Why Hotel Permitting Keeps Getting Slower

A five-month build. An eighteen-month permit. The structural reason hospitality projects get stuck.

A hotel can take five months to build and eighteen months to permit.

What’s changed isn’t the frustration — it’s how unpredictable the process has become, even when teams do everything right.

At HotelSpaces, Andreas Rotenberg, co-founder of Pulley, didn’t spend time rehashing the delay. He focused on why permitting keeps getting worse.

“You create the spaces where we all go to spend our most precious resource, which is not money, it’s time,” Rotenberg said.

So why does permitting burn so much of it?

Hotels Are Penalized for Being in Places People Want to Be

Hotels don't get built just anywhere. They cluster in places people already want to live, visit, and vacation — coastal cities, resort towns, and high-demand urban markets.

Rotenberg offered a blunt rule of thumb that landed immediately: "If you would want to live there, the permitting is not going to be so good. If you'd want to go on vacation there, the permitting is going to be miserable."

The reason is economic, not personal. Demand in these markets is inelastic. No matter how many regulatory hurdles exist, people still come.

And when demand never lets up, the incentive to move fast quietly disappears. The priority shifts to preservation — as Rotenberg put it, keeping ‘Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara.’

Over decades, that mindset adds layers: zoning reviews, site permits, coastal commissions, transportation studies. Each one makes sense on its own. Together, they create a system that only gets heavier.

Permitting didn't suddenly break. It slowly calcified.

More Rules Don't Just Slow Things Down — They Create Congestion

As requirements stack up, permit applications get bigger. Bigger applications mean more to review — and more chances for small issues to surface.

That's when projects fall into comment cycles. Not because teams are careless, but because complexity makes "perfect" submittals nearly impossible.

Rotenberg put it simply, "Inelastic demand leads to added complexity, which results in congestion."

The effect compounds. Rotenberg noted that approving the same project in Santa Barbara County can require roughly three times the staff effort as in neighboring Kern County. Same building. Different congestion.

For project teams, that congestion shows up as unpredictability — late comments, partial feedback, and timelines that are impossible to forecast with confidence.

This Isn't a New Problem — It's a Growing One

Permitting hasn't just gotten slower. It's gotten dramatically slower.

According to Rotenberg, permitting timelines have increased by roughly 400% over the last 70 years — even as construction productivity has barely moved.

That gap explains why schedules feel broken even when projects are well-run. The bottleneck isn't in the field. It's upstream.

Why Waiting for Reform Won't Save You

When permitting drags, it's tempting to hope for regulatory fixes — shot clocks, streamlined approvals, federal intervention.

The reality is structural.

Permitting in the U.S. is decentralized across roughly 19,000 cities and counties. There's no single lever to pull. Even well-intentioned reforms tend to change behavior rather than outcomes.

Rotenberg was blunt about it: "There's nothing the federal government can do here. Permitting is decentralized."

If the process feels inconsistent, it's because structurally, it is.

The Real Cost Is Time

Permitting delays don't just push schedules. They tie up capital, compress construction windows, strain teams, and quietly erode momentum.

And because the slowdown is structural — not accidental — waiting for it to get easier isn't a strategy.

The teams making progress aren't betting on simpler rules or faster cities. They're getting clearer about what they can control and planning around what they can't.

Permitting may never be fast.

But it doesn't have to be a surprise every time.

Watch the video of Andreas's talk here 👇