is sent Monday morning; daily delivery remains a design-partner pilot.
Public sources
- City of Calgary Building Permits, retrieved through the Socrata API.
- City of Calgary Development Permits, retrieved through the Socrata API.
- City council and committee agenda packages, downloaded as official PDFs and parsed for project mentions.
- City Parcel Address data, used as the canonical address reference.
Every source event retains its official URL and raw payload or extracted representation.
Collection and change history
Socrata sources are collected with GET requests—not web crawling. Daily jobs re-read a safe overlap around the latest source timestamp. Repeated ingestion is idempotent. Important public history is never overwritten: source and intelligence events are append-only.
Malformed records are retained with processing status and parsing-error fields rather than silently discarded.
Addresses, entities, and project linking
Addresses are normalized against Calgary parcel data. Company names remove punctuation, common abbreviations, and legal suffixes before conservative exact or fuzzy comparison. Related records may be linked by canonical address, organization, time proximity, and source identifiers.
False negatives are preferred over destructive false positives. Raw source records remain separate, links retain confidence and method, and uncertain company matches are not automatically collapsed.
Project stages
A stable lifecycle taxonomy spans planning signal, land use or zoning, development application, development approval, building-permit application, building-permit issuance, tender or procurement, likely construction, and completion. Stage assignment uses source type and explicit public status text. Weak evidence produces “Stage not yet determined.”
Commercial windows and trade relevance
Commercial windows are directional ranges derived from the current public-record stage. They are not published schedules. Each estimate includes a type, timing range, rationale, confidence, derivation timestamp, and rule version.
Trade relevance begins with transparent rules based on stated scope, project type, and stage. A project may be relevant to several trades. Exact bid dates or procurement commitments are never inferred without official evidence.
Facts, interpretations, and confidence
Verified facts include addresses, public statuses, disclosed values, official dates, applicants, and record identifiers when the source states them. Interpretations include lifecycle stage, likely commercial window, trade relevance, qualification category, and recommended action.
High, medium, low, and not-assessed confidence labels are derived from concrete evidence: whether a value is disclosed, whether an applicant or contractor is named, how many related records support the project, and the confidence of those links. Confidence applies to the interpretation—not to verified facts.
Project qualification
Ranking is transparent. It considers recency, disclosed value, project type, lifecycle stage, linked source count, applicant availability, and whether the project is early enough for outreach. Generic or low-information land-use records receive a penalty unless stronger evidence supports commercial relevance.
Categories are Top opportunity, Worth watching, General activity, and Low-information record. “Selected because” reasons expose the main contributing factors.
Known limitations
Public records can be delayed, corrected, incomplete, or removed from current-state datasets. Values are frequently undisclosed. Project teams and schedules may not appear. Address and entity matching can miss legitimate relationships. Agenda extraction can omit projects when PDFs are scanned or unusually formatted.
Construction Brief is research support, not a substitute for direct verification with the source agency or project team.
Corrections and review
Each project page has a private error-reporting form. Submissions retain the project, error type, explanation, optional correction and evidence URL, submission time, and resolution status. Optional submitter contact details are never exposed publicly.
Read the correction policy →