Public construction — schools, utilities, public housing, transportation and anything else built with federal money — is a large and steady market, and it comes with rules. The Davis-Bacon Act requires locally prevailing wages and benefits on federal and D.C. construction contracts over $2,000, and its Related Acts extend the same requirement to many federally assisted projects. The Department of Labor’s update of the Davis-Bacon regulations — published in August 2023 and effective for contracts entered into after October 23, 2023 — was the most significant in decades, so it is worth confirming coverage on every bid.
Knowing where public work is happening is the other half of the job. Permit data, joined to parcels and zoning, finds it.
Step 1: Parcels find public property
Land Records carries the owner name and owner type for every parcel nationwide. Filter for government owners — counties, cities, school boards, housing authorities, utilities, state agencies — and you have a map of the publicly owned property in your territory.
Step 2: Permits show the work
Join that list to Buildstats permits on parcel_id and you see construction on public property as it is permitted:
- new schools and additions;
- renovations of public buildings;
- utility, water and sewer work;
- public-housing rehabilitation.
Read the permit type, work description and job value — where the department records it — to sort the large jobs from the small. A monthly subscription delivers every permit from the trailing 12 months, refreshed each month, so new public projects reach your estimators while they are still early.
Step 3: Zoning shows what is coming
Public and institutional zoning districts govern what can be built on public land, and at what scale. ZoneOptics reads zoning ordinances into districts, permitted uses and dimensional standards — useful for anticipating expansions on school and civic campuses before the permits are filed.
Before you bid
Permit data tells you a project exists; it does not tell you how it is funded. Confirm with the owner whether federal money — and therefore Davis-Bacon — applies, and plan your payroll and certified-payroll reporting before you price the job.
Get the data
Buy any county or the Virginia statewide file — full history or monthly subscription — and join it to Land Records parcels on the parcel ID. Talk to us about extracts filtered to public owners.