A hotel can take five months to build and eighteen months to permit. That gap isn't new, but it keeps getting worse, even for teams that do everything right. At HotelSpaces, Pulley co-founder Andreas Rotenberg skipped past the familiar complaints and got into why permitting keeps sliding backward, and what teams can actually do about it.
"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 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. When demand never lets up, the incentive to move fast quietly disappears, and the priority shifts to preservation. As Rotenberg put it, the goal becomes 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 became harder to change.
As requirements stack up, permit applications get bigger. Bigger applications mean more for reviewers to look through, 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 a flawless application nearly impossible.
"Inelastic demand leads to added complexity, which results in congestion," Rotenberg said. The effect snowballs: he noted that approving the same project in Santa Barbara County can take roughly three times the staff effort it takes in neighboring Kern County. Same building, different backlog.
Construction has barely slowed over the past 70 years, down only about 6 percent in productivity, according to Rotenberg. Permitting is a different story: it's roughly 400 percent slower over that same stretch. That gap is why schedules feel broken even when a project is well run. The bottleneck isn't in the field. It's upstream.
Rotenberg laid out three ways AI is already changing the permitting process, and none of it depends on waiting for legislation.
1. Research. AI tools can comb through hundreds of pages of city documentation, review a plan set or concept sketch, and compare a project against similar past ones to flag which permits and reviews apply, along with likely fees and timelines. Work that used to take days can now happen in a fraction of the time, and more reliably.
2. Paperwork. AI can automate compiling plan sets, filling out forms, and submitting to city portals. Rotenberg pointed out that architects and civil engineers often spend 20 to 50 percent of their time on permitting work, which isn't why most of them went to design or engineering school in the first place.
3. And Rotenberg called this the most important: AI can check a plan set against the building code before it ever reaches a city reviewer, catching likely sources of comment and resolving them early. "I think 10 years from now, we'll see that this is how permits are actually approved in building departments around the country," he said.
At Pulley, that translates into a workflow that starts with a full rundown of every regulatory requirement, fee, and timeline for a project, delivered fast enough to share with the whole team right away. From there, tasks get assigned automatically, and every project gets a licensed local architect, a full-time Pulley employee based in the jurisdiction where the team is building. The plan set gets checked in full before submission, and teams can track real-time status through the company's integrations with city systems, which also power forecasts of approval timelines across an entire portfolio.
Rotenberg said the approach has helped some clients cut permitting timelines in half, even in some of the toughest markets in the country.
Permitting delays don't just push back opening day. They tie up capital, compress construction windows, and wear down teams over months that were never supposed to take this long.
Permitting may never get dramatically simpler. But between sharper research, tighter processes, and AI catching problems before they reach a reviewer's desk, teams don't have to treat every delay as a surprise.
Watch the video of Andreas's talk here 👇