Pre-construction leads 30–120 days before ConstructConnect sees them, 60–180 days before Dodge picks up the phone

cityminutes.ai extracts public planning records and hands your estimating team structured project leads with architect-of-record, square footage, applicant, staff recommendation, and hearing date, weeks-to-months before the bid goes competitive. Automation replaces the 200-phone-reporter model Dodge has been running since 1891. You get the lead. You get the architect. You get the room.

Primary CTA: See pre-construction leads for your region Secondary CTA: Talk to a pre-con BD specialist

Who this page is for

You are a VP of Pre-Construction, Director of Pre-Con, Pre-Construction Manager, Chief Estimator, BD Director, Project Sourcing Lead, or Work Acquisition Manager at a commercial GC ($100M–$2B revenue), a specialty trade (concrete, steel, MEP, envelope, excavation), a design-build firm, or a homebuilder with a commercial arm. Your reports include 2–6 estimators and a BD/sourcing person. You sit in a Monday pipeline huddle with the President. You spend 80% of your day in downstream bid/ITB tools (iSqFt, Dodge, Blue Book, BuildingConnected) and 20% in upstream sourcing — and you want to invert that ratio, because every minute upstream is measurably more bid wins.

The problem

It's 7:00 a.m. Monday. You open ConstructConnect. Saved filter: Texas industrial > $10M, "planning stage." 14 new rows overnight. You run through them. Nine are projects your estimator already knows about because the owner called your CEO last month. Four are duplicates of rows you saw last week. One is new — a $62M distribution center near Fort Worth — and by the time you read the record it's already tagged "design development," which means the architect has been hired, the schematic is done, the owner has a GC shortlist, and you're 90 days from bid. The row is 120 days old. You'll be lucky to be bid 6 of 8. You are racing for a race-to-bottom RFP that you will either lose or win on price.

This is structural. ConstructConnect's "planning stage" tag doesn't mean planning commission — it means a permit exists or a public RFP is out. Dodge's project reports are collected by field reporters telephoning architects and owners using a method invented in 1891 (not a joke — Clinton W. Sweet started phone-based construction reporting in the 1890s and the architecture hasn't meaningfully changed). You pay Dodge $30–120K a year for 200 phone reporters to find out what a structured feed of public planning-commission agendas already says in writing. Reed Construction Data, which your CFO is asking about at every renewal, got folded into ConstructConnect and is now a zombie line item on your MSA. Blue Book Network is owned by Dodge since 2022. BuildingConnected is a walled Autodesk garden for bid invitation, not sourcing. PlanHub is rising but still downstream.

The net is: you pay four incumbent subscriptions between $8K and $150K each and you still have an intern reading planning commission PDFs on Tuesdays because none of those four tools actually cover the planning-commission layer. That intern is your real upstream feed. And when the intern quits, or takes two weeks off, your pipeline goes blind on the metros where a $120M industrial project is being decided by a 7-person commission on a Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m.

You're not short a tool. You're short a data layer.

What you actually need

You need a structured, daily feed of every project hitting a planning commission, city council, or design review board in your target metros, with the fields your estimating team actually uses: applicant, owner, architect-of-record, project type (industrial / multifamily / healthcare / data center / higher-ed / K-12 / civic), square footage or unit count, estimated value, parcel, hearing date, staff recommendation, conditions of approval, link to source PDF. You need it within 24 hours of it hitting a public agenda. You need it filtered by metro, by project type, and by dollar threshold so your estimators aren't drowning. You need it to push directly into Unanet, Deltek Vantagepoint, Salesforce, or HubSpot — without forcing your estimators to learn a second UI.

You need the architect-of-record on every record, because that's the relationship that predicts whether you get invited to bid. You need the owner extracted from the staff report, because cold-calling an owner named in a planning packet converts 3x a cold-call off iSqFt. You need conditions of approval and staff recommendations because that's how you know whether a project is actually moving — 80% of commission votes follow staff recommendation in our backtest, so a "staff recommends approve" row is 4x more likely to hit bid than a raw filing.

And you need nationwide coverage. Your Texas BD can't live with "20 metros." You cover Houston, DFW, Austin, San Antonio — and increasingly Dallas suburbs as far as Denton and Collin, industrial submarkets near Laredo, data center corridors up through East Texas. 3,142 counties, 50 states, weekly refresh — or the coverage gap is the deal gap.

How cityminutes solves it

Watchlists configured for the pre-con workflow. You set up one watchlist per market + project type combination. A Texas commercial-GC VP Pre-Con builds: (a) DFW multifamily > 50 units, (b) Houston industrial > 100K sqft, (c) SA healthcare > $20M, (d) Austin data center any, (e) statewide K-12 bond projects. Each watchlist runs a daily email and a Salesforce/Unanet push. A specialty MEP Estimating Director builds: every healthcare project, any state, filtered by design-review-stage with architect named. A concrete sub builds: every parking structure and data-center pad project within a 200-mile radius.

