Public records, read carefully.

Markets and cities

A city is where the permits come from. Every home belongs to exactly one, and what we cover is promised city by city: Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, Boca Raton and Delray Beach. A market is a group of cities buyers treat as one place: Fort Lauderdale area (Fort Lauderdale and Pompano Beach) and Boca & Delray (Boca Raton and Delray Beach). Markets set the weekly email and the default place on lists, and stand in for a city’s benchmark when its own sample is thin. They never appear in a page’s address.

Coverage by city

• Lot to keysEvery new-home permit since Jan 2021, each stage as it’s reached, and every sale.

Sources in Fort Lauderdale, in full

• LauderBuild, the city’s permit portal: every new-home permit (record numbers beginning BLD-RNC) since 2021, with the licensed contractor, the declared permit value, the plan description, and the dated documents filed during construction.
• The city’s open permit feed: permits from March 2021 to March 2026, including new construction, demolition, dock and seawall work and certificate-of-occupancy applications.
• The tax parcel roll: lot size, flood zone, base flood elevation, ownership and up to five recorded sales per parcel.
• City GIS: parcel boundaries and mapped waterbodies.
• Aerial photography: six-inch photos flown each January for the Broward County Property Appraiser, published by the City of Fort Lauderdale (2016–2020) and Broward County (2022 on). A home’s page compares its lot before work began with the newest flight, and shows the slider only where the two actually differ. Cards and share images show the newest flight too; if the county’s server is down, a card shows USDA’s public-domain NAIP photo instead. The map’s satellite view is Esri World Imagery.

How stages are read

In Fort Lauderdale, builders must file documents with the city as work passes each inspection. We map them to five stages, and a stage only counts if it comes after the one before it:

• Permitted: the new-construction permit is filed.
• Foundation: soil bearing or pile log reports, termite pre-treatment, the under-construction elevation certificate or a spot survey.
• Going vertical: concrete block (CMU) inspection letters, truss drawings or engineering field reports.
• Finishes: insulation certificates, blower-door tests, the final survey and elevation certificate, or landscape and paving permits.
• Complete: a certificate-of-occupancy packet actually submitted (the city opens placeholder CO records early, and we ignore those), the home appearing on the tax roll, or a recorded sale.

In Pompano Beach, Boca Raton and Delray Beach, the city’s portal logs each inspection as it passes, and the same five stages come from those: Foundation from footing, slab or pile inspections; Going vertical from tie-beam, column, framing or truss inspections; Finishes from insulation, drywall or blower-door inspections; Complete from the certificate of occupancy or the building final, the home appearing on the tax roll, or a recorded sale.

Status badges

• Filed: the new-home permit is applied for but the city hasn’t issued it yet (still in review or awaiting issuance), and no construction documents are on file. Filed homes aren’t counted as rising, and no stage is lit until the permit is issued.
• Rising: permitted and not yet finished, with a live permit (the city extends a permit at each passed inspection) or city records in the past 90 days.
• Quiet: the permit has lapsed (expired, or past its expiration date) with no city record in 90 days, or it’s an application the city hasn’t issued in over a year. No stake is lit for a permit that was never issued. Projects sometimes stall over financing, redesign or a sale.
• Complete: a certificate-of-occupancy packet submitted, or the home on the tax roll as built.
• Sold: a recorded sale of the finished home.
• Townhome projects wear the same badges, plus Selling (some units have recorded sales), Sold out (every unit has) and Stalled (nothing moving for more than 18 months, or the site changed hands). See Townhomes and villa pairs.

What the labels mean

• Likely spec: the record shows evidence the home is being built to sell: for example, the company that owns the lot has sold other new homes, the owner’s name matches the builder, or the home was listed before its certificate of occupancy. Each home’s badge says which. A company-owned lot on its own isn’t enough, and it’s never the builder’s confirmation. Every other home is labeled Custom.
• Lot resold: the lot changed hands again before there’s proof a home was finished on it (a certificate of occupancy, a final inspection, or a 2021-or-later year built on the tax roll). That’s a land resale, not a sale of the home, so the build stays on the list as active.
• Declared permit value: the construction value the builder puts on the permit, which sets the permit fee. It runs well below the real cost: one 6,600 sq ft waterfront home was declared at $750K.
• Townhomes: 3+ attached homes, each on its own lot. Villa pairs: two attached homes sold separately, each on its own lot. Duplex: two homes in one building on one lot, sold together; a duplex is listed with the houses.

