GRAIL

Project

One declared job at one site. Columbus repeats the whole build cost on every permit filed against a job, so these are valued at the maximum rather than the sum — summing instead reported $984M against $723M.

Site

One address. A building runs several projects at once, so both numbers are shown: downtown over two years, 187 projects stand on 115 sites.

Filing

A permit declaring no build cost — signage, mechanical and inspection paperwork. Counted and named, never added to a total.

Declared build cost

What the filer wrote on the application. Not an appraisal, not a sale price, and not the property's worth.

Signal

A record ranked by how much it should change your read of an address. Signage is a record but rarely a signal, so it is off by default.

• Every US countyPlanned

  Around 3,143 of them. The county is the right unit because the county holds the parcel — assessors are county-level almost everywhere, and parcel plus class code is the spine everything else hangs on. Most publish through the same kind of endpoint, and several states publish a statewide layer that covers dozens at once. The real cost is not the count: property class codes are state schemes, not national, so each state needs its own mapping or the same filter quietly means different things in different places.

• The next 100 metrosNext

  Ordered by how much a jurisdiction publishes rather than by population. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Austin all answer on the same open-data API today, so one client reaches all of them. Every source is probed and its licence read before it is listed — a map is only worth as much as the provenance behind it.

• Filtering by what a place isBuilding

  Commercial, residential, industrial, vacant — and the verticals under them: warehouses, truck terminals, gas stations, retail, small office. Plus distance to a highway interchange, because "near the freeway" is the question people actually ask.

• API studioPlanned

  An API over the same records the map reads, and a way to publish your own — a filter you have tuned, offered as an endpoint others can call. The gating already built for the map applies unchanged: no personal data, metered rows, and compositions that would make a consumer report refused rather than served.

Donations fund this list. Nothing on it is gated behind giving — what GRAIL does today stays free whether you give or not.

• •Imagery is 3-inch only in Kentucky. Nationwide coverage falls back to roughly 1-metre NAIP, about an order of magnitude coarser.
• •Parcel boundaries come from county GIS and are typically a few percent out from the deeded acreage. Good for orientation, not for anything legal.
• •Rural addresses geocode poorly. Some do not appear in state address data at all.