Municipalities and building departments
Your reviewers should open a complete set, not a puzzle.
A building department is measured on turnaround time it does not control. Most of the queue is not hard review work. It is the same short list of omissions, coming back a second and third time. PermitX catches that list before the file reaches your staff.
What the queue is actually made of
You are not short of reviewers. You are short of complete applications.
The arithmetic
Every resubmission that never happens is a review slot handed back to your own queue.
The applications that consume the most staff time are rarely the complicated ones. They are the ones missing a dimension string, the ones where the setback was never checked against the current bylaw, and the ones where the exit path was drawn but never measured.
Each of those becomes a comment letter. The comment letter becomes a resubmission. The resubmission rejoins the queue behind everything that arrived while it was out, and your published turnaround time absorbs the cost of a problem that took the applicant ten minutes to fix.
Meanwhile the applicant experience is the same story from the other side. They believe they submitted a complete set. They did not know what they did not know, and there was no way to find out except by filing and waiting.
PermitX moves that discovery to before submission. It is the same check your staff would make, made earlier, by the person who can still act on it cheaply.
The check, drawn
This is what arrives in the queue, and it is always this small.
A side yard a hundred millimetres short is not a design failure and it is not carelessness. It is a number that was right in an earlier revision, and nothing in the applicant's process was going to catch it before one of your examiners did.
- Property line
- Existing wall
- Required min
- Corrected
A worked example rather than a report, and drawn to its own scale, so the gap shown is the gap claimed. A real finding cites the provision and names the sheet it was read off.
Where the bylaw comes from
Coverage is one municipality at a time, in full.
Every one of Ontario’s 444 municipalities is live today and returns a full Ontario Building Code review, which is the majority of what a comment letter contains. Zoning goes on top of that, and where a bylaw is loaded in full a finding cites the provision that governs the address instead of a provincial article that only half applies to it.
A bylaw is loaded on request rather than approximated in bulk, so until yours is read we say so in those words on the coverage page. A department that discovers a gap later has no reason to believe the next thing we say.
Loading a bylaw in full is work we do with the department that wrote it. It is not a subscription conversation, and it is not something anyone can do to a municipality without them.
What it screens for
The items that generate your comment letters.
PermitX reads the drawing set against the Ontario Building Code and, in fully covered municipalities, against your own zoning bylaw. These are the categories that produce most of the back and forth.
- Zoning Front, side and rear yard setbacks measured off the drawings against the bylaw for that zone
- Zoning Lot coverage, building height and gross floor area against the permitted maximums
- OBC 3.3 / 3.4 Exits, travel distance, corridor widths and door swing direction
- OBC 3.1 Occupancy classification and its consequences for the rest of the set
- OBC 3.8 Barrier free access, clearances and turning space, including the dimensions that were never shown
- OBC 9 Housing and small building requirements for residential scopes
- Drawing set Missing dimension strings, unlabelled rooms, and sheets referenced but not provided
Every finding on a real report carries the same three things: the clause, the sheet it came from, and a severity. Nothing is a hunch.
What changes for the department
Nothing about your process. Only what arrives at the start of it.
A shorter first pass
Applications that were pre screened arrive with the routine omissions already resolved, so first pass review is judgement rather than checklist.
Fewer second trips
Every resubmission you avoid is a slot returned to the queue. That is capacity you gain without hiring, and turnaround time you can actually publish.
A better applicant conversation
Applicants who see the findings before filing stop treating a comment letter as a surprise. The department becomes the reviewer again, not the messenger.
See what a pre screened application looks like.
If you want your municipality's zoning bylaw covered in full, that is work we do directly with the department. Tell us which bylaw and we will scope it.