Atlanta building permits and planning cases: what the city and DeKalb County publish, and how to read them

Atlanta is two counties, one city, and three permit systems, and they publish three different things. The City of Atlanta publishes the permit with its value but no phone. DeKalb County publishes the application with a phone and an email. Fulton County outside the city publishes little that can be read daily. Here is what each carries, how the city's planning cases run ahead of its permits, and how to read the set.

The City of Atlanta permit

The Department of City Planning issues building permits through its Accela portal and publishes the issued ones as a layer on the city's GIS. Each record carries the address and parcel, the permit type and the work description, the declared construction value, the issue date and the contractor of record. The value is there on 99 percent of permits, so the city feed is the one to sort by size. Groundbreak reads it every morning; the last 90 days held about 400 permits.

What the city permit does not carry is a phone or an email for the contractor. For a name-to-number, the company file on Groundbreak carries what the public record has for the firm across its jobs, which in Atlanta usually means a DeKalb application.

The DeKalb County application

DeKalb County publishes its building permit applications from the county GIS, and the application carries more than the city's permit: the applicant's name, phone and email, the work and the declared value. It carries no parcel number, so Groundbreak matches each to the parcel by address. In the last 90 days the county feed held about 350 applications with a phone on every one.

DeKalb covers the part of the city east of the county line (parts of Kirkwood, East Lake, Edgewood), plus Decatur, Brookhaven, Dunwoody, Chamblee, Tucker, Stone Mountain and Stonecrest. A Brookhaven tower or a Decatur mixed-use building shows a phone; a Midtown tower does not.

Fulton, Cobb and Gwinnett

Fulton County outside the city limits (Sandy Springs, Roswell, Alpharetta, Johns Creek, South Fulton) issues permits through each city's own system, and none publishes a daily feed Groundbreak can read reliably. Cobb's public portal holds only site plan review records; Gwinnett's search does not return a permit list by date. Each is listed as off, with the reason, on the coverage page. When one of them publishes a feed, it goes on.

What Fulton does publish is the assessor roll: the owner of record on every parcel, which Groundbreak reads daily. A Fulton project with no readable permit still has a parcel, an owner, and any City of Atlanta planning case.

The planning cases that run ahead

The City of Atlanta's Office of Zoning and Development reviews three kinds of case before a building permit, and all three are public at filing:

• Rezonings (Z- cases) to the Zoning Review Board and City Council. The request names the applicant and the change, and a change to a mixed-use or multifamily district is a project. See zoning cases.
• Special administrative permits (SAPs), the city's site plan review for projects in districts that require it: most of Midtown and Buckhead, the BeltLine overlay, the special public interest districts. The SAP names the applicant and shows the building. See site plans.
• Variances and special exceptions to the Board of Zoning Adjustment, which is where a parking reduction or a height variance for a specific building appears.

Groundbreak reads the city's planning feed daily (80 cases in the last 90 days, about half matched to a tracked project). The SAP is the lead for the design side: it is filed when the architect is hired and the GC is not.

Reading the set

The order in Atlanta, from the record:

1. Owner change on the Fulton or DeKalb roll, or a DeKalb deed the day it records (see the deeds guide).
2. A DeKalb security deed, if the site is in DeKalb and the loan records there. The lender is named.
3. A rezoning or an SAP at the city. The applicant and the design team are on it.
4. The building permit. City: contractor and value. DeKalb: applicant, phone, email, value.
5. Trade permits, which both the city and DeKalb issue but neither publishes with the sub named the way Miami-Dade does.

A project at step 3 with no step 4 is one where the general contractor is open. A project at step 4 is one where the trades are. In the city, the permit value tells you how big; in DeKalb, the phone tells you who to call.

Who this is for, and who it is not

If your territory is Sandy Springs, Roswell, Alpharetta or the rest of north Fulton, the permit feeds here will not cover you yet. The coverage page says which sources are off and why, and the honest answer for that reader today is the cities' own portals.

If you need one address, the city's GIS layer and DeKalb's are free. The feeds become worth having as a database when you sell into commercial jobs across the city and DeKalb and want the planning case, the permit, the DeKalb phone and the deed on one project. For that reader, the Atlanta development database carries all of it, with the phones, emails and parties on the Pro plan. The largest permits this month and most active general contractors tables are free.