It’s 2023, and if your municipal building inspection and permitting office hasn’t switched to online permitting, you’re behind the times. Lots of municipal and county governments switched to online permitting years ago, because it’s so much easier and faster than doing things the old-fashioned way.
Online permitting eliminates the need to create endless duplicates of paperwork for review, so it can save your office time and money. It’ll make things easier for citizens who need to get permits, and it’ll speed up the permitting process and bring some transparency to what was once a completely opaque review schedule. You’ll pass savings onto the consumer, and you’ll find that fewer people try to get around the permitting requirements for their home improvements.
Give Your Citizens the Ease and Efficiency They Need
You can do just about everything else online these days, so why should you have to go stand in line at a dreary government office in the middle of a workday to get a building permit? Homeowners and contractors alike want the ease, efficiency, and convenience of being able to apply for building permits online. Contractors, especially, don’t need to waste daylight hours going to city hall to apply for permits when they could put that time to better use on the job site. Government permitting software can allow homeowners and contractors alike to submit permit applications and plans, schedule inspections, track the progress of the project, calculate fees, manage workflow, and even obtain customer service online. Contractors can file their applications right from the worksite to save time.
Issue Permits Faster
Government permitting software can allow you to issue building and other permits much faster. You won’t have to make a new copy of the paperwork for every level of review it undergoes – you can pass the same electronic documents up through all of them. It’s in everyone’s best interest to keep the waiting period for permits as short as possible by processing them quickly. When permits take a long time to approve, circumstances can change. The economy can take a turn, rendering a project unaffordable. If a permit takes months or years to issue, the population of the area can grow, requiring more affordable housing. Issuing permits faster can help developers keep abreast of changes like these.
Reduce Government Costs
The more time officials spend working on a permit issuance, the more money it costs your local government. Paper forms and duplicates cost a lot of money, too. The county of Sonoma in California saved $800,000 by implementing an e-permitting solution for solar panel permits, and that savings accounts strictly for the reduction in time and resources spent scanning paper applications into the system. The less paper and ink you use and the less time you spend processing applications, the more money your office can save.
Pass Savings onto the Consumer
You can pass that very savings onto the developers, homeowners, and even renters of your community. A lengthy, slow permitting process ties up developers’ funds, which can lead to them accumulating even more fees, interest on loans, and other expenses. By speeding up the permitting process, you can reduce these costs, which makes things more affordable for homeowners and even for renters, since landlords won’t have to charge as much rent to make up for the costs of maintaining and upgrading their rental properties.
Discourage Unpermitted Work
Plenty of homeowners balk at the idea of getting building permits for the work they do on their homes. It’s true that some people see permitting requirements as an intrusion by the local government into their private lives. But in many cases, homeowners don’t want to get building permits because of the time it will take to get the permits issued and the hassle of going to city hall to fill out paperwork and discussing site plans. If you can make getting permits easier, these people will be more amenable to getting permits before they do work. So you can cut down on incidents of unpermitted work and keep more of the homes in your community up to code, while spending less time and fewer resources on code enforcement.
It’s well past time for your government agency to implement an online permitting system. Online permitting software will streamline the permitting process and make things easier for everyone, from your agency’s employees to contractors, homeowners, and landlords. Get with the times and implement a digital permitting solution today – your citizens will love it!
