We work hard to present the most accurate, complete picture of Florida's pool builders that public records allow — for the benefit of homeowners and good contractors alike. But no public dataset is perfect, and the person who knows a company best is the company itself. If something here looks wrong, tell us right here and we'll make it right.
A real person reads every report. Corrections from the business itself get priority — you hold the first-hand record we can't see in public data.
These aren't excuses. They're the real, structural reasons the public record is imperfect for everyone who works with it.
The one truly unique identifier for a Florida contractor is their state license number (the DBPR "CPC" number). But permit records almost never store it — permits are filed under a company name and a person's name. There is no clean key linking a permit to a license, so everyone, everywhere, is left matching by name. And names are messy.
A permit clerk might type "Example Pools," "Example Pools LLC," or "Example Pools Florida" — all the same business, filed three different ways. Depending on which spelling a given source keys on, the count changes. One tool shows 40, another shows 55, and both are honestly reporting what they see. Neither is the whole picture.
Punctuation quietly breaks name searches. A record for "Larsen's Pool & Spa" might turn up a full history when searched one way and absolutely nothing when searched another — the ampersand or apostrophe throws the match off, even though the company is right there in the records. When a count looks surprisingly low, a hidden character is often the reason, not a lack of work.
Some builders hold broad licenses that cover pools and other construction (City of Tampa's own permit system flags this). Their pool work and non-pool work sit in one pile, so a raw permit count is never a pure "pools built" number.
Filing the final paperwork to close out a permit is something contractors mean to do — but it doesn't always make it all the way through. A missed final inspection, a scheduling gap, or the county's own process can leave a permit showing "open" long after the pool is finished and the family is swimming in it. So a low "completion rate" usually reflects how the paperwork moves, not an unfinished job.
The commercial services that resell permit data each make their own name-matching guesses, so they don't agree with one another or with the county — and none can fix the underlying name problem. We collect from public and third-party sources; we can't vouch for every third-party claim.
Florida's permit records live in hundreds of separate county and city systems, and they're not equal. Some — like the City of Orlando — publish clean, current open data that we refresh every week. Others keep everything behind portals we have to read page by page, the way a person would. A few we can't reach cleanly at all, so there we lean on third-party aggregates. Freshness and completeness genuinely differ from one place to the next, and we'd rather tell you that than pretend every county is equal.
No. Our score is deliberately not built on permit counts, how recent the permits are, or a "completion rate." A miscounted total won't push a company up or down. We weight verified customer feedback and the honesty of what a company claims about itself — the things that actually help a homeowner choose well.
Use the form at the top of this page, or reach out any time. Tell us what's wrong and a real person reviews it. We give extra weight to corrections that come from the business itself, because you hold the complete, first-hand record that public data can only approximate.
Public building-permit records published by Florida county and city governments, plus third-party permit aggregators. We present it in good faith to help homeowners — it isn't data we author, and we're always working to make it more accurate.
No. Claims like years in business, projects completed, or awards are made by each company, not by us. We surface them and weigh them against verifiable evidence, but they remain that company's own statements.
Florida has thousands of pool builders and hundreds of separate permitting offices with no shared key between them. We refresh and cross-check everything we can, but a truly perfect record for any one company can only come from that company. That's exactly why our invitation to correct the record is open to everyone, always.
As quickly as we reasonably can. Every report reaches a real person, and once we've confirmed an issue we apply the correction promptly.