Building Permits Data — Any Socrata City or County, One Schema

Every city and county publishes building permits on its own open-data portal, with its own column names. This free Actor queries any public Socrata portal (used by hundreds of US cities and counties — e.g. Seattle, Austin, San Francisco, San Diego County) and returns one flat record per permit with the same fields every time: permit ID, issue date, status, address, contractor name and phone, and the work description.

Choose this Actor when you need permit rows with contractor contacts from a specific city or county portal in a consistent schema — for lead lists, vendor monitoring or analysis.

Not the right fit when your city is not on Socrata, or you want ready-made "new contractor" alerts — for that use New Contractor Alerts from Building Permits, built on this Actor.

Use cases

• Contractor lead lists — contractors with phone numbers pulling permits in your area.
• Vendor and insurance compliance — see when a vendor starts new work, then check their certificates.
• Property managers and GCs — monitor permits issued at addresses you manage.
• Analysis — combine several jurisdictions in one schema.

Quick start

1. Find your portal's building-permit dataset at opendatanetwork.com (search "building permits" + your city).
2. Copy the host (e.g. data.seattle.gov) and the 4-4 resource id from the dataset URL (e.g. 8tqq-u7ib).
3. Set dateField if the portal's date column is not issued_date.
4. Run. Leave everything empty to try the built-in San Diego County example.

Input example

{
  "socrataHost": "data.sandiegocounty.gov",
  "resourceId": "dyzh-7eat",
  "dateField": "issued_date",
  "lookbackDays": 3650,
  "limit": 100
}

Input	Default	What it does
socrataHost	data.sandiegocounty.gov	Portal hostname
resourceId	dyzh-7eat	Dataset id from the Socrata URL
dateField	issued_date	The dataset's issue-date column
lookbackDays	3650	Days back from today
limit	100 (max 5000)	Rows per run

About the default example: San Diego County's dataset is a static archive last updated 2023-12-05, so the default lookbackDays is wide enough to return data. For a live portal use e.g. 30.

Output example (one permit, real San Diego County row)

{
  "permit_id": "PDS2023-RESALT-015752",
  "issued_date": "2023-12-05T00:00:00.000",
  "status": "Issued",
  "address": "10568 ROSEDUST GLEN DR, SAN DIEGO, CA 92127",
  "city": "SAN DIEGO",
  "state": "CA",
  "zip_code": "92127",
  "contractor_name": "WALTER ANDERSON PLUMBING LLC",
  "contractor_phone": "6194493852",
  "work_description": "50 GALLON WATER HEATER FOR EXISTING SFD/MISC PLUMBING"
}

Pricing

Free. You only pay Apify platform usage on your own account.

FAQ

Which portals work? Tested on San Diego County. Other Socrata portals work when their permit dataset exposes a date column (set dateField) and contractor columns. If a portal's columns are not recognized, open an issue with the dataset URL.

Is it really free? Yes — no per-row charge. Platform usage (compute) is billed by Apify to your account as for any free Actor.

Is the data public? Yes. Socrata open-data portals are government publications intended for reuse. Requests are unauthenticated and rate-respecting. Contractor phone numbers are business contacts published by the jurisdiction; follow applicable laws (e.g. TCPA) before using them for outreach.

Need a feature? Open an issue on the Issues tab — include your run ID.