A county bid notice is worth more joined to two other public records

This post is an example of what ScrapeUp does: combine messy public sources into one dataset that answers a question the sources cannot answer on their own. The sources here are Florida county procurement records. The question is who competes for county work, and who those companies actually are.

A bid notice by itself tells you that a county wants to buy something. Joined to that county’s past awards, it tells you who bid last time and what the winning number was. Joined to the state’s company and license registries, it tells you whether each of those bidders is an active corporation, how long it has existed, who its officers are, and whether it holds the license the work requires. That third record is the one a bidding-intelligence team pays for.

Source one: the notices

Six counties, as examples, show four platforms. Miami-Dade runs its own INFORMS system, Pasco is on Bonfire, Martin on DemandStar, Hillsborough on Euna, and Santa Rosa and Bay on OpenGov. Construction bids over $200,000 must also run in a local newspaper under Florida Statute 255.0525. The notice record carries the solicitation number, title, description, estimated value where the county publishes it, issuance date, and contact.

Source two: the awards

Award lists are where the vendor names live, and they are even less consistent than the notices. Orange County’s bid awards page is the good case: roughly 230 board-approved awards in five sections, each with a bid number, board approved date, title, awarded vendor, and contract amount. Three rows as written: Y20-824, Ficquette Road Utility Improvements, CPH, Inc., $1,111,896.93; Y22-7009, Orlo Vista Flood Mitigation Construction, Thalle Construction Co., Inc., $21,551,322.00; Y24-700, Orange County Convention Center Campus CCTV Upgrades, Control Engineering Group, $1,984,527.89. The page also warns that “Board approval does not constitute award,” so even the clean case needs a status field.

Pinellas County’s awarded contract list is a PDF. Lee County’s awarded annual contracts page is about 300 lines of contract title and contract number with no vendor column at all; where a company name appears, it is inside the title (“Electrical, Lighting, Data-Graybar”), which is not the same thing as an awardee field. Three counties, three shapes, and only one of them gives you a vendor name you can rely on without reading the attachment.

Source three: the companies

Florida’s Division of Corporations publishes every registered entity on Sunbiz. Its corporate records guide lists what a detail page carries: a document number, the FEIN, the date filed, the state of domicile, a status (“active, inactive, etc.”), an effective date, the last event and its dates, the registered agent’s name and address, the names, addresses and titles of current officers and directors, and the year and filing date of the last three annual reports.

For contractors, the Department of Business and Professional Regulation’s license search can be queried by name, license number, city or county, or license type, and its results carry license type, license number and rank, licensee name, and status with expiry. The licensee detail page links to related licenses and to a complaint history with case number, class, incident date, status and disposition.

The record we deliver

Joined, one record per solicitation carries the notice as published, the county’s last awards in the same category with winner and amount, and for each named vendor: its Sunbiz document number, status, date filed, registered agent and officers; its DBPR license type, status and expiry where the work requires a license; and a match confidence. A bidder reading that record knows the field before the pre-bid meeting. A county reading it knows whether the low bidder is licensed before the tabulation is posted.

The same join works beyond Florida and beyond procurement: any dataset where one source names a company and another source describes it. Procurement is the example, not the limit.

The hard part, stated plainly

Award lists write vendor names as free text. Sunbiz matches on legal names and document numbers. “Thalle Construction Co., Inc.” and “Thalle Construction Company, Inc.” may be the same entity or two, and a county clerk’s abbreviation is not evidence either way. Most of the work in this dataset is entity resolution, not collection, and it does not resolve to certainty. Where a name matches one Sunbiz entity with high confidence, the record says so. Where it matches several, or none, the record says that too, and leaves the vendor fields empty rather than guessing. A null in this dataset is information: either the county did not publish it or the match could not be made.

Interested in this dataset?

If your team wants Florida county solicitations enriched with award history and vendor records, or a dataset like it built from a different set of sources, reach out to sales@scrapeup.com. Tell us which counties, which categories, and which vendor fields matter to you, and we will show you what the records look like.