New Homeowner & Business Leads (Certificates of Occupancy)

A certificate of occupancy is the record a building department issues when a new or renovated building is cleared to be lived in or opened for business. This actor turns those records into new homeowner and new mover leads from any city or county that runs Accela Citizen Access, the permitting portal used by hundreds of US jurisdictions. Give it an agency and a date range; get one row per certificate with the address, record type, status, date and a link to the public record.

Built for people who sell to households and businesses in their first weeks at a new address: movers, furniture and appliance retailers, security and alarm companies, insurance agents, landscapers, signage and point-of-sale vendors, commercial cleaners, and the lead sellers and brokers who supply them. A certificate of occupancy usually lands days before the move-in or the grand opening, which is earlier than any change-of-address or business directory picks it up.

What you get

One row per record. Every field is flat, so the dataset drops straight into Google Sheets, Airtable or a CRM.

Field	Example
permitNumber	COO-2026-00152
permitType	Certificate of Occupancy, Temporary Certificate of Occupancy, Occupancy Permit
status	Issued, Plan Review, In Progress
appliedDate	2026-09-14
addressFull, street, addressCity, addressState, zip	975 E BIRCH St, B, BREA CA 92821
description	Project description as published
detailUrl	Direct link to the public record, when one exists
declaredValuationUsd, parcelId, issuedDate, finalDate	From the record page, with includeDetails
contractorName, contractorLicense, contractorPhone	From the record page, with includeDetails
agencyKey, agencyName, city, state, module	Which portal the row came from
isNewSinceLastRun, previousStatus, statusChanged	Set by the incremental and monitoring modes
scrapedAt	UTC timestamp

Anything the portal does not publish is null. Owner names are off by default because owners are usually private individuals; turn on includeOwnerName together with includeDetails if you need them and your use allows it.

How to use it

Pick an agency, set a date range, run. The default filter keeps every record whose type contains the word "occupancy", which covers certificates of occupancy, temporary certificates of occupancy and occupancy permits on every portal checked so far.

{
  "agency": "BREA",
  "dateFrom": "2026-09-02",
  "dateTo": "2026-09-16",
  "permitTypeContains": ["occupancy"],
  "maxResults": 200
}

Both dates are inclusive. maxResults caps the rows you pay for.

Most Accela portals let you pick a record type on their own search form, and the actor uses that: it reads the agency's record-type list, finds the types whose names match permitTypeContains, and asks the portal for those types only. On Hillsborough County a 90-day occupancy search reads about a dozen result pages that way instead of several hundred. When the agency publishes no list, or nothing on it matches your filter, the actor reads the whole date range and filters the rows itself, and the run log says which of the two it did.

To choose the types yourself, set recordTypes to names copied from the portal's Record Type menu, such as "Commercial Temp Certificate of Occupancy" and "Residential Temp Certificate of Occupancy" on Hillsborough County. A name the agency does not offer stops the run and lists what it does offer.

maxPages (60 by default) is the ceiling on result pages one run reads, across all record types. A run that hits it stops, delivers everything it found, and says so; raise maxPages, narrow the dates, or set recordTypes. Rows are written to the dataset page by page as they are found, so a run that is aborted or times out keeps everything except the page it was reading.

New certificates every week: set lastDays: 7 and schedule the task weekly. The window moves automatically on every run, overriding dateFrom and dateTo. Use a window no wider than the schedule so consecutive runs do not overlap.

Know when a certificate is actually issued: many portals open the record at application and change its status to Issued or Final when the building is cleared. Create a key-value store in Apify Console, select it as statusStateStoreId, and schedule the task. The first complete run delivers every matching record and stores its status (you pay for those rows once); later runs deliver only records whose status changed, with previousStatus filled in. That status change is the move-in signal.

Homes only, or businesses only: narrow the filter to the portal's wording, for example ["residential certificate of occupancy"] or ["non-residential"] on Monterey Park. A record is kept when its type contains any one of the listed phrases as a whole, case-insensitive.

Contractor and valuation: set includeDetails: true to open each record page and add the contractor's name, licence and phone, the parcel number and the declared valuation where the portal publishes them.

Any other Accela portal on aca-prod.accela.com: set agency to the portal's agency code and portalUrl to its base address, for example https://aca-prod.accela.com/CITYNAME/. Portals a city hosts on its own domain are not supported yet.

Quick start

No code needed; about two minutes from input to spreadsheet. For a longer walkthrough with example output, read the guide Research occupancy records and track approvals.

1. Open the example "Certificates of occupancy, Brea CA, last 30 days" on this actor's page, or paste one of the inputs above into the input form.
2. Click Start and wait until the run shows Succeeded.
3. Open the Output tab to see the certificates as a table.
4. Click Export, choose CSV or Excel, and download the file.
5. In Google Sheets, choose File > Import > Upload and select the file.

