Case Study

How a Leading National Retailer Cut Permit Timelines by Up to 120 Business Days

24

construction permits managed across Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas

61+

business days saved on the fastest project

0

resubmittals on first-submission approvals

The Challenge

The client is one of America’s largest retailers, 4,600+ stores across all 50 states,  and it is not slowing down. The company has committed to building or converting 150+ stores over the next five years while simultaneously running one of the largest remodel programs in U.S. retail history: 650 stores upgraded in 2024 alone under the “Store of the Future” initiative.

For the client’s construction and real estate team, the biggest challenge is having predictably, at scale, without losing weeks to avoidable back-and-forth. The Sun Belt markets where the client’s activity is most concentrated, Texas, Florida, and California,happen to be some of the most complex from a permitting standpoint. A project that sails through review in a suburban Texas market can stall for months in a Florida county with multi-agency review requirements or a California jurisdiction running a 10-week backlog.

The client was expanding aggressively across the Southeast and Texas, 24 new store builds moving simultaneously through four different state permitting systems, each with its own Authority Having Jurisdiction requirements, review timelines, and documentation standards. The internal team needed a partner that could manage the complexity at scale: tracking permit status across every location, catching plan issues before they cost time, and keeping projects on schedule.

A single delayed permit could push a store opening by weeks, costing revenue, disrupting supply chains, and compounding pressure on the construction schedule. They needed predictability and a permitting operation that runs like a system.

The Approach

GreenLite’s operational model is to be proactive and attack the problem before it becomes the AHJ’s problem. For the client, that meant deploying LiteTable,  GreenLite’s AI-powered plan review platform,  across all 24 active projects before a single drawing set left the team’s hands.

LiteTable runs every set of plans against local code requirements, AHJ-specific submission standards, and a database built from thousands of real plan review comments. On our first project with them, the process surfaced 670 individual comments across the portfolio, flagging issues ranging from missing documentation and incorrect sheet formatting to code compliance gaps that would have triggered correction letters and re-review cycles. Catching these problems internally, before submission separated the first-pass approval from a 6-week back-and-forth with a plan reviewer.

On the coordination side, GreenLite assigned dedicated permit coordinators to manage each project’s relationship with the local AHJ. These are a team of experts managing the permit from end to end. Making calls, following up on reviewer queues, and flagging when a project is at risk of slipping before it actually does. When a jurisdiction was running behind, the team escalated. When a plan reviewer had a question, the team had the answer ready.

The retailer’s internal team, organized by Design Managers overseeing different regions and store types,  had real-time visibility into every project through a centralized dashboard. Rather than chasing status updates across email threads, each DM could see exactly where their stores stood: submission dates, AHJ response timelines, outstanding items, and projected issuance windows, all in one place. For a program running 24 simultaneous projects across four states, that visibility was what kept the program from becoming unmanageable.

The Results

In the first 7 months, 8 permits crossed the finish line. Projects that closed out ran 6-120 business days ahead of typical municipal timelines for comparable new construction. Across all 24 projects, catching issues that would have generated correction letters, extended reviews, and resubmittals.

Project-level wins from the pilot period:

• Rincon, GA – 120 business days ahead of schedule
• Texarkana, TX – 82 business days ahead of schedule
• McKinney, TX – 76 business days ahead of schedule
• Vernon, TX – 69 business days ahead of schedule
• Cordele, GA – 61 business days ahead of schedule
• Knoxville, TN – 41 business days ahead of schedule
• Chattanooga, TN – 33 business days ahead of schedule
• Maryville, TN – 6 business days ahead of schedule

National retailers running multi-state build programs face the same compounding challenge: the more locations in play, the more permitting risk accumulates. One delay affects crew scheduling, fixture deliveries, lease commencement dates, and every project downstream in the pipeline.

GreenLite’s work on their projects proved that AI-assisted plan review combined with a dedicated team of experts can transform that risk profile. When issues are caught before submission, not after, the entire timeline compresses. 

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