US Building Permits Scraper (NYC, Chicago, LA)

Pulls building permits as they are issued from the three official city open-data portals — NYC Open Data (Department of Buildings, DOB NOW), the City of Chicago Data Portal (Department of Buildings) and the Los Angeles Open Data Portal (LADBS) — through their public Socrata SODA APIs. No API key, no login, no browser automation. Three very different schemas come out as one flat JSON record per permit: address, permit type, work description, declared job cost, coordinates, and — in New York City and Chicago — the property owner and the licensed contractor who pulled the permit. Filter by city, issue-date window, permit type, work-description keyword, minimum job cost, borough or community area, and whether a contractor is named. The three cities together issue roughly 1,100 to 1,300 permits per weekday, so size maxItems to your window — see Limits and freshness.

What you get

One record per issued permit. Every record carries the same 30 keys whichever city it came from; a field a city does not publish is null rather than missing.

Field	Description
id	<city>:<permit number>. New York City appends the tracking number and work type, because DOB NOW publishes one row per work permit, issuance and work type: nyc:S01436796-I1-SL:361968132:Solar.
source	nyc-open-data, chicago-data-portal or la-open-data.
city	nyc, chicago or la — the same values the cities input takes.
cityName	New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles.
url	Public link to this one permit on the city's portal (the Socrata data explorer, pre-filtered to the permit number).
permitNumber	The permit number as the city prints it: S01436796-I1-SL (NYC work permit), 101078712 / B200474019 (Chicago), 26014-20000-02398 (LA).
permitType	NYC work type (Solar, Plumbing, General Construction, Sidewalk Shed); Chicago permit type (PERMIT - NEW CONSTRUCTION, PERMIT - RENOVATION/ALTERATION); LA permit type (Bldg-New, Bldg-Alter/Repair, Swimming-Pool/Spa).
permitSubtype	NYC filing reason (Initial Permit, Renewal Permit with Changes); Chicago review type (STANDARD PLAN REVIEW, EXPRESS PERMIT PROGRAM); LA permit sub-type (1 or 2 Family Dwelling, Apartment, Commercial).
status	Permit Issued / Signed-off (NYC), ACTIVE / COMPLETE (Chicago), Issued / Permit Finaled (LA).
workType	NYC work type; Chicago work type; LA permit group (Building, Grading, Sign).
workDescription	The scope of work in the city's own words. Populated on 100% of records in all three cities (measured over 3,875 permits, 1–8 September 2026).
issueDate, filingDate, expirationDate	ISO YYYY-MM-DD. See the per-city gaps under Limits and freshness: NYC has no filing date, Chicago and LA no expiration date.
estimatedCost	The declared job cost / valuation in US dollars. NYC estimated job cost, Chicago reported cost, LA valuation.
address	One line, always including the city and state: 102 MAPLE PARKWAY, Staten Island, NY 10303.
borough	NYC borough (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, Staten Island). null in Chicago and LA.
communityArea	The city's own neighbourhood unit: NYC Neighborhood Tabulation Area (Williamsburg), Chicago community area resolved from its number to its name (Avondale, Logan Square), LA community plan area (Hollywood).
zip, latitude, longitude	Property location. Chicago publishes no property ZIP (only contact ZIPs), so zip is null there.
ownerName, ownerBusinessName, ownerPhone	Property owner. NYC publishes both a person and a business name; Chicago publishes one owner-contact name, also copied into ownerBusinessName when it looks like an organisation; LA publishes neither. No city publishes a phone number in these datasets, so ownerPhone is always null — the field exists so the schema stays stable.
contractorBusinessName, contractorName	The firm that pulled the permit and, in NYC, the named permittee.
contractorLicenseType, contractorLicenseNumber	NYC permittee licence type (GC, PL, EW) and number — verifiable against the DOB licence register. Chicago reports the contact type it published instead (CONTRACTOR-GENERAL CONTRACTOR) and no number.
extra	An object of city-specific fields: NYC BIN/BBL/block/lot, community board, council district, filing representative, contractor business address; Chicago ward, community-area number, permit milestone, the full fee breakdown and every contact slot (extra.contacts, up to 15 per permit, with type, name, city, state, ZIP); LA zone, assessor parcel number, use code, neighbourhood council, council district, square footage, solar/EV flags. Any column a city adds later also lands here rather than being dropped.
fetchedAt	ISO timestamp of the run that produced the record.

The dataset has three views: Overview (date, city, permit, type, work, address, area, cost, link), Owners and contractors (the lead-generation columns) and Locations (address, ZIP, coordinates).

