Building Permit Leads Scraper – NYC, LA, Chicago, SF, Austin and Seattle

Pull contractor leads from fresh building permits in six of the largest US cities in a single run. A roofer asks for roofing, a solar installer for solar, an HVAC company for hvac — across New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Austin and Seattle. Every row is a real address with a funded job issued this week. No browser, no proxy, no API key. $0.002 per permit.

Use cases

• Roofing and HVAC contractor leads — filter permits tagged roofing or hvac issued in the last 7 days; each row is a homeowner with a funded job open today.
• Solar installer prospecting — narrow solar permits by ZIP to find homeowners actively installing solar in your service area.
• Building permit data for supplier outreach — suppliers to plumbing, electrical or window contractors track permit volume by city and week to time their outreach.
• Proptech and insurtech renovation signals — monitor building permit activity by neighborhood for renovation risk models or home-value trend feeds.

Who this is for

• Contractors and their marketers: roofing, solar, HVAC, pools, ADUs, windows, fencing, electrical and plumbing. A permit means a homeowner or builder with a funded job, at an address, this week.
• Suppliers and distributors selling to the contractors who pull the permits. In Austin you also get the contractor's phone.
• Home-services marketplaces, proptech and insurers tracking renovation activity by ZIP.

A real record (contractor phone masked here, delivered in full)

From a live run on 2026-10-05 (Austin, HVAC):

{
  "city": "austin",
  "issuedDate": "2026-10-05",
  "address": "3500 S LAMAR BLVD", "zip": "78704", "state": "TX",
  "trades": ["hvac", "remodel"],
  "workType": "Mechanical Permit Remodel",
  "description": "Change of use to Medical (Physical Therapy) with Interior remodel.",
  "contractor": "G & P heating and Air Conditioning",
  "contractorPhone": "737•••••••",
  "url": "https://abc.austintexas.gov/web/permit/public-search-other?t_detail=1&t_selected_folderrsn=13771827",
  "source": "https://data.austintexas.gov/d/3syk-w9eu"
}

That test run covered 3 days (2026-10-03 to 2026-10-05) with trades set to roofing, solar and hvac. It scanned 1,142 permits across the six cities and kept 255: 168 HVAC, 90 roofing and 31 solar. It took about 8 seconds.

One schema for six portals

Field	Notes
city, permitNumber, issuedDate	ISO date.
address, zip, state, lat, lon	Chicago publishes no ZIP.
description, workType, permitType	The city's own wording.
trades	Tags from workType and description: roofing, solar, hvac, pool, adu, electrical, plumbing, windows, fence, demolition, new-construction, remodel, ev-charger, kitchen-bath, masonry, foundation. One permit can carry several.
valuation	Declared job cost. null when the city gives none: Austin publishes none, and SF and NYC use $0 or $1 as a placeholder.
contractor, contractorPhone, owner	Whatever the city publishes. Austin has contractor name and phone, NYC has the applicant business and owner name, and Chicago has the contractor and owner contacts.
url, source	The city record link (Austin, Seattle) and the open-data dataset.

City	Portal	Dataset
New York City	DOB NOW approved permits	data.cityofnewyork.us rbx6-tga4
Los Angeles	LADBS permits	data.lacity.org pi9x-tg5x
Chicago	Building permits	data.cityofchicago.org ydr8-5enu
San Francisco	DBI building permits	data.sfgov.org i98e-djp9
Austin	Issued construction permits	data.austintexas.gov 3syk-w9eu
Seattle	SDCI building permits	data.seattle.gov 76t5-zqzr

If one city's portal is down, the run logs it and carries on with the others.

Input

Field	Default	What it does
cities	all six	Which portals to read.
lookbackDays	7	Issued in the last N days, ending at endDate. Portals lag 1–2 days.
trades	all	Keep permits tagged with any of these.
minValuation	0	Above 0, permits with no valuation are dropped.
zipCodes, keywords	all	Narrow to your territory and wording, e.g. tesla, generator.
onlyNew	false	Permit numbers already delivered to you (remembered for 120 days in your account) are skipped and not charged.
maxResults	1000	Hard cap on permits, and so on cost.

Pricing

Pay per event: $0.002 per permit delivered after your filters. Filtered-out permits cost nothing. A week of roofing, solar and HVAC permits across all six cities is roughly 500–600 rows, about $1.10.

Limits

• Trade tags come from keyword rules on the city's own text. They aren't perfect. A permit described only as "alteration" won't say whether a roof is involved. Check the description.
• Homeowner names and phones are only included where the city itself publishes them.
• Six cities for now. Each new city is a dataset mapping. Ask in Issues for yours.

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