County Permit + Contractor Activity Normalizer

Every county and city publishes building-permit records on its own siloed open-data portal, in its own schema. If you need to know when a vendor or contractor is actively starting new work — the exact moment their insurance/compliance status matters most — you're stuck manually watching one county's portal at a time.

This Actor queries any public Socrata open-data platform (used by hundreds of US city/county portals — Seattle, San Diego County, Austin, San Francisco, and many more) and returns one clean, flat schema regardless of how the source county names its own fields.

What you get

One normalized JSON record per permit:

{
  "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"
}

Real output, taken from a real run against San Diego County's own public data — nothing here is a mock.

Input

Field	Required	Description
socrataHost	yes	The county/city open-data host, e.g. data.seattle.gov
resourceId	yes	The dataset's Socrata resource id, e.g. 8tqq-u7ib
dateField	no	The dataset's own column name for the permit date (default issued_date)
lookbackDays	no	How many days back to fetch (default 3650 — see note below)
limit	no	Max rows per run (default 100, max 5000)

Find your county's dataset at opendatanetwork.com (search "building permits" + your county/city name).

Note on the default example: San Diego County's own public dataset is a static archive (last updated 2023-12-05), not a live feed — the default lookbackDays is set wide so a first-time run actually returns data. Point this at your own county's live dataset (e.g. Seattle's, updated within days) and use a normal 30-day window for current activity.

Who this is for

Property managers, GCs, and insurance-compliance teams who need to know the moment a vendor starts new work on a property — pair this Actor's output with your own vendor certificate-of-insurance records to catch lapses exactly when they matter, instead of on a fixed annual re-check schedule.

Rights and data source

Socrata open-data portals are government open-data publications explicitly intended for public reuse — that is the entire purpose of an "open data portal." This Actor makes only unauthenticated, rate-respecting requests to each county's own published API.