Case Study

How GreenLite became the permitting partner behind one of the fastest-growing emergency veterinary clinics in the country.

20+ hospitals

opened with GreenLite

105 average days

saved compared to AHJ averages

0.9

average resubmissions

14

states served

Industries: Healthcare / Veterinary

Scope: Interior alterations/tenant improvements for emergency veterinary hospitals

The Challenge

Opening 30 Hospitals a Year to help pets across the US, with permitting as a bottleneck.

The clinic operates at a fast pace, and their operational success depends on how many hospitals they’re able to open. With 119 locations across the country and a goal of 30 new hospitals per year, the team has manages permitting as a continuous, high-stakes logistics problem. Their biggest challenge is unpredictability.

For most operators, a delayed opening means delayed revenue. For this client, it means something more. Each new hospital has veterinarians contracted, staff onboarded, and a community, often underserved, sometimes hours from the nearest emergency animal clinic, waiting for care. Every week a permit is stuck in a municipal queue is a week families have nowhere to turn when their pet is in crisis. That urgency is what makes permitting mission-critical.

The client doesn’t open hospitals in predictable clusters; they go where the need is. That means permitting in Miami-Dade one month, a mid-size Pennsylvania township the next, then Honolulu. Each jurisdiction has its own requirements, its own review culture, its own timeline. And for a healthcare tenant improvement with specialized equipment, plumbing, HVAC, and occupancy requirements that general commercial tenants don’t face, the margin for error is small. One missed requirement means a correction cycle, and that can mean two to six more weeks. At 30 hospitals per year, that math adds up fast.

Over the years, the clinic worked with several permitting companies. The results were mixed at best. Most of them are really just paper pushers, not real partners. What they needed was a team with the industry knowledge to catch problems before they reached the building department, the credentials to unlock faster review pathways in the right jurisdictions, and the proactivity to keep every project moving forward without constant hand-holding from their in-house team.

The Approach

GreenLite’s engagement with the client is built on three things: pre-submission plan review, Private Plan Review (PPR) capability, and end-to-end permit management.

The pre-submission review is where the most value gets created. Before any of their project hits a building department, GreenLite’s review team, powered by our AI-assisted plan review engine, goes through the drawings looking for the issues a plan reviewer will inevitably flag. Incomplete life safety plans, missing equipment schedules, plumbing details that don’t align with the jurisdiction’s adopted code cycle, etc. These are specific, predictable correction categories that extend veterinary healthcare permit timelines. Catching them before submission means they can submit cleaner plan sets, get fewer comments and resubmissions, and move through review faster.

GreenLite also unlocked Private Plan Review (PPR) for this client. In states where PPR is available, a certified third-party reviewer can review and stamp plans for code compliance on behalf of the municipality, bypassing the AHJ’s review queue entirely. They had encountered PPR-eligible jurisdictions before without knowing who could perform the review or how to initiate the process. GreenLite’s licensure and familiarity with PPR statutes across multiple states removed that barrier.

The third element is harder to quantify but matters just as much: true partnership. GreenLite’s permit coordinators don’t relay messages. They work the phones with building officials directly. When a hold appears on a permit, whether a stormwater clearance, an outstanding fee, or a contractor paperwork gap, GreenLite’s team fights to clear it. That’s the difference between a project that sits at “approved” for six weeks waiting for issuance, and one that closes out clean.

“GreenLite is proactive, not reactive. And that proactivity is what helps bring timelines down and get to the end result of receiving a building permit so much faster than anybody else.”

Senior Director of Design

The Results

Across their portfolio, GreenLite has delivered permits across 14 states, including Pennsylvania, Florida, California, Kentucky, Tennessee, Hawaii, Maryland, North Carolina, Delaware, Indiana, Illinois, Maine, Washington, and New Hampshire, with more markets entering the pipeline. The results are consistent: first-submission wins, aggressive timelines, and zero resubmittals on the strongest projects. Completed projects average 49 business days from submission to building department approval, fewer than one AHJ resubmittal, and 40% have achieved zero resubmittals through the entire review process.

The Willow Grove, Pennsylvania project is GreenLite’s fastest result on record: 22 business days from submission to permit issuance, with zero resubmittals. GreenLite’s pre-submission compliance review and the licensure of its plan reviewer enabled an immediate approval from the Township of Abington. The project, from intake through permit completion, reflected a process where permitting is not the bottleneck.

GreenLite’s national reach matters for a client like this. Opening hospitals in 14+ states means 14 different sets of AHJ relationships, 14 different code adoptions, 14 different submittal formats. GreenLite’s jurisdiction intelligence and multi-state review capability allows the veterinary clinic to expand into new markets without rebuilding permitting knowledge from scratch in each one.

For our client, the math of permitting is particularly sharp. A veterinary emergency hospital that opens two weeks early means two extra weeks of 24-hour care available to pet owners in an emergency, and two fewer weeks of carrying contracted staff, signed leases, and installed equipment against zero revenue.

Their goal of 30 hospitals per year requires every piece of the development pipeline to perform. Permitting used to be the most unpredictable piece. GreenLite’s pre-submission review, PPR capability, and end-to-end management have made it consistently faster and more predictable.

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