Estimates and benchmarks

Build time runs from the new-construction permit to the first submitted certificate-of-occupancy packet, for homes permitted 2021 to 2023 (old enough that slow builds have finished too). In Fort Lauderdale, across 95 waterfront homes the median is 33.1 months, and the middle half take 26.6 to 39.9 months (28.3 months across all 175 homes). In Pompano Beach, across 18 waterfront homes the median is 37.5 months, and the middle half take 23.8 to 40.6 months (19.7 months across all 162 homes). In Boca Raton, across 72 waterfront homes the median is 23.9 months, and the middle half take 19.6 to 31 months (23.2 months across all 250 homes). In Delray Beach, across 36 waterfront homes the median is 25.9 months, and the middle half take 21.3 to 31.1 months (19.6 months across all 388 homes).

A home is compared with its own city: on the water with homes on the water, off it with homes off it, since each city’s permits and inspections run on their own clock. Where a city has fewer than 30 finished homes of that kind, the comparison uses its market’s, then every city’s, and the chart key names which. A builder’s pace is each of their finished homes against its own city’s typical build, then the middle of those differences, so building in a slower city never counts against them.

Estimated completion is a window, not a date: the permit date plus the middle half of build times for homes like it (on the water, or off it), never earlier than today. While the permit is still in review the count starts today, since building can’t start before the city issues it. When a build is already behind that pace for the stage it has reached, no window is shown. It is an estimate, not a builder’s commitment.

Lot prices are the last arms-length sale before the home went vertical; a sale is the first one after the home is finished. Deeds recorded at the same price on several parcels are multi-lot deals and are left out, as are deeds below the lot price (partial or related-party transfers).

The likely sale price

Homes still rising that aren’t listed show a likely sale range: what a finished home like it has been selling for nearby, from the lot’s price and recorded sales of new homes. Each range is fitted on what finished new homes sold for against what their lot cost, on a log scale, so the multiple falls as lots get pricier: a lot that cost twice as much comes out at about 1.7 times the house, not twice. The fit also knows the side of the water and the city, and the range is the middle half of how far actual sales fell from it. A range never runs past the highest new-home sale of the last three years in its neighborhood on the same side of the water (in its city, where the neighborhood has fewer than five), and one that falls entirely above or below those sales isn't shown. It’s fitted on 418 finished new-home sales since 2020, each with its lot price. Pompano Beach doesn’t show a likely price yet, until the model is checked against its own sales. When those sales disagree too much (the top of the range more than twice the bottom), no range is shown. It’s our estimate, not an appraisal or the builder’s asking price, and builders can correct it once they claim their profile.

The lot calculator

The “Does it pencil?” calculator on every lot report is a build-and-sell pro forma: sale price minus land, build, soft costs, carry and selling costs. Its build-cost defaults step up with what homes sell for nearby. Tested against 148 recorded Fort Lauderdale build-and-sell deals: with these build costs the calculator's land budget is a median 100% of what the builders actually paid for the lot, and within 25% of it on 87 of the 148 (the old defaults came to 41%). Pompano Beach doesn’t have enough recorded build-and-sell deals of its own yet, so its calculator starts from Fort Lauderdale’s. Those deals all sold for $400 or more a square foot, so where new homes sell for less the calculator doesn’t guess: it says there’s no fair default until you enter a build cost. Every number is editable, and a builder’s bid should replace the build cost.

How accurate it is in Fort Lauderdale

Checked against 50 hand-verified homes as of Oct 2026: the status is right on 49 (98%), the “permitted” date falls within 30 days of the real permit on 49 (98%), and the builder is right on 49 (98%). Each refresh is scored against the same set, and misses are fixed at the source rule rather than home by home.

Permit times

A permit’s time runs from the new-home permit application to the day the city issued it, from the city’s own permit records. The headline figure covers permits issued in the last six months, compared with the six months before; the month-by-month chart groups permits by the month they were issued, so a slow month means the permits issued then had waited longer. A gap of more than three years is a reissued or revived application, not one review, and is left out. Fort Lauderdale’s records don’t say when a permit was issued, so there the first step runs from the application to the first foundation record, and includes the review.

Waiting now counts the applications the city hasn’t issued yet, with nothing built and nothing gone quiet: how long each has waited so far, as of the day the records were last checked. The steps after the permit run between the stage records above (foundation, walls, finishes and the certificate-of-occupancy packet), for homes that finished each step in the last year. A figure needs at least 5 permits, and a month at least 3.

