Building Permit Leads – Denver, Chicago, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco

Fresh building permits from official city open-data portals, normalised into one clean schema so you can filter by work class (roofing, solar & battery, HVAC, remodel, new build, pool, demolition…), property type, valuation and ZIP. Schedule it daily and get only permits that are new since your last run.

Built for contractors, solar and roofing installers, suppliers, lenders and home-service marketers.

• Official sources only: Socrata (Chicago, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco) and ArcGIS (Denver) open-data APIs. No scraping, no logins.
• One schema for every city: permit ID, type, work class, residential/commercial, description, status, address, ZIP, neighbourhood, coordinates, valuation, issue/applied dates, contractor company and trade, housing units, link to the official record.
• Privacy: owner, applicant and individual names and phone numbers are never output. Only contractor companies (where the city publishes them). "Homeowner" entries become ownerBuilder: true.
• Per-city adapters, so more cities can be added quickly.

Cities

City	Source	Contractor	ZIP	Description
Denver, CO	Residential + commercial construction permits (ArcGIS)	✅	–	– (permit class only)
Chicago, IL	Building Permits ydr8-5enu	✅ (contractor contacts only)	–	✅
Austin, TX	Issued Construction Permits 3syk-w9eu	✅ company + trade	✅	✅
Seattle, WA	Building Permits 76t5-zqzr	–	✅	✅
San Francisco, CA	Building Permits i98e-djp9	–	✅	✅

Input

{
  "cities": ["denver", "austin"],
  "workClasses": ["roofing", "solar"],
  "categories": ["residential"],
  "minValuation": 5000,
  "issuedWithinDays": 7,
  "onlyNew": true
}

Field	Default	Description
cities	denver	Any of denver, chicago, austin, seattle, san-francisco.
workClasses	all	solar (incl. battery storage), roofing, demolition, pool, sign, hvac, plumbing, electrical, new_build, addition, remodel, other.
categories	all	residential, commercial, unknown.
minValuation	–	Minimum declared job value in USD.
zipCodes	–	ZIPs or prefixes (cities that publish ZIP).
keywords	–	Any word in description / permit type.
requireContractor	false	Only permits with a contractor company.
issuedWithinDays	7	Look-back window by issue date.
onlyNew	false	Turn on for daily schedules: each permit is returned once per filter set.
maxPermitsPerCity	5000	Cap per city per run.
socrataAppToken	–	Optional, for very large pulls.

Output (example, shortened)

{
  "city": "chicago",
  "permitId": "B200517912",
  "permitType": "PERMIT – EXPRESS PERMIT PROGRAM / Small-Scale Solar PV System",
  "workClass": "solar",
  "category": "residential",
  "description": "INSTALLATION OF ROOF MOUNTED SOLAR PV SYSTEM …",
  "status": "ACTIVE",
  "address": "6543 S TROY ST, Chicago, IL",
  "zip": null,
  "neighborhood": "66",
  "latitude": 41.77,
  "longitude": -87.69,
  "valuation": 32230.0,
  "issueDate": "2026-10-29",
  "appliedDate": "2026-10-27",
  "contractor": "SUNRUN INSTALLATION SERVICES INC",
  "contractorTrade": "Electrical",
  "housingUnits": null,
  "ownerBuilder": false,
  "link": "https://webapps1.chicago.gov/buildingrecords/home?permit=B200517912",
  "source": "data.cityofchicago.org/ydr8-5enu",
  "firstSeenAt": "2026-11-01T09:00:00Z"
}

workClass is derived from each city's permit type and description with keyword rules (specific trades like solar and roofing win). It is a best-effort label; permitType and description hold the city's own wording.

Pricing (pay per event + usage)

Event	Price	When
apify-actor-start	$0.001	Apify built-in event, charged once per run (per GB of memory above 1 GB). Covers start-up cost and deters empty runs.
records-scanned	$0.0005	Each started block of 1,000 permit records read from a city portal, matching or not.
permit	$0.0015	One new building permit matching your filters.

Example: a daily roofing + solar watch in two cities (a few thousand records scanned, 20 matches) ≈ $0.001 + $0.002 + $0.03 = $0.033 per day. A one-off 7-day pull of all five cities (~2,000 permits) ≈ $3.

Plus Apify platform usage for the run itself (server time), typically $0.0002–0.0005 per run because the Actor is lightweight and capped at 512 MB. The run stops cleanly when your maximum cost per run is reached.

Notes

• Cities publish with a delay of 1–3 days; a 7-day window with onlyNew catches late postings without duplicates.
• Valuations are as declared by applicants; some cities record $0–$20 for revisions or trade permits.
• One city's portal being down does not stop the others; the run log and OUTPUT record name the failed city.

Adding a city (developers)

Write a norm_<city>(row) function in src/cities.py that maps the portal's fields to base_record(...), then register a SocrataCity(...) or ArcGISCity(...) in CITIES and add the key to the input schema enum. Never map owner/applicant fields.

Local development

pip install -r requirements.txt pytest pytest-asyncio respx
pytest          # HTTP mocked with recorded portal responses (personal names scrubbed)
python -m src   # reads storage/key_value_stores/default/INPUT.json