When it comes to new construction projects, knowing any of the relevant information early on can mean the difference between winning and losing the contract among general contractors and vendors.
Traditionally, this relevant information makes its way across the networks of general contractors and vendors, but by the time it is common knowledge, it’s already too late.
That’s where the power of local government meeting minutes and agendas come in.
Before any wild construction plans are allowed to begin, they must first be discussed and approved by local municipalities. These discussions take place during public meetings for city, village, township, county, or school boards.
For example, people who live in the suburbs want things to look a certain way, especially when it comes to their neighborhoods.
Let’s say Mickey D’s wanted to pop a squat next to our house in the middle of our street. That’d just be madness, right? Every board member at the meeting would shoot down that request before you could say “I’m lovin’ it.”
Because everyone has to go to the city to do just about anything, Curate is at the bottleneck of upcoming construction projects, and our technology catches these projects by flagging keywords such as zoning or conditional use permit.
In fact, back in April 2017, Taralinda and Dale noticed several hits for keywords indicating water engineering projects — such as the word wastewater — in minutes for small communities of Mount Pleasant and Sturtevant. They knew these communities must be gearing up for increased wastewater needs for their business parks.
They also knew Foxconn, $10 billion manufacturing facility, was coming to the U.S.
While everyone around the country wanted to know where this 1,000-acre campus would call home, however, no one had a clue of how to guess.
But Taralinda and Dale did.
By noticing these keywords hinting at major engineering restructuring — and even keywords hinting at increased real-estate development to accommodate the influx of a new workforce — in the communities’ meeting minutes, they were able to put the pieces together.
With the possibility of building a facility that uses millions of gallons of water per day, it’s no surprise they were able to make the connection months in advance.
While Foxconn seems to be a poster child for the power of Curate, it’s not just the corporate giants our software catches in the act of plotting out their next project.
We’re also catching medium and small-scale projects that (1) don’t get any build up by the press and that (2) not a lot of people, especially industry competitors, know about.
By looking at the minutes and agendas, we’re able to pull all this “half-baked” information together and present valuable insight — such as the name of architects involved or location of a proposed certified survey map request by a new developer — for general contractors seeking these opportunities.
And because we pull information every week, we’re also able to track the progress of projects over time and gather competitor intel, both of which are well recorded and updated in municipality documents.
Needless to say, minutes and agendas are goldmines of uncommon knowledge that our software is able to extract for general contractors and vendors. With this information, they’ll know exactly who to strike up their next project-seeking conversation with and, hopefully, win that next contract.