The open-data version had the names removed

A building permit is published before the work is tendered. Everyone who sells into the finished building, the fit-out contractor, the HVAC firm, the furniture supplier, has a window between the notice appearing and the trades being chosen.

The notice usually names two useful parties: the client, who is paying, and the architect, who decides most of what gets specified. Getting both from one public document is unusual.

Timing is the entire value. A permit says a specific building will be worked on, at a known address, on a schedule that has just started. The decisions that follow have not been made yet.

Compare it to the alternative, which is finding out when the project is tendered. By then the shortlist exists and you are on it or you are not.

Switzerland is the good one. The federal gazette portal exposes a free REST API at amtsblattportal.ch/api/v1/publications. No key, no account, updated daily, carrying cantonal building publications. We saw twelve cantons publishing in a partial August sample, and that is a floor: we paged 6,000 of 37,701 notices for the month.

Germany does not publish building applications centrally at all. Sixteen state building codes, and the process is neighbour notification rather than public register. We looked for a federal or state-level feed and there is none. This is a firm negative, not a gap in our search.

Austria produced no permit feed either, only aggregate counts from the statistics office.

The UK has a national planning data platform, keyless and openly licensed, with a planning-application dataset of about 100,000 entities. It is alpha, contribution is voluntary, we observed roughly three authorities participating, and the records carry no applicant or agent name. Not usable yet.

TED, the EU tenders service, works well for public-sector construction: POST-only search, no key, same-day publication, and 1,112 German notices under the general construction classification since the start of August.

The obvious first stop is the official open-data portal. Zurich publishes its building publications there as a daily CSV: 9.3 MB, 17,370 records, exactly the dataset you would want.

Every name field is stripped. The only column resembling a name is the municipality. The client is gone, the architect is gone.

Had we assessed this vertical from the open-data listing, as any reasonable survey would, we would have written it off.

The same source published through the gazette API keeps the names. Request the individual notice as XML and you get the client and the architect, each with a company name, a Swiss company identifier and a full address.

The general lesson is worth more than the Swiss specifics. The curated, documented, officially blessed export of a dataset is not the dataset. Somebody made choices when they built it, and the field you need is often the field they removed.

One more asymmetry: the list endpoint has no names either. Names live only in the per-notice XML, so the useful shape is a cheap daily list query followed by one fetch per candidate.

For tenders, one field decides everything: whether the notice is a call for tenders or a contract award. An award notice is a project that has already chosen its suppliers, and a letter written on one arrives after the decision, arguing for a need the notice itself shows is met.

This is the same failure we hit in renewable energy, in a completely different dataset, which suggests it is structural rather than a coincidence. The best-documented events are the concluded ones. Completion is what gets announced. Whatever you are building, find the field that separates “deciding” from “decided”, and filter on it first.

The money is in private construction and the publication is best for public. Swiss cantonal building publications do cover private projects, which is why Switzerland scores well here, but the EU tender route is public procurement only, with its own competitive dynamics where a letter matters less.

We could not verify the length of the window. Zurich's statutory display period is twenty days, which is not the same as the time between a permit and a fit-out contractor being appointed. That number would decide how urgently a letter has to go out, and we do not have it.

Two sources resisted inspection entirely: the Swiss public-tender platform and the Zurich cantonal permit portal are both JavaScript applications that return no server-rendered content, so their scope is unconfirmed.