Measured field coverage over one full unfiltered week (3,875 permits issued 1–8 September 2026):

	New York City (2,280)	Chicago (537)	Los Angeles (1,058)
contractorBusinessName	100%	97.4%	0% (not published)
contractorLicenseNumber	100%	0% (not published)	0% (not published)
ownerName	98.8%	97.6%	0% (not published)
estimatedCost	100%	87.3%	100%
latitude / longitude	99.6%	98.9%	100%
communityArea	99.6%	99.3%	99.9%
zip	100%	0% (not published)	99.9%

Input

Input	Type	Default	Description
cities	string[]	all three	nyc, chicago, la. Records are taken city by city in rotation, so maxItems splits roughly evenly between the cities you select.
daysBack	integer	7	Look-back window on the permit issue date, counted back from the run. Issue dates are calendar dates, so 7 means today plus the seven previous days. Ignored when dateFrom/dateTo are set. Keep it at 7 or more: NYC runs about two business days behind, so a shorter window can return no NYC permits at all.
dateFrom	string	–	Earliest issue date, YYYY-MM-DD, inclusive. Overrides daysBack.
dateTo	string	today	Latest issue date, YYYY-MM-DD, inclusive.
permitTypes	string[]	all	Case-insensitive substrings matched against permitType, permitSubtype and workType; any match keeps the permit. Each city has its own vocabulary, and short substrings such as "new" or "demolition" cut across all three.
workKeywords	string[]	none	Case-insensitive substrings matched against workDescription, workType and permitType. This is the trade filter: "roof", "solar", "kitchen", "pool", "adu", "hvac", "sprinkler".
minValuation	integer	0	Keep only permits whose estimatedCost is at least this many US dollars. Permits with no published cost are dropped when this is above 0 — that removes about 13% of Chicago permits.
boroughsOrAreas	string[]	all	Case-insensitive substrings matched against borough, communityArea, zip, ward, council district and community board. "Brooklyn", "Logan Square", "Hollywood", "11215".
contractorsOnly	boolean	false	Keep only permits that name a contractor or permittee business. Los Angeles publishes none, so switching this on removes every LA permit — the run logs a warning when you do it with la selected.
socrataAppToken	string (secret)	–	Optional free Socrata app token, sent as X-App-Token. Not required; it only lifts the shared per-IP throttle. One token works on all three portals.
maxItems	integer	500	Stop after this many permits. You are charged per permit delivered, so this is also the cost cap. Permits come newest-first within each city, so a value below the window's volume drops the oldest permits in each city.

Roofing, solar and HVAC leads over $20,000 in the last fortnight, contractor named:

{
  "daysBack": 14,
  "workKeywords": ["roof", "solar", "hvac", "boiler"],
  "minValuation": 20000,
  "contractorsOnly": true,
  "cities": ["nyc", "chicago"],
  "maxItems": 1000
}

New residential construction in Brooklyn and Queens:

{
  "cities": ["nyc"],
  "daysBack": 30,
  "permitTypes": ["General Construction", "Foundation"],
  "boroughsOrAreas": ["Brooklyn", "Queens"],
  "minValuation": 100000,
  "maxItems": 2000
}

The complete unfiltered feed, scheduled daily (the overlapping window absorbs each city's publication lag, and 8000 comfortably covers what a week produces):

{ "daysBack": 7, "maxItems": 8000 }

An unknown city, a malformed date or a negative minValuation fails fast: the run stops with the validation message as its status before a single request is made.

Output example

A real New York City record from a live run on 2026-09-08, extra trimmed:

{
  "id": "nyc:S01436796-I1-SL:361968132:Solar",
  "source": "nyc-open-data",
  "city": "nyc",
  "cityName": "New York City",
  "url": "https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/rbx6-tga4/explore/query/SELECT%20*%20WHERE%20work_permit%20%3D%20'S01436796-I1-SL'/page/filter",
  "permitNumber": "S01436796-I1-SL",
  "permitType": "Solar",
  "permitSubtype": "Initial Permit",
  "status": "Permit Issued",
  "workType": "Solar",
  "workDescription": "FILING HEREWITH TAX ABATEMENT APPLICATION FOR INSTALLATION OF ROOF-MOUNTED SOLAR PANELS. NO CHANGE IN USE, EGRESS, OR OCCUPANCY.",
  "issueDate": "2026-09-03",
  "filingDate": null,
  "expirationDate": "2026-10-01",
  "estimatedCost": 18000,
  "address": "102 MAPLE PARKWAY, Staten Island, NY 10303",
  "borough": "Staten Island",
  "communityArea": "Mariner's Harbor-Arlington-Graniteville",
  "zip": "10303",
  "latitude": 40.631048,
  "longitude": -74.156477,
  "ownerName": "Adeel Ahmad",
  "ownerBusinessName": "Not Applicable",
  "ownerPhone": null,
  "contractorBusinessName": "SUNRUN INSTALLATION SVC",
  "contractorName": "PAUL JOYCE",
  "contractorLicenseType": "GC",
  "contractorLicenseNumber": "613329",
  "extra": {
    "jobFilingNumber": "S01436796-I1",
    "sequenceNumber": "1",
    "trackingNumber": "361968132",
    "approvedDate": "2026-08-31",
    "bin": "5171438",
    "block": "1218",
    "lot": "38",
    "bbl": "5012180038",
    "communityBoard": "501",
    "councilDistrict": "49",
    "workOnFloor": "Roof",
    "contractorBusinessAddress": "775 FIERO LN STE 200",
    "filingRepresentativeName": "Lisa Marie V Stavola",
    "filingRepresentativeBusinessName": "Sunrun"
  },
  "fetchedAt": "2026-09-08T02:25:56.441Z"
}

A Chicago permit from the same run (fields common to both cities omitted; note the contact array, which is where Chicago hides everyone involved):

{
  "id": "chicago:B200474019",
  "source": "chicago-data-portal",
  "city": "chicago",
  "url": "https://data.cityofchicago.org/d/ydr8-5enu/explore/query/SELECT%20*%20WHERE%20permit_%20%3D%20'B200474019'/page/filter",
  "permitNumber": "B200474019",
  "permitType": "PERMIT – EXPRESS PERMIT PROGRAM",
  "permitSubtype": "EXPRESS PERMIT PROGRAM",
  "status": "ACTIVE",
  "workType": "Storm Water Management Plan",
  "issueDate": "2026-09-06",
  "filingDate": "2026-09-06",
  "expirationDate": null,
  "estimatedCost": null,
  "address": "5275 S ARCHER AVE, Chicago, IL",
  "communityArea": "Garfield Ridge",
  "zip": null,
  "ownerName": "CASIMIRO ROBERTO",
  "extra": {
    "permitMilestone": "POST CONSTRUCTION FILING",
    "totalFee": 3000,
    "communityAreaNumber": 56,
    "ward": "23",
    "contacts": [
      { "type": "OWNER", "name": "CASIMIRO ROBERTO", "city": "CHICAGO", "state": "IL", "zipcode": "60632" },
      { "type": "WEB APPLICANT", "name": "GARCIA JUSTIN", "city": "ROSEMONT", "state": "IL", "zipcode": "60018" },
      { "type": "PROFESSIONAL ENGINEER", "name": "MCGOVERN SEAN H", "city": "CHICAGO", "state": "IL", "zipcode": "60657" }
    ]
  }
}

And a Los Angeles permit — no owner or contractor, but a full valuation, parcel number and zoning:

{
  "id": "la:26014-20000-02398",
  "source": "la-open-data",
  "city": "la",
  "url": "https://data.lacity.org/d/pi9x-tg5x/explore/query/SELECT%20*%20WHERE%20permit_nbr%20%3D%20'26014-20000-02398'/page/filter",
  "permitNumber": "26014-20000-02398",
  "permitType": "Bldg-Alter/Repair",
  "permitSubtype": "1 or 2 Family Dwelling",
  "status": "Issued",
  "workType": "Building",
  "workDescription": "ePlanConvert portion of the front porch to part of the (E) SFD and enlarge (E) kitchen. All work per engineer.",
  "issueDate": "2026-09-05",
  "filingDate": "2026-06-29",
  "estimatedCost": 45000,
  "address": "6029 N NEDDY AVE, Los Angeles, CA 91367",
  "communityArea": "Canoga Park-West Hills-Winnetka-Woodland Hills",
  "zip": "91367",
  "latitude": 34.18066,
  "longitude": -118.65271,
  "contractorBusinessName": null,
  "extra": {
    "useDescription": "Dwelling - Single Family",
    "zone": "RE11-1",
    "assessorParcelNumber": "2045004004",
    "neighbourhoodCouncil": "WOODLAND HILLS-WARNER CENTER NC",
    "councilDistrict": "3",
    "businessUnit": "Plan Check at Counter",
    "solar": "N"
  }
}

The run also writes a SUMMARY record to the key-value store with the rows scanned, kept and filtered per city, the newest issue date each city had reached, the resolved window, and how many permits each filter removed.

