US Building Permits – 8 Cities, One Schema (Official Open Data)
Pricing
from $2.00 / 1,000 building permits
US Building Permits – 8 Cities, One Schema (Official Open Data)
Issued building permits from 8 US city open-data portals (Chicago, NYC, LA, Austin, Seattle, Cincinnati, Mesa, Baton Rouge) in one clean schema. Adds trade category (solar, roofing, HVAC, ADU…), status, processing days, value band, contractor company. No homeowner names. Only-new mode.
Pricing
from $2.00 / 1,000 building permits
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Reval
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US Building Permits – 8 Cities, One Schema
Get newly issued building permits from the official open-data portals of Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, Austin, Seattle, Cincinnati, Mesa (AZ) and Baton Rouge in one normalized schema. Every row is categorized by trade, so you can pull a roofing, solar, HVAC, ADU or new-construction lead list in a single run.
What problems this solves
People using other permit scrapers report the same problems again and again. Here is how this Actor handles each one:
| Common complaint | How this Actor handles it |
|---|---|
| Every city has different column names, so you end up writing one parser per city | One schema for all 8 cities: permitType, category, issueDate, valuationUsd, fullAddress, latitude/longitude, contractorBusinessName… |
| Raw permit types like "Bldg-Alter/Repair" or "EXPRESS PERMIT PROGRAM" can't be filtered by trade | Trade classifier. category plus multi-label tradeTags cover 26 trades: solar, battery storage, EV charger, roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, ADU, demolition, new construction, pool, fence, sign, elevator, tenant improvement and more |
| Output includes homeowners' and applicants' personal names and phones, which is a privacy and compliance risk | No personal data. Owner, applicant and person names, phones and emails are dropped. Only contractor company names are kept: a name is output only if it looks like a business (LLC, Inc, Co, Electric, Roofing…) |
| Expensive ($8–30 per 1,000) and slow browser scraping | Uses the official Socrata APIs directly, with no browser and no proxies. 1,000+ permits in seconds |
| Duplicate rows (NYC and Cincinnati repeat permits) | Deduped by city + permit number |
| Daily runs return the same permits again | Only-new mode remembers permit numbers between runs, so you can schedule it daily and get only fresh leads |
| One big city crowds out the rest | maxItemsPerCity cap |
Enrichment added to every row
categoryandtradeTags: trade classification from the permit type and scope textstatusNormalized: one of issued / active / completed / expired / cancelled / in_reviewprocessingDays: days from application to issue, so you can compare permit speed by cityvaluationBand: <$10k, $10k–50k, $50k–250k, $250k–1M, $1M–10M, $10M+daysSinceIssued, afullAddressready for geocoding, and lat/long where the city publishes thempermitUrl: a link to the official permit or property page where available (LA, NYC, Austin, Seattle, Cincinnati)contractorBusinessNameandcontractorLicensewhere the city publishes them
Example uses
- Solar, roofing and HVAC lead generation: set
categories: ["roofing"]andonlyNew: true, then schedule it daily. - Construction market intelligence: new-construction volume and value by city or neighborhood.
- Supplier and subcontractor prospecting: find active general contractors by company name.
- Real estate: watch permit activity in specific ZIP codes.
Input example
Output example
Data sources (all official, public)
| City | Portal dataset |
|---|---|
| Chicago | data.cityofchicago.org ydr8-5enu |
| New York City | data.cityofnewyork.us rbx6-tga4 (DOB NOW work permits) |
| Los Angeles | data.lacity.org pi9x-tg5x |
| Austin | data.austintexas.gov 3syk-w9eu |
| Seattle | data.seattle.gov 76t5-zqzr |
| Cincinnati | data.cincinnati-oh.gov uhjb-xac9 |
| Mesa | citydata.mesaaz.gov dzpk-hxfb |
| Baton Rouge | data.brla.gov 7fq7-8j7r |
Cities update on their own schedules. Most update daily; Los Angeles usually lags about a week. Fields a city doesn't publish (for example, Chicago has no job value) are null.
Pricing
Pay per result: you pay only for the permits you receive. The run summary (per-city counts, filters and errors) is saved to the RUN_SUMMARY record in the key-value store.
Want another city added? Open an issue. Any city on Socrata can be added quickly.
