Building Permit Lead Feed: 11 US Cities, One Clean Schema

Get newly issued building permits from 11 official city and county open-data portals in one normalized dataset. That includes NYC, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Seattle and more. Each record carries the job value, the address, the coordinates and the contractor business. Schedule it daily with Monitor mode and you only get permits you haven't seen before. It works as a lead feed.

Who uses this

• Contractors and subcontractors (roofing, solar, HVAC, electrical, pools) find active projects and the GCs running them.
• Building-material suppliers and equipment rental reach contractors the week a big job is permitted.
• Home services and insurance spot remodels, additions and new construction in their territories.
• Investors and analysts track construction activity, valuations and hot ZIP codes.

Coverage

All data comes from official government open-data portals (Socrata SODA APIs). No login, no scraping of private sites.

Source ID	Jurisdiction	Official dataset
chicago_il	City of Chicago, IL	data.cityofchicago.org
nyc_ny	New York City, NY	data.cityofnewyork.us
los_angeles_ca	City of Los Angeles, CA	data.lacity.org
san_francisco_ca	City and County of San Francisco, CA	data.sfgov.org
austin_tx	City of Austin, TX	data.austintexas.gov
seattle_wa	City of Seattle, WA	data.seattle.gov
cincinnati_oh	City of Cincinnati, OH	data.cincinnati-oh.gov
montgomery_county_md	Montgomery County, MD, MD	data.montgomerycountymd.gov
new_orleans_la	City of New Orleans, LA	data.nola.gov
cambridge_ma	City of Cambridge, MA	data.cambridgema.gov
baton_rouge_la	East Baton Rouge Parish, LA	data.brla.gov

Every record links back to its dataset_url, and to the city's permit page (record_url) where the city provides one.

Input

Field	What it does
sources	Which cities to query. Leave empty to query all of them.
daysBack / dateFrom / dateTo	The issue-date window. Defaults to the last 7 days. Accepts YYYY-MM-DD or forms like 30 days.
keywords	Matches against the description, permit type, work class and contractor (e.g. roof, solar, pool, demolition).
propertyClass	any, residential or commercial.
minValuation / maxValuation	Filter by declared job value in USD.
onlyWithContractor	Keep only permits that name a contractor business.
maxResults / maxResultsPerSource	Overall and per-city caps. Results are sorted newest first.
monitorMode / monitorKey	Return only records not returned before for the same filters (or the same key).

Example: solar and roofing jobs over $20k in Austin, Seattle and SF, as a daily feed:

{"sources": ["austin_tx", "seattle_wa", "san_francisco_ca"], "daysBack": 7, "keywords": ["solar", "roof"],
 "minValuation": 20000, "monitorMode": true, "maxResults": 500}

Output

Every city's records come out in one flat schema:

{
  "record_id": "2776a974158b024f",
  "source_id": "chicago_il",
  "source_name": "Chicago Building Permits",
  "jurisdiction": "City of Chicago",
  "state": "IL",
  "permit_number": "101074874",
  "permit_type": "PERMIT - RENOVATION/ALTERATION",
  "work_class": null,
  "property_class": null,
  "status": "ACTIVE",
  "description": "SPR 2019 CBRC: NEW 2ND FLOOR FRAME ADDITION IN EXISTING 1.5 BRICK BUILDING WITH BASEMENT. MECHANICAL, ELECTRICAL & PLUMBING PER PLANS.",
  "date": "2026-10-30",
  "issue_date": "2026-10-30",
  "applied_date": "2025-11-11",
  "valuation_usd": 61750.0,
  "address": "1511 N MONITOR AVE",
  "city": "Chicago",
  "zip": null,
  "latitude": 41.9078598250023,
  "longitude": -87.77177140054073,
  "contractor_name": "BLUE LINE ELECTRICAL CONTRACTO",
  "contractor_trade": null,
  "contractor_phone": null,
  "owner_business_name": null,
  "housing_units": null,
  "record_url": null,
  "dataset_url": "https://data.cityofchicago.org/d/ydr8-5enu",
  "scraped_at": "2026-10-31T22:10:42+00:00"
}

Fields that a city doesn't publish are null. Coverage differs by city: Seattle rarely lists contractors, NYC rarely gives a residential/commercial class, and several cities don't publish ZIP codes.

Each run also writes a RUN_SUMMARY record to the key-value store. It shows each source's status (ok/failed), its error, timing and how many records it contributed, so a portal outage is visible and never silently drops data.

Pricing

Pay per result: $0.004 per permit ($4 per 1,000). The run stops cleanly at your max-charge limit, and you are never charged beyond it. In monitor mode you only pay for new permits.

For comparison, as of Oct 31, 2026 other building-permit actors on Apify charge between $0.002 and $0.03 per record, and Shovels' paid plans start at $599/month for 25,000 records.

Reliability

• Retries with exponential backoff, honours Retry-After, and has timeouts on every request.
• Sources are isolated: if one city's portal is down, the others still deliver, and the failure is reported in RUN_SUMMARY and the status message.
• Records are deduplicated across pages and runs (a stable record_id per city and permit number).
• Only portals with fresh data are included. Stale datasets were removed during development.

Privacy

Only business names are output for contractors and owners. Names that look like an individual's are dropped, and a contractor phone is only output when a contractor business is named. Applicant names and homeowners are never output.

FAQ

How fresh is the data? It is as fresh as each city's portal. Most update daily, with a lag of 1–7 days (Los Angeles typically lags about a week). Can I get historical data? Yes. Set dateFrom, which can go back up to 10 years where the city's dataset does. Why are some valuations null? Some permits (e.g. electrical or plumbing) don't declare a job value. If you set minValuation, permits without a value are excluded. Do I need an API key? No. For very large pulls you can add a free Socrata app token to raise the rate limits.

Limitations

• Coverage is limited to the 11 jurisdictions above; more will be added as reliable official feeds are verified.
• Field completeness varies by city (see Output).
• property_class is inferred from each city's permit class, or from the description when no class is given, and may be null.