Pricing

Pay per result: US$0.003 per permit delivered (US$3 per 1,000 permits). You are charged only for records pushed to the dataset; a run that returns nothing costs nothing. A full unfiltered week across all three cities is about 3,900 permits, so about US$11.60. Runs on the Apify free plan are limited by the platform's free-tier usage allowance.

Data source and licence

All three sources are Socrata SODA 2.1 endpoints and all were read on 8 September 2026.

• New York City — DOB NOW: Build – Approved Permits, NYC Department of Buildings: GET https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/rbx6-tga4.json. Dataset page: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/d/rbx6-tga4. Published under NYC Open Data, whose enabling law (New York City Local Law 11 of 2012, Admin. Code § 23-502(d)) requires datasets to be available "without registration requirement, license requirement, or usage restrictions". Terms of use: https://www.nyc.gov/home/terms-of-use.page. Commercial reuse is permitted; the City warrants nothing about completeness or accuracy. Attribute to the NYC Department of Buildings via NYC Open Data.
• Chicago — Building Permits, Chicago Department of Buildings: GET https://data.cityofchicago.org/resource/ydr8-5enu.json. Dataset page: https://data.cityofchicago.org/d/ydr8-5enu. Licence field on the dataset: "See Terms of Use", attribution "City of Chicago". Data Terms of Use: https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/narr/foia/data_disclaimer.html. Commercial reuse is permitted, but the terms require any secondary or derivative application built on the data to display this disclaimer where it can be accessed: "This site provides applications using data that has been modified for use from its original source, www.cityofchicago.org, the official website of the City of Chicago. The City of Chicago makes no claims as to the content, accuracy, timeliness, or completeness of any of the data provided at this site. The data provided at this site is subject to change at any time. It is understood that the data provided at this site is being used at one's own risk." If you publish anything on top of these records, reproduce that notice.
• Los Angeles — Building and Safety – Building Permits Issued from 2020 to Present, Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety: GET https://data.lacity.org/resource/pi9x-tg5x.json. Dataset page: https://data.lacity.org/d/pi9x-tg5x. Terms of use: https://data.lacity.org/terms-of-use. The terms place no licence or restriction on reuse or redistribution of the published datasets; everything is supplied "as is" without warranty. Attribute to LADBS via the Los Angeles Open Data Portal.
• Socrata app tokens — optional, free, and only relevant to rate limits: https://dev.socrata.com/docs/app-tokens.html.

Personal data

These records are public records that name real people. ownerName, ownerBusinessName, contractorName, contractorBusinessName, contractorLicenseNumber, extra.filingRepresentativeName, extra.contractorBusinessAddress and every entry in extra.contacts come straight from the permit application. Each city publishes them lawfully under its own open-data programme — building permits are public documents — but your use of them is your responsibility:

• No phone numbers or email addresses are included. None of the three datasets publishes them, so ownerPhone is always null and there is no contact-email field at all. If you enrich these leads with phone numbers from elsewhere, US telemarketing law applies to the calls and texts you then make: the TCPA (47 U.S.C. § 227) and its FCC rules require prior express written consent for autodialled or pre-recorded marketing calls and for marketing texts, and require you to scrub against the National Do Not Call Registry. A permit record is not consent.
• Commercial email to these people is covered by CAN-SPAM (15 U.S.C. § 7701 et seq.): accurate headers and subject lines, a physical postal address, and a working opt-out honoured within ten business days.
• Individual owner names in NYC and Chicago identify natural persons. Californian residents in the LA feed are not affected here — LADBS publishes no names — but if you combine this output with other sources, the CCPA/CPRA may apply to the combined profile.
• Do not republish the owner and contractor names as a standalone directory; that is not what the cities publish them for, and it is the fastest route to a complaint.

Limits and freshness

Volumes, measured 8 September 2026 by exhausting the window. One unfiltered run over 1–8 September 2026 returned 3,875 permits — NYC 2,280, Chicago 537, LA 1,058 — in 26 seconds and six API requests. Row counts from the portals' own count(*) matched the run exactly (2,282 / 537 / 1,058 rows scanned), so the window is read in full. Over the whole of August 2026 the three cities issued 15,067 (NYC), 3,044 (Chicago) and 5,566 (LA) permits — about 1,100 to 1,300 per weekday combined. Weekends and public holidays are near-empty in all three cities: on 22–23 August 2026 Chicago issued 10 and 8 permits against a weekday average of about 140.