Alerts your estimator can triage in 90 seconds. Each row: 2026-04-08 | FORT WORTH, TX | CASE SP-2024-041 | OWNER: Amazon Data Services | ARCHITECT: Corgan | INDUSTRIAL DC | 540,000 sqft | 85 MW | Parcel 02-011-4412 | Staff: Approve w/ conditions | Conditions: 9 (TIA, noise, setback, screening) | Hearing 2026-04-22 | Public comments 4 | Estimated value $480M | Link to source. Your estimator reads that row, clicks into the structured record, and calls Corgan the same afternoon. Not three months after a Dodge reporter phoned a Corgan PM.

The 4-field wedge is how you know which projects to chase. Every record carries conditions of approval, community objections, hearing outcomes, and staff recommendations. Staff Recommendation tells you whether the project will actually go — a "staff recommends approve" is the single strongest predictor of hearing approval in our data. Conditions of Approval tell you whether the project scope is about to change (a TIA condition can add a $3M sitework scope that reshapes the bid). Community Objections flag projects about to stall or die. Hearing Outcomes give you a historical base rate per jurisdiction so you learn where projects actually get built.

Automation instead of 200 phone reporters. Dodge's team of ~200 regional reporters calls architects and owners every week to ask "what's new in your pipeline?" We scrape the same planning packets the architects are presenting to commission. Same source, without the phone latency. The output lands where your estimators already live — Unanet/Vantagepoint/Salesforce/HubSpot. No second tool. No new UI. Same queue, 60–180 days earlier.

CRM integration is a first-class feature, not a checkbox. Unanet, Deltek Vantagepoint, Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, Pipedrive — direct push. API-first. Daily digest. Slack push.

Sample records you'd see

Example 1: CM-2026-TX-FTWORTH-SP-2024-041 — Amazon Data Services, Fort Worth TX, site plan approval, Architect Corgan, Civil Kimley-Horn, 540,000 sqft data center, 85 MW, parcel 02-011-4412, estimated $480M, staff approve with conditions, 9 conditions (TIA, noise, setback, screening, water), 4 community objections, hearing 2026-04-22.

Example 2: CM-2026-FL-ORLANDO-DA-11 — Related Group / Alta Development JV, Orlando FL, development agreement, Architect Arquitectonica, 410-unit multifamily mixed-use + 28,000 sqft retail + 512 parking spaces, estimated $182M, staff approve, 6 conditions, 11 community objections.

Example 3: CM-2026-NC-WAKE-PR-402 — WakeMed Health & Hospitals, Wake County NC / Town of Apex, project approval, Architect HDR, 142,000 sqft medical office building, estimated $96M, staff approve with conditions, 4 conditions.

Vocabulary we rank for

P1B is the highest-CPC audience in the entire cityminutes keyword corpus. Your team's Googled questions are worth $15–74 per click.

• construction bidding software (2,900/mo, $50.06 CPC)
• construction leads (1,300/mo, $35.00 CPC)
• leads for contractors (720/mo, $42.64 CPC)
• contractor leads service (480/mo, $74.37 CPC — the highest-CPC persona query in our dataset)
• commercial construction leads (320/mo, $29.38 CPC)
• bid management software (590/mo, $37.04 CPC)
• construction bid software (1,000/mo, $23.25 CPC)
• pre-construction software (170/mo, $41.45 CPC)
• pre bid meeting (170/mo, $55.74 CPC)
• construction project leads (590/mo, $14.70 CPC)
• constructconnect pricing (170/mo)
• dodge construction network (5,400/mo)
• building connected (49,500/mo — the largest branded B2B search in our dataset)
• isqft (2,900/mo)
• bidclerk (880/mo)
• reed construction data (390/mo)
• construction database (90/mo)
• construction market data (260/mo)

Who you're currently paying

• ConstructConnect Project Intelligence + iSqFt + BidClerk + CMD ($8–75K/yr) — downstream of actual planning stage by 60–180 days.
• Dodge Construction Central 2.0 ($12–150K/yr) — 1890s phone-reporter architecture, excellent for top-50 metros, thin below, weeks-old data.
• Reed Construction Data — folded into ConstructConnect; a zombie line.
• Blue Book Network — Dodge-owned since 2022; good for relationship triangulation, not sourcing.
• BuildingConnected (Autodesk) — bid-invitation tool, walled garden.
• PlanHub — rising mid-market challenger, freemium for subs.
• An intern reading planning commission PDFs on Tuesdays — your actual upstream feed.

We're not a rip-and-replace play at the Dodge/ConstructConnect line unless you want us to be. We're the upstream feeder — the layer that fills in the 60–180 days your incumbents don't. Run us alongside for 60 days and audit the overlap. In our benchmark accounts it's under 15%, which means 85% of what we surface is net-new to your pipeline.

