Congratulations Mayor Landes!

A BIG Congratulations to our very own Don Landes on his successful campaign for the Mayor's Office.

We are excited and proud to have the new Mayor with us. It's always nice to have friends in high places, but it's even better to have friends with integrity that are willing to work and sacrifice their time and energy for the betterment of their community and country.

Don brings a lot to our team already and now he will have the opportunity to gain invaluable insight into the operations, challenges and issues facing city government today.

We work very closely with thousands of cities and jurisdictions throughout the Western US and are grateful for the many people out there that help us accomplish this business of tracking and reporting on the building and construction industry.

You can reach Don via his email here at the Construction Monitor with your questions or comments; donl@constructionmonitor.com


Justin Harris
Business Development Director
Construction Monitor

Octobers Largest Single Family Homes

One of the things I love to do with our data is look up groups of projects by certain parameters.
A favorite is new single family homes by valuation.

So far for the month of October, we have over 100 multi-million dollar homes that have been collected by our field agents across the Western US. The typical areas you would expect show up like Jackson Hole, Seattle, Santa Barbara, Kauai, Paradise Valley, Rancho Santa Fe, San Francisco, Bellevue and on and on....

The thing that surprised me were the projects like the 13,000 SF home in tiny little Pine Valley, Utah and the 9,000 SF $3M home in Tulare, CA.

The custom high end projects are out there, we see them every week, you just need to know where to look.

This months winner (so far) is a 15,000 SF custom home in Aspen, Colorado...
Estimated worth of $30 million.

Have an incredible day!

Justin Harris
Business Development Director
Construction Monitor

Last Weeks Totals

I wanted to share a bit of information with all of you, something I think is very relative to our
current economic climate. Weekly totals for new building permits collected by the Construction Monitor.

New building permits are one of the market indicators out there to help you gauge the pulse of our industry and the activity in your area.

So here is the breakdown on last weeks totals.... We want to keep you updated on these numbers so please check back often or even sign on to follow the blog and see the new numbers each time we post the new update.... It's not only good to know what is happening right now in your market, it's vital to your business.

Permit Totals for Latest Editions 10/11/2009 - 10/17/2009

Permits	Area	Total Valuation
112	Central Coast, CA	$6,712,249
136	Cntrl San Joaquin Valley, CA	$15,015,919
234	Colorado Springs, CO	$15,593,543
486	Denver Metro, CO	$30,789,390
94	Hawaiian Islands, HI	$3,000,990
140	Inland Empire, WA	$25,083,977
122	Kern County, CA	$9,702,918
207	Las Vegas Metro, NV	$21,095,124
1,182	Los Angeles County, CA	$75,500,371
130	New Mexico, NM	$16,359,654
199	North San Joaquin Valley, CA	$20,052,382
57	Northern Colorado, CO	$4,143,167
56	Northern Utah, UT	$5,328,958
426	Orange County, CA	$23,174,926
311	Phoenix Metro, AZ	$52,569,191
405	Portland Metro, OR	$86,767,288
549	Puget Sound, WA	$104,691,791
162	Riverside County, CA	$18,962,551
467	Sacramento Valley, CA	$28,941,862
150	San Bernardino County, CA	$15,078,209
247	San Diego County, CA	$35,163,082
403	San Francisco East Bay, CA	$32,872,602
186	San Francisco North Bay, CA	$7,450,934
201	San Francisco South Bay, CA	$13,281,097
402	San Francisco West Bay, CA	$20,344,305
177	Southern Idaho, ID	$26,513,724
29	Southwestern Utah, UT	$4,857,191
92	Tucson Metro, AZ	$9,935,323
83	Ventura County, CA	$1,744,173
221	Wasatch Front, UT	$35,304,333
175	Western Montana, MT	$19,599,887
70	Western Slope, CO	$23,755,888

Total Permits Published Last Week #7,911 for $809,386,999.00

(Are you getting your share of the pie? If not, let us help with that).

Have a great day!
Justin Harris - Business Development Director - Construction Monitor

Problem with Emails sent to customers

As previously mentioned, we are using a new server to send emails. This change, which happened about 3 weeks ago affected some customers. There were some customers receiving the Puget Sound edition who did not get their emails when normally sent as part of our weekly publication. There may have been customers in other areas that were also affected.

We have resolved this issue, however, in so doing we made another mistake and some Puget Sound customers may have received 4 copies of this weeks Puget Sound Edition.

We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you.

Please call or email us at support@constructionmonitor.com if you have any other questions or concerns.

Changing File Names

3 weeks ago we slightly modified the way we send emails. We are now using a new server with more bandwidth. This means that emails are sent to customers in a matter of minutes, instead of hours. This is makes the Construction Monitor information even more timely.

As part of this upgrade we were attaching files with a different naming convention. The names given to the files, while unique, gave no indication of the area, week or anything else. After hearing from you we understand that is important, especially to those who subscribe to multiple areas, to be able to determine certain things about a file just from looking at it.

So, the files that you receive via email will now be named using the following pattern:

State Abbreviaton
Area Abbreviation
Year
Week
Type of permits (Commercial, Pool, All)

These are seperated by a hyphen, so an examle is: "UT-WF-2009-37-All.pdf"

This will make sorting files easy for you and best of all, you know at a glance what is contained in the file which makes picking one out of a list of many very simple.

Permit Stats For 6 Major Markets, 1st Half Of 2008 vs 2009.

One of the great things about our website, albeit underused, is the building statistics area.

With a few mouse clicks you can pull data up based on an area, type of construction and time frame and do comparisons to previous months, quarters, and years.

Interesting things show up if you look hard enough, for example, in the chart above comparing the 1st half of 2008 to 2009, you can see how single family home permits have sustained a steady drop across these 6 markets in the Western US, however remodeling and additions look to be holding their own and in one market have drastically increased.

Use the statistics and tools available to you, you just might learn something new!

Make it a great day!

Justin Harris
Business Development Director
Construction Monitor

Can't I just get it myself?

I love it when I hear the comment, "It's public record, can't I just go get it myself?"

Some of our best lifelong clients have "been there and done that" and wouldn't think of ever doing it again.... Here's why;

1. Get in the car, fuel up at nearly $3 a gal. & proceede to fight traffic.
2. Search for parking, nothing close or free near the building, pay a fee and park.
3. Start searching the building for the right department. Wait in line.
4. Request the permits, you might get a friendly & helpful technician or you might get asked 20 questions. Eventually, hopefully, you will get to view the documents.
5. Start writing stuff down, or pay another fee for copies or lists.
6. Drive back to your office.
7. Sit down and go over what you got, only to find out some of the contact info is missing, now you Google people trying to find a way to track them down.
8. Several hours later you've made some progress and have some leads, time to sell!
9. You made a few calls but you don't have much time left in the day so you take your leads home and start typing up or hand addressing envelopes and letters.
10. Your exhausted, frustrated and rethinking the whole process.

The following week you call Construction Monitor, where for less than the cost of your daily cappuccino, they do it all for you so you can do what you do best...
Sell Your Products and Services!

Pics above are of Audrey our awesome data collector in the Salt Lake City market out
doing her thing - Go Audrey!

Have a great day!

Justin Harris
Business Development Director
Construction Monitor