Where should you open your next location? City rankings exist, but they're generic. You need to rank cities by YOUR criteria: permit processing time, zoning flexibility, inspector responsiveness. This tutorial shows how to rank 75 Texas cities by permit approval speed using AI to research and synthesize public data—turning a week of research into a $3.89 analysis.
Problem
Real estate investors need to consider many factors. But one that's often overlooked is how long it takes to get a renovation permit approved. A permit that takes 30 business days instead of 2 means an extra month of holding costs in mortgage payments, insurance, property taxes, and lost rental income. A delay like that can easily cost thousands of dollars.
However, this information isn't centralized. Each city publishes their permit timelines differently. Some put it on their website. Some bury it in PDF documents. Some don't publish it at all. Compiling this manually would have taken me many hours.
Instead, I used everyrow.io/rank to do it in about 5 minutes.
Results
I started with all 75 Texas municipalities with populations over 50,000.
For 45 of the 75 municipalities, I was able to find official processing times, either based on historical performance data or stated targets. For the remaining 30 cities that don't publish this information, I asked everyrow.io/rank to estimate based on contractor reports and comparable cities.
| City | Population | Business Days | Source Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corpus Christi | 317,317 | 2 | Official metrics (FY22 avg: 1.75 days) |
| San Antonio | 1,526,656 | 2 | Official metrics (FY24 avg: 2.3 days) |
| Waco | 146,608 | 2 | City council presentation |
| Irving | 258,060 | 3 | City website |
| Frisco | 235,208 | 3 | City website |
| McAllen | 148,782 | 3 | City website |
| Grapevine | 51,320 | 3 | City website |
| ... 33 more cities with official data ... | |||
| Denton | 165,998 | 12 | City council audit (2023) |
| Garland | 250,431 | 14 | City website |
| Sherman | 50,229 | 15 | City permit process guide |
| Georgetown | 101,344 | 18 | City website (15-20 day range) |
| Round Rock | 135,359 | 30 | City website |
View the full dataset with all 75 cities
At 2 business days average, San Antonio is one of the fastest cities despite being the 7th largest city in America. Their Development Services Department publishes actual performance metrics showing FY2024 averaged 2.3 days against a 3-day goal.
Austin and Houston are in the middle of the pack. Austin processes interior remodels in 5 business days (additions take 15). Houston averages 8 days based on their August 2024 permitting report.
Georgetown (18 days) and Round Rock (30 days), neighboring cities outside Austin, are the slowest at issuing permits.
The research notes contain helpful context. For instance, they explain that Dallas reported its median residential permit time dropped from 68 days in 2022 down to 8 days in 2024.
A Note on Data Quality
Of the 75 cities researched, 45 had official performance metrics or city-stated processing times. The remaining 30 cities don't publish this information, so those values are estimates based on contractor reports and comparable nearby cities. The research notes in the full dataset include the source for each number, including the reasoning behind the estimates.
This inconsistency is itself a finding: 40% of cities in Texas don't publish permit processing timelines at all. This makes it difficult for investors to compare markets and for property owners to plan renovations.
How This Was Done
I started with Wikipedia's list of Texas municipalities and filtered to the 75 cities with populations over 50,000.
Then I used everyrow.io/rank to research each city's permit processing time. I prioritized sources in the following order:
- Official performance metrics (actual measured averages)
- City-stated standard processing times
- Contractor/homeowner reports with specific timelines
For each city, the system searched the city's permit office website, development services documentation, and contractor forums. Each result includes sources, which I can use to verify the number.
Cost: $3.89 in total, only 5¢ per row
Time: 5 minutes, 12 seconds
This research would be very difficult without everyrow.io/rank.
- There's no aggregator for permit times like there is for home prices. Each city publishes (or doesn't) in their own format.
- Manual research doesn't scale. I could research one city in 10 minutes, but 75 cities would take 12+ hours.
- ChatGPT could find this information for a single city. But it's not set up for researching all 75 at once.
everyrow.io/rank handles all of this: it researches each entity, extracts the relevant number with citations, and ranks them.
Try It Yourself
If you're evaluating markets for real estate investment, you can run your own analysis. Here are a few ideas:
- Rank counties by property tax appeal success rate
- Rank cities by landlord-friendliness (eviction timeline, tenant laws)
- Rank neighborhoods by how aggressively they enforce building codes
The pattern is: you have a list of entities, you need a number for each of them, and that number isn't available in a single dataset.