Building Permits Multi-City

New building permits from nine large US cities, in one clean format. Pick the cities and a date range and get every permit the city issued: what's being built or repaired, where, how much it's worth, and who the contractor is (where the city publishes it).

Handy for contractors and suppliers looking for new jobs, solar and roofing sales teams, real estate investors watching neighborhoods, and anyone building market reports.

Cities and sources

City	Source (official open-data portal)	Coordinates	Valuation	Contractor	Notes
Chicago, IL	data.cityofchicago.org, Building Permits	yes	yes	yes	updated daily
New York, NY	NYC Open Data, DOB NOW Approved Permits	yes	most	yes (permittee)	updated daily
San Francisco, CA	DataSF, Building Permits	yes	yes	no	updated daily
Los Angeles, CA	data.lacity.org, Building Permits	yes	yes	no	city refreshes weekly, so the last few days can be empty
Austin, TX	data.austintexas.gov, Issued Construction Permits	most	some	yes	links to the city's permit page
Seattle, WA	data.seattle.gov, Building Permits	yes	yes	sometimes	links to the city's permit page
Dallas, TX	dallasopendata.com, Building Permits	no	yes	yes	no coordinates or status in the source
New Orleans, LA	data.nola.gov, Permits	yes	yes	yes	also includes non-construction permits (signs, vacancy, etc.)
Philadelphia, PA	OpenDataPhilly / L&I permits (Carto API)	yes	no	yes	no job value in the source

All data comes from official city APIs. No login, no API key, no scraping of web pages. The Actor reads each portal politely (at most one request per second per city).

Input

Field	What it does	Default
Cities	Which cities to include	all nine
Issued from / Issued to	Issue-date range, as dates or relative ("7 days")	last 7 days
Permit type keywords	Match words in permit type, work type or class, e.g. new, demolition, electrical, roof	none
Description keywords	Match words in the work description, e.g. solar, pool, ADU	none
Min valuation	Only permits with a declared job value at least this high	none
Max permits (total)	Stop after this many	5000
Max permits per city	Cap per city	no cap

Example: new construction worth $500k+ in Austin, Seattle and Chicago over the last 30 days:

{
  "cities": ["austin", "seattle", "chicago"],
  "dateFrom": "30 days",
  "permitTypeKeywords": ["new"],
  "minValuation": 500000
}

Output

Every permit has the same fields, whatever the city:

city, state, permitNumber, permitType, workType, permitClass, status, description, address, zip, latitude, longitude, valuation, issueDate, applicationDate, applicant, contractor, sourceUrl, sourceDataset, scrapedAt

Fields a city doesn't publish are null. A real record from a test run:

{
  "city": "Seattle",
  "state": "WA",
  "permitNumber": "7117265-CN",
  "permitType": "Building",
  "workType": "New",
  "permitClass": "Single Family/Duplex",
  "status": "Issued",
  "description": "Construct SOUTH two-family dwelling per plan. [Establish use as housing for one and two attached dwelling units per land use code. Construct one- and two-family dwellings per plan. Review and processing for (2) construction records under 7117265-CN.]",
  "address": "2222 NE 80TH ST",
  "zip": "98115",
  "latitude": 47.68676315,
  "longitude": -122.30352451,
  "valuation": 617735,
  "issueDate": "2026-10-20",
  "applicationDate": "2026-03-25",
  "applicant": null,
  "contractor": null,
  "sourceUrl": "https://services.seattle.gov/portal/customize/LinkToRecord.aspx?altId=7117265-CN",
  "sourceDataset": "https://data.seattle.gov/d/76t5-zqzr",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-10-30T19:00:00+00:00"
}

sourceUrl points to the city's own permit page when it has one (Austin, Seattle, Philadelphia property history) and otherwise to the exact record in the city's API. The run's RUN_SUMMARY record shows how many permits came from each city and whether any city's portal failed.

Good to know

• Each city words things its own way. "New construction" in Chicago is PERMIT - NEW CONSTRUCTION, in Seattle it's work type New, in LA it's Bldg-New. Short keywords like new work best.
• Valuation is the job value the applicant declared, in US dollars. Zero or missing values come back as null.
• Owner names are left out on purpose. The Actor only returns business names for applicants and contractors where the city publishes them (New Orleans lists applicants as published by the city).
• If one city's portal is down, the run still finishes with the other cities and the summary tells you which one failed.
• Schedule the Actor daily with "Issued from: 2 days" to get a rolling feed of new permits.

Pricing

Pay per result. You only pay for permits saved to your dataset:

Event	Price
Permit	$0.005

Some examples:

• 1,000 permits from one city costs $5.
• The default cap of 5,000 permits costs at most $25.
• Narrow with permit type keywords, description keywords or a minimum valuation to pay only for the permits you need.

Apify also charges a tiny standard Actor start fee ($0.00005 per run). You can set a maximum charge per run in Apify, and the Actor stops cleanly when it reaches that cap.

Missing a city?

Open an issue with the city name. Cities with a public permits API (Socrata, ArcGIS or CKAN) are usually quick to add. Boston is not included because its data portal's robots.txt doesn't allow automated API access.