NYC New Businesses — Newly Licensed Leads by Borough

Every week New York City issues licences to businesses that did not exist the week before. This Actor reads that register newest-first and returns one flat row per licence: the business name, what kind of business it is, the licensed address, the borough, the phone number on the application and the coordinates — so a list that is ordered by when the business started, not by when a directory last crawled it.

The source is the DCWP Issued Licenses dataset on New York City Open Data (w7w3-xahh). It is public, needs no key, and covers roughly 72,000 licences with new ones added every month.

What you get

• New licences view — licence number, business name, category, issue date, expiry, days since issued, and the phone number from the application.
• Addresses view — street number, street, city, state, ZIP, borough, community board, council district, BBL, BIN and coordinates.

Every row carries the same 25 fields. Rows are de-duplicated on the licence number, so a business that appears twice in the feed comes back once.

{
  "id": "nyclic:0016371-DCA",
  "licenseNumber": "0016371-DCA",
  "businessName": "JAMES ROBINSON, INC.",
  "category": "Secondhand Dealer - General",
  "licenseType": "Premises",
  "licenseStatus": "Active",
  "createdDate": "2003-10-31",
  "daysSinceIssued": 8395,
  "phone": "2127526166",
  "addressBuilding": "480",
  "addressStreet": "PARK AVENUE",
  "borough": "Manhattan",
  "zipCode": "10022",
  "bbl": "1012940033",
  "latitude": 40.7614,
  "longitude": -73.9712
}

Inputs

Field	What it does
Issued within (days)	The recency window. 30 is last month, 365 is the last year.
Category	Substring match on the licence category, e.g. Secondhand Dealer, Laundry, Electronics.
Borough	Manhattan, Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens or Staten Island. Empty means all five.
Licence type	Premises (a business location, the default), Individual (a person's licence) or Any.
Maximum rows	Hard row cap, up to 5,000. The source pages 500 at a time.
Time budget	Stops cleanly, returns what it has, and reports why it stopped in SUMMARY.

What this is good for

• New-business outreach — the businesses that opened this month, with a phone number attached.
• Territory work — filter to one borough and get the address list for a rep's route.
• Market mapping — count new licences per category per month and watch a trade grow or shrink.
• Address enrichment — the register carries BBL, BIN and coordinates, so a row joins directly to property, zoning and 311 data without a geocoder.

Limitations

• The register lags by weeks, not days. A licence issued yesterday may not be published yet, and the city's own dataset updates monthly. A window of 30 days can look thin for that reason alone; widen it before assuming a category is quiet.
• DCWP licences only. This is the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection register — not state liquor licences, not health permits, not LLC formations filed with the state. A restaurant with no DCWP licence will not appear.
• A licence is not a storefront opening. Licences are issued before a business opens, and some are never used. licenseStatus and expiresDate are the fields to check.
• No email address. The register publishes a phone number, not an email; there is nothing to infer.
• Phone numbers are digits only. Formatting is stripped by the source, not by this Actor.
• New York City only. Five boroughs, one register.

Why this is different

A business directory is a snapshot — the same stale list, sold again. This returns the delta: what the city licensed inside the window you ask for, sorted by issue date, with the licensed address and the application phone in the same row. The filter is applied at the source with a $where clause, so a narrow request fetches a narrow page rather than downloading 72,000 rows and discarding most of them. Nothing is invented: a missing phone or coordinate comes back null, and the SUMMARY object records the exact query, the number of pages read and why the run stopped.

FAQ

Do I need an API key? No. New York City Open Data is public.

Why are the newest rows a few weeks old? The city publishes the register monthly. daysSinceIssued counts from the issue date, not the publication date.

Can I get only businesses, not individuals? Yes — that is the default (License type: Premises).

Can I search by name? Not directly. Filter by category and window, then match names in your own data; the register's text search is not a name index.

What does daysSinceIssued measure? Whole days from the licence issue date to the moment the run executed. It is recomputed on every run, so it ages correctly.

What happens at the row cap? The Actor stops at the cap, keeps the newest rows, and SUMMARY reports stopReason: max-items.

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.0005 per licence row. Each stored dataset row is billed, including any diagnostic row returned instead of results.

An Actor-start event is also charged at $0.0001 per GB of allocated memory (minimum one event), even if no rows are returned. At 1 GB or less, 1,000 result rows cost $0.5001 before any applicable Store discount.

Data source

NYC Open Data: DCWP Issued Licenses, published by the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection. Public domain data published by the City of New York.