US Building Permits Scraper — Construction Leads from 13 Major Cities

Get fresh building permits straight from official city open-data APIs, normalized into one clean schema: permit number, type, status, issue date, address, project valuation, and contractor name where the city publishes it. Type a city name, get permits. No proxies, no brittle HTML scraping — every source is a government JSON API.

Supported cities

City	Contractor names	Valuation	Source
Chicago, IL	✅	✅	data.cityofchicago.org
New York, NY (DOB NOW)	✅	✅	data.cityofnewyork.us
Los Angeles, CA	—	✅	data.lacity.org
Austin, TX	✅	partial	datahub.austintexas.gov
Seattle, WA	—	✅	data.seattle.gov
San Francisco, CA	—	✅	data.sfgov.org
Philadelphia, PA	✅	—	phl.carto.com (L&I)
Boston, MA	✅ (applicant)	✅	data.boston.gov
New Orleans, LA	✅	✅	data.nola.gov
Cincinnati, OH	✅	✅	data.cincinnati-oh.gov
Baton Rouge, LA (EBR Parish)	✅	✅	data.brla.gov
Norfolk, VA	—	—	data.norfolk.gov
Montgomery County, MD	—	✅	data.montgomerycountymd.gov

Bonus: any other city on a Socrata open-data portal works too — paste the dataset's resource URL (https://<portal>/resource/<id>.json) and the actor auto-maps the common permit fields.

Why this actor

• Construction leads with purchase intent. A freshly issued permit is a project that is funded and about to start. Filter by issue date, sort by valuation, call the contractor.
• Official sources only. Government open-data APIs — stable, legal, no anti-bot arms race, no proxy costs passed to you.
• One schema across all cities. No per-city CSV wrangling; permitNumber, issuedDate, valuation, contractor mean the same thing everywhere.
• Honest field coverage. The table above tells you exactly which cities publish contractor names and valuations. Cities that don't publish a field return null — we don't fabricate or "enrich" data.
• Built-in quality guard. If a city changes its data schema, the actor flags it and skips the garbage instead of filling your dataset with empty rows.
• Pay per result. You pay only for permits actually delivered.

Who uses this

• Building-material suppliers — new permits by ZIP = who needs lumber, roofing, HVAC equipment this month.
• Contractor & subcontractor sales teams — solar, HVAC, plumbing, electrical subs prospecting the GCs pulling permits.
• Market researchers & PropTech — construction activity, valuations, and permit velocity by city and neighborhood.
• Real-estate investors — track renovation and development activity block by block.

Input

{
    "cities": ["chicago", "austin", "philadelphia", "baton-rouge"],
    "issuedAfter": "2026-06-01",
    "maxPermitsPerCity": 500
}

• cities — city names (chicago, nyc, la, sf, philly, …), portal URLs, or raw Socrata resource URLs.
• issuedAfter (optional) — only permits issued on/after this date. For lead generation, the last 7–30 days is the sweet spot.
• maxPermitsPerCity — cap per city, newest first (default 500).

Output

One dataset item per permit:

{
    "city": "Chicago, IL",
    "permitNumber": "B200476664",
    "permitType": "PERMIT - EXPRESS PERMIT PROGRAM",
    "status": "ACTIVE",
    "issuedDate": "2026-07-10T00:00:00.000",
    "address": "9764 S LOOMIS ST",
    "description": "INSTALL SOLAR PANELS ON ROOF OF ACCESSORY BUILDING",
    "valuation": 5130,
    "contractor": "SUNRUN INSTALLATION SERVICES",
    "latitude": 41.716239,
    "longitude": -87.657705,
    "url": null,
    "source": "chicago"
}

Export as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the dataset tab, or pull via the Apify API into your CRM.

FAQ

Is this legal? Yes. All data comes from official government open-data portals that cities publish explicitly for public use, via their documented APIs (Socrata, Carto, CKAN). No scraping of protected or private systems.

What about homeowner privacy? This actor deliberately does not output homeowner/owner name fields, even where cities publish them. Lead generation needs the contractor and the project — not the resident. Contractor and business names are included because they are commercial actors on public commercial records.

Why isn't my city listed? Many cities (Miami, Denver, DC, Phoenix, …) run their permits on ArcGIS or Accela portals that need per-city integration — they're on the roadmap. If your city has a Socrata portal, paste the dataset resource URL and it will likely work today. Unsupported cities are logged in the run, never silently dropped.

How fresh is the data? Each supported city's dataset is refreshed by the city itself, typically daily. The actor always returns the newest permits first.

A city returned fewer permits than my cap — why? Either the issuedAfter window contains fewer permits, or the city published fewer records. The run log shows per-city counts.