Building Permit Leads Scraper — Solar, Roofing, HVAC & Windows

Get fresh, trade-filtered building permit leads from five major US metros in one run. This actor pulls newly-issued building permits from official city open-data portals (Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Seattle), automatically classifies each permit by trade — solar, roofing, HVAC, windows, siding, EV charger — and returns one clean, consistent spreadsheet-ready feed. No more downloading five different city CSVs and filtering permit descriptions by hand.

Built for home-improvement contractors, solar installers, roofing companies, HVAC sales teams, building-material suppliers, and market analysts who want a recurring stream of permit-based leads instead of a raw, unfiltered data dump.

Why this permit scraper is different

Most building-permit actors hand you every permit a city issued and leave you to guess which rows are solar jobs, which are re-roofs, and which are HVAC replacements. This one does the sorting for you:

• Trade classification built in. A transparent keyword table tags each permit as solar, roofing, HVAC, windows, siding, or EV-charger work. Filter to just the trades you sell.
• Same schema across every city. Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Austin and Seattle each publish permits with different column names — this actor normalizes them into one flat schema so issueDate, address, valuationUsd and primaryTrade mean the same thing everywhere.
• Fresh by default. Returns the last 30 days of issued permits out of the box; set a sinceDate to your last run and get only the new ones.
• Public data only. Every source is an official municipal Socrata open-data API — no logins, no CAPTCHAs, no scraping behind a paywall.

Input

Runs with zero configuration — the defaults return the last 30 days of solar, roofing, HVAC and window permits across all five metros.

Field	Type	Default	Description
metros	array	all 5	Cities to pull from: chicago, los_angeles, san_francisco, austin, seattle.
trades	array	solar, roofing, hvac, windows	Trades to keep. Also supports siding, ev_charger. Clear it to get every permit.
dateBasis	string	issued	Filter/sort by issued or applied date.
lookbackDays	integer	30	How many days back to pull when no sinceDate is set.
sinceDate	string	—	YYYY-MM-DD; overrides lookback. Set to your last run for deltas.
untilDate	string	—	YYYY-MM-DD; upper bound.
minValuationUsd	integer	0	Drop permits below this declared job value (0 = off).
maxItems	integer	500	Total leads returned, newest first.
maxItemsPerMetro	integer	200	Per-city cap so one big city can't crowd out the rest.
socrataAppToken	string	—	Optional free Socrata token for higher rate limits.

Sample output

Each dataset item is one permit:

{
  "metro": "chicago",
  "metroLabel": "Chicago, IL",
  "primaryTrade": "solar",
  "trades": ["solar", "roofing"],
  "permitId": "chicago:B200478850",
  "permitNumber": "B200478850",
  "permitType": "PERMIT - EXPRESS PERMIT PROGRAM",
  "description": "INSTALL SOLAR PANELS ON ROOF OF PRINCIPAL BUILDING. ARRAY OUTPUT: 9.43 KW. INCLUDES 15 KWH ENERGY STORAGE SYSTEM.",
  "status": null,
  "issueDate": "2026-07-24",
  "valuationUsd": null,
  "contractorName": "SUNRUN INSTALLATION SERVICES",
  "address": "1234 N Example Ave",
  "city": "Chicago",
  "stateCode": "IL",
  "zip": null,
  "latitude": 41.8226,
  "longitude": -87.6960,
  "url": "https://data.cityofchicago.org/Buildings/Building-Permits/ydr8-5enu",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-07-26T13:00:00.000Z"
}

Use cases

Solar & roofing lead generation

Pull every solar and re-roof permit issued in your service area this week, then work the list by address and ZIP. Because solar permits are frequently roof-adjacent, each item lists all detected trades so a roofer can spot solar cross-sell opportunities and vice-versa.

HVAC replacement outreach

Filter to hvac and a minValuationUsd threshold to focus on larger mechanical jobs, then route by city and neighborhood to your reps.

Supplier & market intelligence

Track permit volume by trade and metro over time to size a market, plan inventory, or scout a new territory before opening a branch.

FAQ

Where does the data come from?

Official municipal open-data portals running on the Socrata platform: Chicago (data.cityofchicago.org), Los Angeles (data.lacity.org), San Francisco (data.sfgov.org), Austin (data.austintexas.gov) and Seattle (data.seattle.gov). All are public government datasets published for civic and commercial reuse.

Is scraping building permits legal?

Yes. These are public records that each city publishes deliberately through a documented open-data API. This actor only reads public endpoints — no logins, no terms-of-service circumvention, and no personal data beyond what the city already publishes on the permit.

How fresh is the data?

As fresh as each city publishes. Portals typically refresh daily to a few times per week. Sort is newest-first by issued date. Run the actor on an Apify schedule and pass sinceDate to collect only new permits each run.

How do I get owner or contact details?

Owner/contact enrichment is intentionally out of scope to keep the data clean and the source strictly public. Each permit includes the property address, coordinates, and (where the city publishes it) the contractor of record.

Can you add my city?

More Socrata metros can be added on request — open an issue on the actor. Denver, NYC, Seattle-area suburbs and other portals are candidates.

Related actors & docs

• Apify Store — Lead Generation actors
• Apify scheduling docs — automate recurring pulls
• Apify API & client docs — run this actor from your own code

Changelog

0.1

• Initial release: Chicago, LA, San Francisco, Austin & Seattle; solar / roofing / HVAC / windows / siding / EV-charger classification; normalized schema; date-window and valuation filters; per-metro caps.