CNR Magazine (Construction News and Review) has published Before the Submittal: How Tech is Helping the Permitting Backlog, a guest column by Tiffanie Reynolds, founder and principal at MarCom Consultants. The piece looks at how construction technology is attacking the permitting bottleneck: not by speeding up the review queue, but by eliminating the errors that send projects back into it before review even begins. The column opens with a frustration every contractor and developer knows: an incomplete plan check, a revision cycle that takes weeks, and a project clock that keeps running while the paperwork stacks up.
Kestrel features as the company working earliest in that sequence. The column describes how the platform embeds code compliance checking directly into Revit, flagging occupancy, egress, ADA, and other code requirements in real time, rather than surfacing them after a plan is printed and submitted. It also walks through where the code data comes from: officially licensed building code data through Kestrel's partnership with the International Code Council, with jurisdictional amendments layered on top based on project address, construction type, and whether the building is sprinklered.
“It's like having another set of eyes working alongside you in the model. The earlier you catch a compliance issue, the less it costs to fix it.”
Why the earliest phase of the bottleneck matters
The column puts numbers on the backlog: 77 percent of developers report permit delays, and cities like San Francisco average 33 months to secure approval. It also maps the landscape, contrasting Kestrel with permit automation platforms like PermitFlow, which streamline submissions and track applications once a plan set exists. As the piece frames it, the two target different phases of the same bottleneck, and Kestrel's phase comes first: the errors caught during design never become rejection letters at all.
The accountability angle gives the argument legislative weight. The column points to California's AB 253, signed in October 2025, which allows homebuilders to hire a licensed third-party reviewer when a local building department exceeds a 30-day review window. In that environment, a documented record of which requirements were reviewed, which were addressed, and which remain open stops being a nice-to-have. The column calls the Kestrel report “a practical fit” for exactly that.
“It becomes a tool of accountability. Not a replacement for plan reviewers, but something that establishes a data path they can trust.”
Honest about the limits
The part of the column we appreciate most is the part about what automation should not do. Kestrel compares Revit model data against applicable building code parameters, which works well for requirements with clear, objective thresholds. Where code language is ambiguous, or a project requires modifications, the platform flags the issue and defers to licensed professionals. That line is a design choice, not a limitation we are waiting to engineer away, and we have written about it at length in Where AI Doesn't Belong. As the column concludes, the tools that earn a permanent role in the permitting process will be the ones that make project teams more capable, not the ones that try to cut them out.
Read the full column in CNR Magazine: Before the Submittal: How Tech is Helping the Permitting Backlog →
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