Department of Building Inspection Customer Communication

Dear Customers,

Welcome to 2025! We want to take a moment to share some of the improvements DBI has made over the past year, the progress we’re making towards reducing permit issuance times, and our plans to further improve our service this year.

First a quick review.

2024 started with some of the biggest changes DBI and our partners have made to the permitting process in years:

• Requiring Planning Department approval before filing for a building permit.
• Reimagining pre-plan check to include a “completeness check” in tandem with the other permitting departments.
• Mandating electronic plan review for all In-House Review projects.
• Enabling simultaneous plan review by all City departments.
• Creating a single comprehensive webpage detailing all potential documents and information needed to obtain a building permit.
• Establishing legally-mandated permit review timelines.

And that was just what we launched on January 1 last year!

Over the course of 2024, we reorganized DBI’s Permit Services Division, hired new permit services supervisors, created a new issuance stamp, started two social media video series, and clarified the guidelines for commercial-to-residential building conversions.

We also hired a new deputy director for inspections, launched the permit review roundtable for ADUs, and even expanded online scheduling for plumbing and mechanical inspections.

But all of this good work is only noteworthy if we can show results and actually speed up permit issuance times. To see how we’re doing today, DBI looks at the front end of the process and tracks whether permit applications are being reviewed by the first building (BLDG) station within the targeted timeframe. We then measure those success rates against our past performance.

We’re happy to report that DBI is off to a solid start. According to our data, we’re meeting this goal more than twice as often, for all building types, so far in FY25 compared to all of FY23.

Refer to this table

We also look at how often each DBI station is meeting its time target to make sure our teams are properly resourced and that work is being assigned and overseen effectively.

Refer to this table #2

As you can see, we’re consistently meeting our housing review targets but there’s an opportunity to do even better. We won’t settle until we are hitting this goal 100% of the time.

Overall, the City has made great strides in the past year and, today, nearly 100% of completeness checks are done in 15 days or less and 94% of housing permit plan checks at all DBI stations are hitting their plan review time targets.

At the same time, 64% of Over-The-Counter (OTC) permits were issued in two days or less in 2024. This beats our 60% target and is better than our performance before 2020 and the pandemic.

We hope you are seeing and experiencing the service improvements being documented in our data and, as always, welcome your feedback at dbi.communications@sfgov.org.

Looking Ahead

In the coming weeks, DBI is going to launch the new building permit issuance report with all of the key building permit information in one place – project scope, contacts, plan review comments, payment receipts, etc… No longer will building permit holders need to keep track of multiple documents and receipts. With the new report, you will get a building permit issuance report and a job card – that’s it!

At the same time, we are creating a new, more customer-friendly addressing process, expanding online inspection scheduling for building and electrical permits and hope to hire additional inspectors when the citywide hiring freeze ends.

Working with the Permit Center and other city permitting departments, we will continue to scope the Permit Tracking System (PTS) replacement and refine the completeness check process to make it easier for you to add missing documents. We also plan to test automated permit application routing systems and explore ways artificial intelligence can support our work.

Taken as a whole, we’re systemically improving the way we do business and rebuilding DBI one nail at a time, one year at a time.

Thank you for your ongoing support for our efforts to improve DBI. Let’s be safe out there.