New Business License Leads — Chicago + NY State Liquor

Get businesses that just got licensed to open — every new Chicago business license (all categories) and every pending New York State liquor license application — straight from the official government feeds. Normalized, deduplicated, lead-ready.

A new license is a stronger signal than a new LLC filing: it means a real business, at a real address, in a known category, about to start operating. A pending liquor application is the classic soon-to-open signal — bars and restaurants file 1–6 months before opening day, which is exactly when they're buying everything.

Why this actor

• Official sources only. City of Chicago business licenses and NY State Liquor Authority pending applications, from the government open-data portals — no scraping of third-party sites, no stale resold lists.
• Category-rich. Chicago: every license category (Retail Food, Pop-Up Retail, Tobacco, Home Repair…). NY liquor: human-readable class (Restaurant, Grocery Store, Tavern…).
• Soon-to-open leads, not old news. NY liquor applications are captured the day the SLA logs them — months before the doors open.
• You only pay for new leads. With newOnly enabled (default), records already delivered in previous runs are skipped — a scheduled run only charges for rows you haven't seen before.
• New issuances only. Chicago renewals are filtered out at the source (application_type=ISSUE); you only see businesses that are new.

Output example

{
    "region": "NY-LIQUOR",
    "event": "liquor application received",
    "event_date": "2026-07-07",
    "business_name": "Watches of Switzerland LLC",
    "category": "Restaurant",
    "address": "1 Vanderbilt Ave",
    "city": "New York",
    "zip": "10017",
    "area": "New York County",
    "status": "Pending",
    "source": "NY State Liquor Authority — Pending Licenses (data.ny.gov)"
}

Typical volume: 250–550 new license events per week across both sources.

Who uses this

• Restaurant suppliers & food distributors — a pending liquor license is a restaurant fitting out its space right now.
• POS, payments & reservation platforms — reach owners before they've picked a stack.
• Commercial insurance — new licensees need liquor liability, GL, workers' comp.
• Marketing agencies & sign makers — new businesses need launch marketing.
• Beverage distributors — every pending license is a future account, with the county included.
• CRE & market analysts — track retail/hospitality openings by neighborhood.

Inputs

Field	Default	Notes
sources	both	CHI (Chicago licenses), NY_LIQUOR (NY State pending liquor)
sinceDays	7	Look-back window (1–90 days)
newOnly	true	Skip records delivered by previous runs
maxResults	0 (no cap)	Handy for test runs
socrataAppToken	—	Optional; raises API rate limits for large backfills

Recommended setup: scheduled lead feed

1. Create a Schedule in Apify Console (daily or weekly).
2. Input: your sources, sinceDays: 7, newOnly: true.
3. Add an integration (email, Slack, webhook, Google Sheets, Make/Zapier) to deliver each run's fresh leads to your pipeline.

More sources?

Chicago and NY State are live. Other cities and state liquor boards publish similar feeds — open an issue and tell me which region you need; well-supported requests ship within days. (NYC's own license feed was evaluated and excluded on purpose: the city publishes new licenses with a ~3-month lag, which is not a lead. NYC bar & restaurant openings are covered here via the NY State liquor feed.)

Data & fair-use notes

All records are public business licenses and license applications published by government agencies for exactly this purpose. The actor queries official open-data APIs politely (paged, rate-limited, identified). Records describe businesses, not consumers.