About Constructel NYC
Constructel NYC tracks New York City's construction pipeline — new building filings, permit activity, top contractors, and skyscraper projects — directly from primary municipal data, and tracks the public bidding market for construction opportunities. For a plain, table-form list of every dataset used and how often each updates, see Data & Sources.
Live Data
Developments, Skyscraper Watch, Permits, Top Contractors, and the Borough reports pull directly from NYC Open Data's DOB Job Application Filings and DOB Permit Issuance datasets, refreshed on every page load.
Companies Methodology
Companies are ranked by DOB permit volume — the only company-level activity metric NYC's public data supports. There is no public dataset of contractor revenue, executive rosters, or safety ratings, so none are shown or implied. "Key employee" data is the actual licensed professional of record on file for each permit; safety/compliance records shown on a company's page are address-level municipal filings, not violations attributed to that contractor. Because DOB's own records spell the same company's name inconsistently (e.g. "Structure Tone Inc" vs. "Structure Tone Inc." vs. "Structure Tone"), rankings merge near-duplicate spellings that differ only by a legal-entity suffix (Inc/Corp/LLC/etc.) — never by matching partial or similar names, which would risk merging genuinely different companies.
Leadership
NYC has no public dataset of company officers or ownership, so a company page shows an executive only when the company's own site or a named, reputable press source (not a data-broker listing) discloses one — each entry links to where we found it and the date we checked. Most small subcontractors don't publish an executive name anywhere findable, and that's shown honestly as "not publicly disclosed" rather than guessed.
Why No Safety Score
We deliberately don't show a safety rating on company pages. NYC's violation records aren't attributed to contractors (ECB violations are filed against the property owner; DOB's equipment-compliance data has no company field at all) — showing one would mean misattributing. Company pages link to the real government lookup tools (NY Dept. of State entity search, OSHA's establishment search, NYS DOL's WARN dashboard) so you can search the primary source yourself.
Future Developments
The pipeline view is filtered to DOB job statuses that mean "filed, still in plan review" — pre-filing through plan-exam approved — excluding disapproved filings and anything already permitted or built. Cost estimates at this stage are often placeholder values DOB doesn't require to be finalized until later in review.
The Skyline
Distinct from Future Developments — this shows New Building filings with an issued permit and DOB activity in the last 3 years, meant to represent buildings actually under construction right now. A permit-issued status alone isn't reliable for that on its own: some older jobs never get formally closed out in DOB's system long after a building is finished and occupied (we found one from 2012 for a tower open since 2011), which the 3-year activity window filters out. Proposed heights are the applicant's filed figure, not a certified as-built measurement.
Risk & Compliance Signals
Company pages also show DOB Stop Work Orders and a name-matched lookup against New York State's official WARN Dashboard (layoff and closure notices for 50+ employees). We deliberately do not compute a single "risk score" from these — a score would imply a precision the underlying matches don't have. Stop Work Orders are address-level unless a job number in the order's text matches one of the company's own permits, in which case it's marked directly linked; WARN matches are by business name only and are explicitly approximate, since a WARN filing can be under a parent company, subsidiary, or DBA that differs from the name on a DOB permit. Both link back to their official source so you can verify independently.
Spend Dashboard
Total filed construction value is summed directly from every DOB job filing's own "initial cost" estimate for the current year — the applicant's filed figure, not an audited or adjusted total, and not literal money spent to date.
Companies by Trade
Painting, plumbing, electrical, and other trade pages classify companies by keyword match against their own DOB-registered business name — not a self-reported specialty, since NYC doesn't publish one. Keywords are deliberately conservative (full words only) to avoid false matches, so a real trade contractor with an unusual name may be missing; that's an undercount, not a misclassification. Where a well-known trade contractor's primary work isn't captured in DOB data at all — most often because it's regulated by a different agency, like bridge painting under NYSDOT/MTA rather than NYC DOB — we add it as a separately labeled, hand-verified callout instead of leaving it out or inventing a permit history for it.
Jobs
Listings come live from the City of New York's own Jobs NYC Postings feed, filtered to construction-relevant categories and titles. This covers public-sector (civil-service) openings only — private contractors and developers post through their own channels or job boards like Indeed and LinkedIn, which require a registered partner API this build doesn't have.
Awarded Construction Contracts
Live from the city's own "Recent Contract Awards" dataset (Mayor's Office of Contract Services), filtered to construction and construction-related-services categories — real agencies, vendors, amounts, and award dates, updated daily. The contract amount is the value on file at time of award, not necessarily total lifetime spend for contracts later modified or extended. Vendor names link to a company profile using the same lookup as Companies; many awarded vendors (large infrastructure and design firms especially) won't have a DOB permit history, so a "no history found" result there is expected, not a bug.
Bidding & Opportunities
Live from the city's own "Current Solicitations" dataset — the pre-award counterpart to Recent Contract Awards, same publisher and category taxonomy, filtered to currently-open construction opportunities. This covers NYC agency procurement (via PASSPort) only; MTA, DASNY, and Port Authority run separate procurement systems with no open API, so their opportunities aren't included here.
Constructel NYC is an independent project and is not affiliated with the City of New York or the Department of Buildings.