Early Construction Project Intelligence

Find fresh, source-backed construction projects in New York City and Austin while they are still in filing or plan review.

This Actor turns fragmented municipal construction records into a cleaner project-level feed for people and software that need to identify meaningful commercial, institutional, industrial, public, and multifamily activity without manually monitoring multiple government systems.

What you get

Each qualified project can include:

• Project name and address
• Market and project type
• Official project description
• Filing/application date
• Latest source activity date
• Current review status
• Reported project value
• Reported floor area and unit counts when available
• Owner/developer identity when available
• Applicant, architect, engineer, or representative when available
• Source-visible work packages
• Qualification score and reasons
• NEW / CHANGED / UNCHANGED tracking
• Official-source record IDs and provenance

The Actor deliberately prefers unknown or source-qualified values over unsupported guesses.

Why use this Actor?

Raw permit and plan-review feeds contain significant noise, including small residential work, temporary protection, scaffolding, fencing, narrow discipline filings, duplicate or subsequent filings, and records tied to larger parent projects.

Early Construction Project Intelligence applies conservative normalization and qualification rules to surface project-level records that are more useful for research, prospecting, monitoring, and downstream analysis.

Current coverage

New York City

Source: NYC Department of Buildings DOB NOW: Build Job Application Filings

The Actor monitors recent filing and status activity and groups related filing packages where possible.

Austin, Texas

Source: City of Austin Plan Review Cases

The Actor uses official commercial/nonresidential plan-review fields, project scope, status, applicant/owner information, reported value, and floor area where available.

Input options

You can configure:

• Markets NYC, Austin, or both
• Activity lookback
• Maximum results
• Minimum qualification score
• Minimum reported valuation
• Minimum reported floor area
• Only changes return only projects that are NEW or CHANGED since prior observations
• Minimum source rows per market fail visibly when an official source unexpectedly returns too little data

Change tracking

The Actor maintains project observations across runs.

A project can be marked:

• NEW first observed
• CHANGED source-observed facts changed
• UNCHANGED source-observed facts match the previous observation

Change detection tracks real source facts such as project status, dates, description, value, owner/applicant, size, and work packages.

History is delivery-safe. NEW or CHANGED projects that do not fit within maxResults or the run's maximum-charge limit are not committed as observed. They remain eligible for a later run instead of disappearing from the change feed. Previously delivered UNCHANGED projects can still refresh their last-observed timestamp when dataset output is suppressed.

Pricing

• Qualified early-project record: $0.01 for each project written to the default dataset.
• Actor start: Apify's standard $0.00005 synthetic start event.

Platform usage is included. A default run returning 100 projects costs about $1.00. Runs with onlyChanges: true charge only for NEW or CHANGED projects that are actually delivered.

The Actor respects the run's maximum-charge limit and reports deferred projects in RUN_SUMMARY.

Reliability

Official-source failures stop the run visibly. The source-health summary also reports row counts and warns when a market reaches its configured fetch cap. The default source-row floor prevents an empty or unexpectedly blank response from being treated as a healthy successful scan.

Important limitations

This Actor does not claim that:

• a specific subcontract is available
• an owner is currently soliciting bids
• a particular trade has or has not been awarded
• every source-reported valuation is accurate
• every public filing represents a new sales opportunity

Where an official source reports an implausible valuation, the original value may be preserved while being flagged as suspect.

The Actor returns a ranked, bounded feed rather than claiming exhaustive permit coverage. Increase the per-market fetch cap when broader recent coverage is required; a cap warning indicates that additional source rows may exist.

Data provenance

Results preserve official source identifiers and links wherever available so important facts can be traced back to the originating public record.

Unofficial tool. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the City of New York, NYC Department of Buildings, or the City of Austin. For isolated staging or validation, set the advanced historyStoreName input to a separate named store. Keep construction-intel-history-v1 for production so change tracking remains continuous.