Automate it

A weekly lead pull: keep lastDays in the task (for example 7 or 30) so the date window moves with every run. Click Save as a new task, then add a schedule for that task under Schedules in Apify Console (for example every Monday at 07:00). To get only certificates you have not received before, turn on sinceLastRun and select a key-value store as stateStoreId.

Into Google Sheets with n8n: add the Apify node with the On new Apify Event trigger, choose your task and the succeeded event, then add an Apify node with Get Dataset Items using the run's defaultDatasetId, and finish with a Google Sheets node that appends the rows. Every scheduled run then adds its certificates to the same sheet. Make and Zapier have Apify integrations that work the same way.

Pricing

Pay per event. There are no platform usage charges on top.

Event	Price	When
actor-start	$0.01	Once per run
permit-record	$0.006	Per row delivered
contractor-detail-page	$0.004	Per record page fetched, only when includeDetails is on

Examples: 50 certificates without details cost $0.31. Fifty with contractor details cost $0.51. A run that finds nothing costs $0.01. You pay for the rows that match the filter, not for the permits the actor reads and discards on the way.

Set a maximum charge on the run if you want a hard ceiling; the actor stops cleanly at the cap.

Coverage

These bundled portals publish certificates of occupancy as their own record type in the Building search, so the default filter returns rows. Checked live on 2026-09-16.

Agency key	Jurisdiction	State	What the portal calls them
BREA	Brea	CA	Certificate of Occupancy, Temporary Certificate of Occupancy
CRYSTALLAKE	Crystal Lake	IL	Occupancy Permit (rare: about one a week)
HCFL	Hillsborough County	FL	Commercial and Residential Temp Certificate of Occupancy
MILWAUKEE	Milwaukee	WI	Occupancy, Conditional Occupancy, Temporary Occupancy
MONTEREYPARK	Monterey Park	CA	Residential and Non-Residential Certificate of Occupancy, plus temporary
TAMPA	Tampa	FL	Temporary Certificate of Occupancy, Residential Temp Certificate of Occupancy

The other bundled portals work with this actor but do not label certificates of occupancy as a separate record type in their Building search, so the default filter finds nothing there: Anaheim (ANAHEIM), Culver City (CULVERCITY), DeLand (DELAND), Downey (DOWNEY), Fontana (FONTANA), Goodyear (GOODYEAR), Hartford (HARTFORD), Hermosa Beach (HERMOSABEACH), Loveland (LOVELAND), Manteca (MANTECA), Missoula (MISSOULA), Palo Alto (PALOALTO), Reno (RENO), Sacramento (SACRAMENTO), Stockton (STOCKTON), Thurston County (THURSTONCO) and Visalia (VISALIA). On those portals the certificate is a step inside the building permit; clear permitTypeContains to get every permit, or use the Accela Building Permit Scraper by the same publisher with the status monitor to catch permits reaching Final. Atlanta (ATLANTA_GA) has only a "Historical Certificate of Occupancy" type, an archive record rather than a new certificate, so the default filter returns old records there.

Any other portal on aca-prod.accela.com works with portalUrl. Run it once with a short window to see what that agency calls its occupancy records.

Good to know

• The actor reads every permit in the date window and keeps the ones that match, so busy portals take longer: a two-week window on Tampa or Hillsborough County reads about a hundred result pages and takes a few minutes. Narrow the window or schedule smaller runs if that matters.
• Record pages differ by portal. Brea's certificate pages carry no parcel, valuation or contractor, so leave includeDetails off there; Milwaukee's records that still have a temporary number have no record page yet.
• Temporary certificates count. A temporary certificate of occupancy means the building is in use while final items are finished, which is still a move-in.
• Public records only. The actor reads the same pages a visitor sees, honours the portal's robots rules, and never logs in, solves CAPTCHAs or uses proxies. If a portal blocks access, the run fails with a clear message rather than returning an empty result.
• Requests are polite: at most two at a time per portal, with retries and backoff on errors.
• Dates are the portal's local calendar dates. A record's applied date is what the agency shows in the results grid; on some portals that is the last update date.
• This is the same code as the Accela Building Permit Scraper by the same publisher, listed separately so certificate-of-occupancy searches are easy to find. The actor is not affiliated with Accela or with any listed agency. Public records can be incomplete or corrected later.

FAQ

Where do new homeowner leads come from here?

From certificates of occupancy: a city issues one when a new or renovated home or commercial space is cleared for people to move in or a business to open.

Can I search certificates of occupancy by city?

Yes, for cities and counties that run Accela Citizen Access and publish occupancy as its own record type. The Coverage table lists the ones checked live.

Does it include the new owner's name?

Only when the portal shows it and you turn on includeOwnerName. Many portals show the address and contractor but not the buyer.

Related actors

• Florida Property Sales & New Owner Leads: recorded sales with the new owner's mailing address.
• Accela Building Permit Scraper: building permits with contractor details from Accela cities and counties.
• Florida Business Leads by Industry: Florida businesses by NAICS code and county.

Questions or a portal that misbehaves? Open an issue on the actor page and include the agency and date range.