How We Track Greenville Development

Pemberton Data Solutions compiles building-permit and planning activity across the greater Greenville, SC area into a single, regularly updated dataset. That dataset powers our interactive map and these story pages.

Where the data comes from

The pipeline now pulls from 55 city and county permit systems across 39 counties in South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee. The authoritative list, with per-jurisdiction update cadence, is on the permit data page. Each source is read from its official public system, including ArcGIS open-data services, eTRAKiT permit portals, and county GIS layers.

How often it updates

Permit and planning records are refreshed on a weekly cycle. Each story notes the permit's own application and issue dates. The "last 12 months" trend on a story reflects activity through the most recent pull for that jurisdiction.

What's included

Commercial and residential building permits, including new construction, additions, alterations, and demolitions, along with rezoning, annexation, and subdivision planning applications. For commercial projects we surface the address, permit numbers, declared valuation when the source provides it, applicant and contractor when listed, parcel identifiers, key dates, and scope of work.

How we handle personal information

We never publish an individual's name. Building permits are public records and many of them name a private homeowner. Owner and contractor names are stripped from the public map entirely, apart from a small sample of business entities shown as a product preview, and free-text fields such as scope of work and permit comments are scrubbed of personal names, phone numbers, and email addresses before publication. This is a firm line, not a best effort: South Carolina's Family Privacy Protection Act (S.C. Code § 30-2-50) makes it an offence to take personal information out of a government record and use it for commercial solicitation, and we treat the whole Upstate footprint that way regardless of state.

Addresses are handled by permit type. Alterations to existing homes are aggregated into roughly one-kilometre cells, so remodelling a house does not put your address on a public map. New construction and demolition show the site address, because a new building or a teardown is a change to the streetscape rather than a fact about whoever lives there. In both cases the address appears without a name attached.

What's not included

Valuation, contractor, and parcel data are only as complete as each source system exposes them. Some jurisdictions publish less than others, and we omit fields rather than guess. Coordinates for sources that do not publish geometry are derived from the parcel record or geocoded from the address, and are approximate to the parcel or block.

Corrections

Spot an error in a permit record? Email [email protected] and we'll review it against the source.