The pipeline nobody tracks
Every quarter, somewhere around 230 restaurant and bar buildout permits get pulled in New York City. Some are new builds. Some are renovations. Some are tenant improvements on spaces that have been sitting empty for two years. All of it is public record through the Department of Buildings, and none of it is aggregated in a way that's useful to the people who actually need it.
Who needs it? Equipment vendors. Architects. Staffing agencies. Liquor distributors. Consultants. Anyone whose revenue depends on being in a conversation with an operator before they open, not after.
The window for getting in front of an operator before they're open is narrow. Once a restaurant is operational, vendor relationships are mostly established, build-out decisions are made, and consulting relationships are in place. The value is in knowing who's building six months before they open.
What the data actually covers
New York City's Department of Buildings open data covers permit applications and approvals. For restaurants and bars, the relevant permit types include work type codes for commercial fit-out (PA permits for plumbing, EQ for equipment, BL for building). Cross-referenced with business type codes, you can identify buildout activity with reasonable accuracy.
The State Liquor Authority posts license applications in near-real-time. An SLA application is usually filed 90-120 days before a bar or restaurant expects to open. That's your lead time.
The Department of Health pre-operational inspections are a third signal. A pre-op inspection request means they're close, usually 30-60 days from opening.
Stacked together: DOB permit, SLA application, DOH pre-op gives you a pretty clear signal of stage-of-buildout for any given location.
The tool I built to track it
I built a feed called BuildoutFeed that aggregates these three data sources, geocodes the results, and outputs a dashboard showing active buildouts by neighborhood, permit stage, and business type.
The data pipeline is: DOB API (updated daily), SLA public license search (scraped weekly), and DOH data export (updated monthly). These feed into a structured database that deduplicates by address and business name, and outputs a clean list with stage indicators.
The implementation is not complicated in principle. DOB has a documented API. SLA has a public search interface. DOH exports structured data. The complexity is in the matching logic, because the same address appears with different formatting across all three sources, and business names at permit stage are often different from the DBA name at opening.
Why this doesn't exist as a product yet
It's a narrow market. The people who would pay for this, vendors and service providers targeting pre-opening restaurants, are distributed across a dozen different industries that don't coordinate. There's no natural buyer aggregation.
The data quality issue is also real. A DOB permit doesn't guarantee a restaurant is going to open. A significant percentage of buildouts stall, change concept, or get abandoned. Any feed built on this data needs to be treated as a signal, not a guarantee, which makes it harder to productize cleanly.
That said, for the right user, the signal is enormously valuable even with a 20-30% false positive rate. If you're a spirits distributor and I give you a list of 50 bars currently in buildout in Manhattan and Brooklyn, getting 35 of them right is a significant lead advantage.
Building your own version
If you're in a position to use this data, here's the minimum viable approach.
DOB API is documented at data.cityofnewyork.us. Set up a weekly pull filtered to commercial work types. Export to a spreadsheet. Layer in the SLA license search by searching "applied" status applications in your target boroughs. Cross-reference by address.
You won't get full automation without some development work, but even a weekly manual pull from both sources, done in 45 minutes, gives you a working pre-opening pipeline that most vendors in this space don't have.
The Punch List (thepunchlist.com) is one of the only commercial products doing something adjacent to this. Worth looking at if you want to see what a productized version looks like, though their coverage and update frequency have limits.
The broader principle
Public data is almost always underused. The city publishes an enormous amount of information that's relevant to people in the hospitality industry: building permits, health inspection results, SLA actions, zoning changes. Most operators and vendors don't look at any of it systematically.
Building a feed on top of public data is a systems problem. It's not glamorous. It requires patience with messy data and imperfect matching. But the output, a real-time view of what's happening in your market before everyone else can see it, is the kind of competitive information that used to require a full-time researcher. Now it requires a well-configured API connection and a few hours of data modeling.
