Where Does a Seattle Tenant Rep Find a Building's Permit History, and Can an AI Assistant Pull It?

A permit is a public record that someone paid to change a building. That makes the permit file the closest public proxy for what an owner has invested, and for what is still in progress. Three things are worth reading on any building on your client's shortlist.

First, the recent capital projects: description and estimated project cost show whether the landlord has filed real work on the building in the last few years, or whether the latest filing is an old tenant build-out. Second, open work: a permit that is still active can mean construction noise or an unfinished scope during your client's term. Third, the certificate of occupancy status. Seattle's Department of Construction and Inspections says a temporary certificate of occupancy has an expiration date and is tied to an active building permit, so a TCO that is still open on a building you are touring deserves a question to the landlord.

Do not over-read the reverse. SDCI also says tenant improvements do not require a certificate of occupancy unless the building code occupancy classification changes, so a missing certificate is not a red flag by itself.

A permit file does not replace a physical tour or a building engineer's answer. It tells you where to point your questions.

Seattle posts building permits as an open dataset on the city's data portal. In the live feed, each permit carries a permit number, permit class, a free-text description, estimated project cost, current status, the original address, contractor company name, latitude and longitude, and review-cycle counts. There is no tenant field.

That last point shapes how you use it. You can search by address and read what was filed for a building. You cannot search by company name to find where a prospect is building out, because the company is usually absent or buried in the description text. Treat the description as something to read, not something to filter on.

Every city and county keeps its own permit system, so a search that covers Seattle and the Eastside is at least two searches with two sets of fields and two refresh schedules. That fragmentation is the problem Ploti's pitch rests on. A tenant rep comparing six buildings across three jurisdictions is doing this lookup by hand six times.

According to PLOT Daily's October 14 report, Ploti collects public property records, including zoning, permits and planning decisions, stores them in searchable datasets and links results back to their sources. Users query the data from ChatGPT or Claude through MCP, the open standard that lets an assistant call outside tools. The company says it has queryable data across 40 states and names developers, land investors and brokers as users.

Pricing, as reported: $50 per county for the first five counties, with lower rates after that. Five counties cost $250 a month and include the whole team and 100 monthly credits. A delivered data request uses 3 credits, agent work uses credits based on effort, and extra credits cost $1 each.

If an assistant cannot find a record, it can submit a collection request. The article says collected datasets then become available to other subscribers in that county, without disclosing who asked, and that the team that pays for collection does not get exclusive access.

The one case study in the article is the company's own: 1,823 meeting documents processed for an unnamed developer evaluating a Georgia rezoning, producing 324 cases from 2005 to 2026 in about two and a half days. It names no customer and no county, so treat it as a vendor claim. The article also does not list Washington counties, so Washington coverage is unconfirmed, not ruled out.

1. Which of my counties and cities are covered, by name, and from what start year?
2. Does every answer link to the source permit record, so I can verify the line before I repeat it to a client?
3. What is the last refresh date for each jurisdiction?
4. What happens when a record is missing, how long does collection take, and who else can see what I asked for?

The fourth question matters more than it looks. Which building you ask about can reveal which building your client is considering.

Permit history is a proxy. A building can be well maintained with no filings, and a heavily permitted building can be a sign of a landlord fixing problems, not investing. The landlord's property manager can often tell you the same thing in a phone call, and many deals turn on rent, timing and concessions long before anyone reads a permit.

On cost, for a boutique shop that checks a handful of buildings a quarter, the free city dataset may be enough, and $250 a month for five counties may not pencil. The Ploti example is vendor-reported with no named customer, and an assistant that reads free-text permit descriptions can misread them. Verify against the permit record every time.

Take a building from a current tour list. Search the city dataset by address and write down three things: the last filed capital project and its estimated cost, any permit still open, and the certificate of occupancy status if one applies. Time it. Then ask an assistant the same question, require source links, and compare. What it missed, and what you had to supply by hand, is your spec for a permit tool.

At BrokerHQ we are working on permit and parcel history keyed to building identity, so a lookup lands on the right building the first time. Not every piece is live today, and we will say which ones are when they ship.

• PLOT Daily, "Ploti connects local property records to ChatGPT and Claude," October 14, 2026.
• City of Seattle open data portal, Building Permits dataset (live feed field list checked October 18, 2026).
• Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections, Tip 120, "Getting a Certificate of Occupancy."