Florida law (F.S. 553.791) lets a builder hire a private provider to review the plans instead of the city. The headline figures count every permit; where a city’s permits say a private provider reviewed the plans, the page also times those apart from the city’s own reviews, and a permit that names a provider only for inspections counts with the city’s.

Townhomes and villa pairs

Fort Lauderdale permits a townhome row one unit at a time: each unit gets its own new-home permit, with the same record type and construction documents as a house, and a separate site-work permit covers the common areas (the driveway, utilities and landscaping). We group the unit permits into one project by that site-work permit, the permits’ shared parcel, and permits filed together on the same street by the same contractor. Today that’s 177 projects, 59 of them rising.

Pompano Beach files one application per unit too, often naming the building’s master permit (“Unit 3 of master 23-6776”). There we group units by that master permit, by the plat their lots were recorded on, and by applications filed together on one street by the same builder or owner. A whole-building application (“new 6 unit townhouse”) counts its units before the lots are split.

• Townhomes: three or more attached homes, each on its own lot and sold on its own.
• Villa pairs: the two sides of a duplex split onto two lots and sold separately. The city permits them one side at a time.
• Duplex: two homes in one building on one lot, sold together as one property. That’s a house on this site, with a Duplex tag, not a townhome. When a duplex is later split onto two lots, it becomes a villa pair.
• Condos (buildings where units are condominium parcels, not lots) are left out.

In Boca Raton and Delray Beach, each townhouse unit is listed on its own, as a home, rather than grouped into a project.

How units are found on the tax roll

Each townhome unit gets its own 12-digit folio when the plat or lot split is recorded, usually well before it’s built. We find a project’s units three ways: the unit addresses on the permits (including suffixes like “#102”), the project name the roll writes into each lot’s legal description (“Unit 802 8Hundred North Townhouses”), and the parent parcel named on the permits. A new unit shows on the roll as a vacant lot, then as a single-family home with a year built, then with its first sale. The roll has no townhouse code, so a folio’s use code alone doesn’t say which homes are attached.

Stages, sales and prices

Each unit’s stage is read from its own documents, exactly as for a house. A project’s stakes show the stage most units have reached, dated by the first unit to reach each one, with a count of units under each stake. A unit’s sale is its first arms-length sale after it was built; later ones are resales. The developer buying the whole site in one deed is the land cost, never a unit sale. Price per square foot uses the roll’s adjusted area, which is close to under air; the gross area includes garages and would understate it by about a fifth.

Townhome units get their own build-time benchmark in each city, apart from houses: in Fort Lauderdale, a median 23 months from permit to certificate of occupancy across 51 townhome units (the middle half take 20.7 to 25.7), and 23.7 months across 41 villa-pair units; and in Pompano Beach, a median 25.4 months from permit to certificate of occupancy across 212 townhome units (the middle half take 13.9 to 44.8). A project’s estimated completion uses its city’s.

Projects without sales yet can show a likely price per unit: the plan’s size times the middle half of what new townhome units sold for per square foot nearby (the same neighborhood with at least five sales, otherwise on the same side of the water citywide). It’s an estimate, not an appraisal or the builder’s price.

Why declared value understates cost. Each unit permit carries its own declared value, and those run far below what the homes cost or sell for. 8Hundred North Townhouses declared about $420K per unit on its permits; the units sold for a median of about $1.66M. The declared value sets the permit fee and covers construction only, and even that at the builder’s own figure; a sale price also pays for the land, design, financing and profit.

Renovations

Builder profiles also list major renovations: whole-home alteration permits pulled by a licensed general contractor on homes that later sold. They round out a builder’s top sales, but they appear only on builder profiles and never count toward new homes, build times or any market figure.

Known limits

• The cities covered are Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, Boca Raton and Delray Beach, each within its own city limits: a home outside them isn’t tracked, even with a covered city’s mailing address.
• New permit applications start as general records and take their new-home number a few weeks later, so the newest filings appear with a short delay.
• Declared permit values are the builder’s own figure and understate the final cost.
• Waterfront means the parcel boundary touches a city-mapped waterbody. It says nothing about depth, bridges or dockage.
• Builders come from the licensed contractor on the permit; a builder with several companies may appear more than once.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, especially about a home you own or a builder you run, tell us and we’ll fix it or explain the record behind it. Builders can also claim their profile to add photos and plans.

Privacy

We don’t publish homeowners’ names, even though they’re public record, and we don’t store contractors’ phone numbers. Following a home needs only an email address.