Freshness and publication lag, measured 8 September 2026 (the Monday was Labor Day):

City	Newest issue date available	Lag	Committed refresh
Chicago	2026-09-06 (Sunday)	same day	daily
Los Angeles	2026-09-05 (Saturday)	~1 business day	weekly (observed daily)
New York City	2026-09-03 (Thursday)	~2 business days	daily

This is why daysBack defaults to 7 and why the cities are read round-robin rather than merged newest-first. A strict newest-first merge would spend the whole of maxItems on Chicago and LA and could return no NYC permits at all. Taking one permit from each selected city in rotation guarantees every city is represented; within a city, permits still come newest-first, so a maxItems below the window's volume drops that city's oldest permits. A daysBack of 3 is genuinely likely to return zero NYC permits — that is the source's lag, not a defect in the Actor.

Which NYC dataset, and what is left out. New York City runs two permit systems. This Actor reads DOB NOW: Build – Approved Permits (rbx6-tga4), the current one. The legacy BIS feed, DOB Permit Issuance (ipu4-2q9a), is still refreshed but is now a small tail: it recorded 459 permits issued in August 2026 against DOB NOW's 15,067, i.e. about 3% of NYC issuances, and it stores every date as free text (04/21/2014), which no SoQL date filter can select on. It is not read. If you need pre-DOB-NOW history, query ipu4-2q9a directly.

Fields no city publishes, so no filter can recover them.

• Los Angeles publishes no owner and no contractor in its permit dataset — LADBS removed those columns when it replaced the old "Building and Safety Permit Information" dataset. ownerName, contractorBusinessName and the licence fields are null on 100% of LA records, and contractorsOnly: true therefore removes every LA permit. The run warns you when both are set together.
• No phone numbers anywhere. ownerPhone is always null.
• NYC has no filing date in DOB NOW; the approval date is in extra.approvedDate instead. Chicago and LA publish no expiration date; LA's extra.statusDate is the nearest equivalent.
• Chicago publishes no property ZIP (the ZIPs in extra.contacts belong to the contacts, not the building) and no reported cost on about 13% of permits.
• Chicago does not say whether a contact is a person or a company. ownerName is always the raw owner-contact name; it is copied into ownerBusinessName only when the string carries a company marker (LLC, Inc, Corp, Trust, Group, &, and so on). That is a documented heuristic, not source data.

Rate limits and paging. The SODA API is read in pages of 1,000 rows ordered issue date DESC, :id, with a 500 ms pause between pages of the same city and a ceiling of 200 pages per city. Without an app token Socrata throttles by IP from a shared pool and answers 429 when you exceed it; fetchWithRetry honours Retry-After and backs off exponentially on 429 and 5xx. A default run needs one to three requests per city, so the throttle is not reachable; supply socrataAppToken only if you are pulling months of history in a tight schedule. An invalid token makes the portals answer 403 — the run then fails with the HTTP error rather than silently returning nothing.

Duplicate rows. DOB NOW carries a handful of byte-identical duplicate rows (14 groups in the 64,327 permits issued 1 May – 8 September 2026, about 0.02%). They collapse into one record and the count appears as filteredOut.duplicate in the SUMMARY. The week-long run above dropped exactly 2.

Scope. These are building permits. LADBS publishes electrical and mechanical permits in separate datasets that this Actor does not read; Chicago's and NYC's electrical, plumbing and elevator permits are inside the same datasets and are returned. Dates are the cities' own calendar dates with no timezone conversion. Costs are the applicant's declared figure, not an appraisal, and are not inflation-adjusted.

Use cases

• Contractor lead generation. A daily feed of new roofing, solar, HVAC, pool or kitchen jobs in your ZIP codes, filtered by minimum job cost, with the property address and — in NYC and Chicago — the owner and the general contractor already on the job.
• Construction market intelligence. Track permit volume and declared value by city, community area and permit type; spot which firms are pulling the most permits, where, and at what size, using contractorBusinessName and contractorLicenseNumber.
• Real-estate and proptech data. Attach live renovation, addition and new-build activity to a property (NYC BBL/BIN, Chicago PIN, LA assessor parcel number are all in extra) for valuation models, off-market sourcing or insurance underwriting.

Support

Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Store. Replies within 14 days. Bug reports that name the run id and the input used are fixed fastest.