Building Permits Monitor — Official City Feeds (NYC, Chicago, LA, SF, Austin)

Get every building permit issued in five of America's biggest construction markets, straight from the official city open-data feeds — normalized, deduplicated, and lead-ready. Contractor names, licenses, phone numbers (where the city publishes them), job descriptions, and job values, the day the city publishes them.

Building permits are a buying signal you can set your watch to: a permit means money is being spent at that address, by that owner, through that contractor — right now.

Why this actor

• Official sources only. Data comes directly from city government open-data portals (NYC DOB, Chicago, LA DBS, SF DBI, Austin) — no scraping of third-party sites, no stale resold lists.
• Contractor intelligence included. NYC: contractor business name + license. Chicago: contractor name + trade. Austin: contractor company, trade, and phone number. Deep links to the city permit record where available.
• You only pay for new permits. With newOnly enabled (default), permits already delivered in previous runs are skipped — a scheduled run only charges for rows you haven't seen before.
• Job-value filter. Set minCost to only receive permits above a dollar threshold (e.g. $50,000+ renovations) and skip the water-heater swaps.
• One normalized schema across cities. Permit number, type, work description, issue date, cost, address, contractor — same columns whether it came from NYC or Austin.

Output example

{
    "city": "NYC",
    "permit_number": "M01419837-I1-GC",
    "permit_type": "General Construction",
    "description": "Interior renovation of existing retail space...",
    "issued_date": "2026-07-07",
    "estimated_cost": 150000,
    "address": "50 GREENE STREET",
    "zip": "10013",
    "contractor_name": "ARIEL CONSULTANTS LLC",
    "contractor_license": "616931",
    "source": "NYC Department of Buildings (data.cityofnewyork.us)"
}

Typical volume (all five cities): 700–1,000 permits per day.

Who uses this

• Building-material & equipment suppliers — reach contractors with active jobs, not cold lists.
• Subcontractors (electrical, plumbing, HVAC, roofing) — see which GCs just pulled permits near you.
• Solar, security, smart-home installers — homeowners mid-renovation are buying.
• Insurance & bonding — new projects need coverage; valuation included.
• Real-estate investors & proptech — track renovation activity by neighborhood, spot flips early.
• Data teams — construction-activity indices, comps, market research.

Inputs

Field	Default	Notes
cities	all five	Any subset of NYC, CHI, LA, SF, AUS
sinceDays	7	Look-back window (1–90 days)
minCost	0	Only permits with job value ≥ this (permits without a recorded cost are excluded when > 0)
newOnly	true	Skip permits delivered by previous runs
maxResults	0 (no cap)	Handy for test runs
socrataAppToken	—	Optional; raises city API rate limits for large backfills

Recommended setup: scheduled lead feed

1. Create a Schedule in Apify Console (daily, e.g. 7:00 AM).
2. Input: your cities, sinceDays: 3, newOnly: true, and a minCost that fits your ticket size.
3. Add an integration (email, Slack, webhook, Google Sheets, Make/Zapier) to deliver each run's fresh permits to your pipeline.

Note on freshness: cities publish on their own schedules — most update daily, but some (e.g. Los Angeles) can lag a few days behind the issue date. newOnly mode handles this automatically: late-arriving permits are delivered as soon as the city publishes them, never duplicated.

More cities?

NYC, Chicago, LA, SF, and Austin are live. Dozens more cities publish official permit feeds — open an issue and tell me which city you need; well-supported requests ship within days.

Data & fair-use notes

All records are public building permits published by city governments for exactly this purpose. The actor queries official open-data APIs politely (paged, rate-limited, identified). Records describe permits and businesses, not consumers.