US Building Permits Feed — New Permit Alerts (NYC, Chicago, LA, Austin)

A scheduled feed of newly issued building permits straight from the official city open-data APIs — no scraping, no stale exports. Run it on a daily schedule and every run emits ONLY the permits it has never seen before, already filtered to your trade, your minimum job value and your zip codes. You pay per new permit detected, not per page fetched.

Built as a monitor, not a one-shot scraper: it keeps a per-city last-issued-date watermark plus the set of permit numbers already delivered, so a rerun on the same day emits zero duplicates and the next morning's run emits exactly what is new.

Who uses this

• Solar installers: workTypes: ["solar"] — every new rooftop PV permit in Chicago and NYC, with the contractor who pulled it (see who is winning work in your patch) or the homeowner going out to bid.
• HVAC / plumbing / electrical contractors: new trade permits in your zip codes, daily, with addresses and job descriptions — call while the project is live, not after it is finished.
• Building-material suppliers & proptech: minValuation: 100000 for a feed of significant construction starts with valuations, coordinates and (where published) the general contractor.

City coverage (v1)

Seattle, San Francisco, Phoenix and Dallas are next on the roadmap.

Example output

{
  "city": "nyc",
  "permitNumber": "B01448018-I1-SL",
  "permitType": "Initial Permit",
  "workClass": "solar",
  "workClassRaw": "Solar",
  "description": "Installation of solar panels, Roof Top, Grid Tied, railed, (16) Modules, (6.56) kW System Size",
  "address": "1969 HENDRICKSON STREET Brooklyn",
  "zipCode": "11234",
  "valuation": 32800.0,
  "issuedDate": "2026-08-25",
  "applicantName": "Mina Makar",
  "contractorName": "MOMENTUM SOLAR",
  "latitude": 40.613135,
  "longitude": -73.813281,
  "sourceUrl": "https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/rbx6-tga4.json?work_permit=B01448018-I1-SL",
  "detectedAt": "2026-08-31T02:14:09Z"
}

workClass is one normalised enum across all four cities —

residential | commercial | solar | demolition | electrical | plumbing | mechanical | other

Input options

Honest data notes (so you are not surprised)

• Chicago publishes no site zip code — zipCode is null for Chicago, so a zipCodes filter excludes Chicago entirely. Use coordinates instead.
• Austin publishes valuations only on building (BP) permits — trade permits (electrical/plumbing/mechanical) carry valuation: null.
• LA publishes no applicant/contractor names in its permits dataset.
• contractorName and applicantName are only ever what the city portal itself displays publicly — no enrichment, no scraped phone numbers.
• One portal being down never kills the run: the other cities still emit, the failed city's watermark stays put, and its permits arrive on the next successful run.

Reliability & maintenance

• Every run logs per-city fetch and emit counts so you can audit it from the Apify console alone.
• Schema drift on any portal logs a clear warning naming the field and degrades that field to null — the feed keeps flowing.
• Field mappings are checked against all four portals' live APIs; the work-class normalisation table covers every value the portals currently publish.

Pricing events

• Actor start: $0.005 per run
• New permit detected: $0.005 per permit emitted
• City checked: $0.001 per portal successfully checked

A daily all-cities run with no new permits matching your filters costs under a cent. A solar installer watching one city typically sees 5–60 new permits a day.

Changelog

• 0.2 — maxItems is now split fairly across the cities you select, so a multi-city run with a small cap no longer returns only the first city's permits. Nothing was skipped: capped-out permits still carry over to the next run.
• 0.1 — initial release: NYC (DOB NOW), Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin; normalised workClass; watermark + seen-permit dedupe; trade, valuation and zip filters.