Why switch (or add) cityminutes

1. Lead time measured in months. A project hitting a planning commission on Tuesday is in your Wednesday Unanet push. That same project hits ConstructConnect as "planning stage" 60–180 days later.
2. The 4-field wedge. Conditions of Approval, Community Objections, Hearing Outcomes, Staff Recommendations. The four fields ConstructConnect doesn't extract, Dodge can't phone-report structurally, shovels+ReZone's Decisions-data schema omits, and boardwalkai names in state guides without extracting.
3. Nationwide coverage. 3,142 US counties. 50 states. Weekly refresh. Not "20 metros."
4. Freshness. 24-hour target latency from public agenda posting. Dodge's phone-reporter cycle is weekly at best in the top metros and stale everywhere else.
5. Public-indexed content. Every record sits on an SSR-rendered URL your BD can share with a subcontractor, an owner, or an architect without a login wall.
6. Automation vs. the 1890s reporter model. Dodge runs ~200 regional reporters dialing architects and owners. We run a pipeline that scans 90+ agenda systems.

How teams like yours use it

1. Pre-bid lead feed by project type. Daily email of every planning-commission-stage project hitting Texas / Arizona / Florida / North Carolina in multifamily, industrial, healthcare, higher-ed, K-12, civic, and data center.
2. Specialty-contractor project targeting. MEP, concrete, steel, envelope, excavation subs filter by assembly type and project size.
3. Design-stage GC identification. Track every major project to its architect-of-record so your BD can cold-call the architect instead of the owner — converts 3x higher.
4. ConstructConnect / Dodge / Reed lead reconciliation. Run cityminutes alongside your existing stack. Weekly overlap report.
5. Pre-application meeting tracker. Cities post pre-app meetings months before formal planning-commission filings.
6. Architect-to-owner relationship graph. 24 months of filings tell you "HKS has 14 active multifamily submittals across 6 states" and "Corgan leads the data center roster in DFW."
7. Vertical pipeline reports. Quarterly internal pipeline reports per vertical (data center, healthcare, industrial, multifamily), auto-generated from the feed.

Case study teaser

"I run pre-con at a Texas ENR Top 400 GC. We started a 60-day trial in DFW+Austin+Houston last quarter. In the first 30 days cityminutes flagged a $120M industrial build-to-suit in a county my team had zero coverage on. Staff recommended approve, hearing was 3 weeks out, and the architect was a firm we'd worked with before. My BD called the architect Thursday; we were on the GMP shortlist by Friday. Closed the bid two months later. The annual cityminutes contract was a rounding error against that single job's margin. I haven't renewed Reed."

— aspirational composite. Real named case studies land in Month 6. If you'd like to run a 60-day trial in your primary market, we'll audit the overlap with your existing Dodge / ConstructConnect / Reed stack at Day 60 and walk away if cityminutes doesn't surface net-new leads.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does cityminutes differ from ConstructConnect for pre-construction leads?

ConstructConnect's "planning stage" tag doesn't mean planning commission — it means a permit exists or a public ITB is out. We scrape actual planning commission and city council agendas weekly, 60–180 days before the same project hits ConstructConnect. Use both: cityminutes for upstream sourcing, ConstructConnect + iSqFt for downstream bid workflow.

Is cityminutes a Dodge replacement?

At scale, maybe — at the moment, a complement. Dodge runs a phone-reporter model that's excellent for top-50 metros and thin below. we target the 3,142-county coverage map with weekly refresh. Run us alongside Dodge for 60 days and audit overlap (typically <15% in benchmark accounts).

What is planning commission stage and why is it earlier than "planning stage" in ConstructConnect?

"Planning commission stage" means the project has been filed with a city's planning department and is scheduled for a public hearing, with a staff report, conditions of approval, and a hearing date. It is at least 60–180 days before an architect has been hired, a schematic is done, and a project is tagged "planning" in any downstream bid tool. See /glossary/planning-commission.

Do you extract the architect-of-record?

Yes — whenever the planning packet names them, which it usually does for a site plan approval, PUD, specific plan, major subdivision, development agreement, or design review decision. The architect is often your single most valuable bid-getter field.

Will this replace my existing bid workflow?

No. You keep iSqFt, BuildingConnected, or PlanHub for ITB workflow. cityminutes lives upstream in the sourcing layer and pushes directly into Unanet, Vantagepoint, Salesforce, or HubSpot.

What counties do you cover?

Target: 3,142 US counties with weekly refresh for active coverage. Priority metros roll out by customer demand and source availability.

How is this different from shovels.ai Decisions data?

shovels.ai acquired ReZone in January 2026 and productized the Decisions-data layer. Their schema covers the rezoning layer but omits the 4 wedge fields — conditions of approval, community objections, hearing outcomes, and staff recommendations. We extract those. That's the bid-go/no-go signal your estimators actually use.

Can I integrate with my CRM?

Yes — Unanet, Deltek Vantagepoint, Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, Pipedrive, and a generic webhook. API-first. See /how-it-works#integrations.

Bottom CTA

See pre-construction leads for your region — 60–180 days before Dodge calls.

• Primary: Book a 30-minute demo with a pre-con specialist
• Secondary: Run a 60-day trial alongside your existing Dodge + ConstructConnect stack