US Building Permits Scraper — Construction Leads from Official City Open Data

Extract building permit records for New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, San Francisco, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Montgomery County (MD), and Norfolk (VA) — straight from each city's official open-data API, normalized into one shared schema. Filter by issue date, permit type, project valuation, and keyword, and download clean JSON, CSV, or Excel.

Because this Actor reads the cities' own open-data APIs (Socrata/SODA) instead of scraping fragile permit-search websites, it is fast, complete, and doesn't break when a city redesigns its search page — the #1 failure mode of other permit scrapers.

What data do you get?

One result per permit, in the same schema for every city:

Field	Example
city / state	New York City, NY / NY
permitNumber	M01129209-I1
permitType / permitClass / workType	General Construction / Initial Permit / ...
description	Work description as filed
status	Issued, Active, ...
appliedDate / issuedDate / expirationDate	2026-07-10 (ISO dates)
address / zip	Job site address
valuation	Declared project value in USD, e.g. 2507920
squareFootage / fees	When published
contractorName / contractorLicense	Contractor / permittee, when published (NYC, Chicago, Austin, Baton Rouge)
applicantName / ownerName	When published
latitude / longitude	Job site coordinates
raw	Optional: every extra field the city publishes

Supported cities (verified sources)

City	Source dataset
New York City, NY	DOB NOW: Build — Approved Permits (data.cityofnewyork.us)
Chicago, IL	Building Permits (data.cityofchicago.org)
Los Angeles, CA	Building Permits Issued 2020+ (data.lacity.org)
Austin, TX	Issued Construction Permits (data.austintexas.gov)
San Francisco, CA	Building Permits (data.sfgov.org)
New Orleans, LA	Building Permits (data.nola.gov)
Baton Rouge, LA	EBR Building Permits (data.brla.gov)
Montgomery County, MD	Residential + Commercial Permits (data.montgomerycountymd.gov)
Norfolk, VA	Permits (data.norfolk.gov)

Need another city? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab — adding a city with a public open-data permits feed is usually a same-week change.

Use cases

• Construction lead generation — new permits are the earliest public buying signal in construction. Schedule the Actor weekly with issuedAfter set to last week and feed fresh permits (with valuations and contractor names) into your CRM. Building-material suppliers, dumpster/equipment rental, insurance, solar, and HVAC companies all sell to the addresses on these permits.
• Contractor prospecting — permits name the contractor doing the work: build lists of active roofers, electricians, or GCs by city and volume of recent permits.
• Market intelligence — track construction activity by neighborhood, permit type, and declared value; benchmark competitors' project pipelines.
• Real-estate due diligence — pull the full permit history of an address before buying or underwriting.
• AI agents / MCP — the normalized cross-city schema means one tool call answers "what was just permitted near X?" in any supported city.

How to use it

Fresh high-value construction leads in two cities:

{
    "cities": ["austin", "chicago"],
    "issuedAfter": "2026-07-01",
    "minValuation": 50000,
    "maxResultsPerCity": 1000
}

Find all recent solar work in Los Angeles:

{
    "cities": ["los-angeles"],
    "searchQuery": "solar",
    "issuedAfter": "2026-06-01",
    "maxResultsPerCity": 500
}

Leave cities empty to query all supported cities in one run. permitTypeContains filters by trade (electrical, roof, plumbing...). Set includeRawData to true to also get every city-specific extra field. You are only charged for records actually returned.

Pricing

Pay per result: one charge per permit record extracted.

Suggested store pricing (set in the Apify Console → Publication → Monetization):

• permit-record event: $0.005 per record ($5.00 per 1,000 records)

Rationale: comparable permit actors charge $0.002–$0.03 per record, and the two highest-user incumbents (79 and 83 users) sit at $0.005 and $0.002 with 1.0★/unrated reviews and failing runs. $5/1,000 keeps a 1,000-lead weekly pull under a coffee's cost while reflecting that each record is a warm, dated, valued construction lead.

Data source & freshness

Every record comes from the city's own open-data portal (Socrata SODA API) — official public records published by the municipalities themselves, refreshed daily or near-daily. No HTML scraping, no captchas, no blocked requests, no stale mirrors. Date filtering and full-text search run server-side on the portal, so runs are fast and cheap even against multi-million-row datasets.

FAQ

How current is the data? Most of the cities refresh these datasets daily (we verified issue dates from the last 24–48 hours at publication). Schedule the Actor daily or weekly for a continuous feed.

Do I get contractor phone numbers? Only when the city publishes them (e.g. Austin publishes contractor phone; NYC publishes license numbers). No fabricated enrichment — records are exactly what the city of record publishes.

Can I pull a full permit history? Yes — omit the date filters and raise maxResultsPerCity (up to 200,000 per city per run).

Why is a permit missing? If the city hasn't loaded it into its open-data feed yet, it won't be here; feeds typically lag the permit office by 0–2 days.