US Building Permits Scraper

Find every HVAC, solar, roofing, or plumbing permit filed in 8 major US cities — straight from government records.

• ✅ Search 8.8 million+ permits across NYC, Austin, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, and more
• ✅ Get permit type, address, contractor, estimated cost, status, and dates
• ✅ Filter by trade keyword and date range — find exactly the permits you need
• ✅ Pay only for what you use: $0.002 per permit record
• ✅ Free $5 Apify credit on signup = ~2,500 permit records to start with

HVAC contractors pay $115–153 per lead through Google Ads. Roofing leads run $200+ in major metros. Meanwhile, the exact same homeowners are filing building permits with their city — public records that include the address, the type of work, and the contractor. This Actor turns those government permit databases into a lead list you can download as a spreadsheet.

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What you can do with it

1. Build an HVAC lead list from recent permits

Every HVAC installation and replacement in a major US city gets a building permit. That permit is a public record with the address, work description, contractor name, and estimated cost. Search for "HVAC" in your service area and you have a list of properties that just had — or are about to have — HVAC work done.

To run this, all you fill in are three simple fields in the Apify input form at the top of this page:

What you enter:

What	Example
Keyword	HVAC
Cities	Chicago (or any combination of the 8 sources)
How many results	100 per city

Click Start. Within seconds, the Actor queries the official Chicago Open Data portal and returns every permit matching "HVAC":

What you get back:

Permit #	Description	Address	Status	Cost	Date
100987654	HVAC REPLACEMENT - RESIDENTIAL	1455 N Dearborn St	ISSUED	$12,000	2026-03-15
100988123	INSTALL NEW HVAC SYSTEM	2200 W Division St	ISSUED	$45,000	2026-03-22
100989001	HVAC DUCTWORK MODIFICATION	900 N Michigan Ave	COMPLETE	$8,500	2026-02-28

Each row is a property where HVAC work was just permitted. For a maintenance company, permits 5+ years old mean the equipment is due for service contracts. Permits 15+ years old mean it's time for full replacements. This is the same data that Construction Monitor charges ~$96/month per city for.

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2. Find solar installation prospects from recent roofing permits

Here's a trick solar installers use: a homeowner who just spent $5,000+ on a new roof is a pre-qualified solar prospect. They've already invested in the roof — and a new roof is the best time to install solar panels. Search for "roofing" permits from the last 60 days and you have a targeted list of homes ready for a solar pitch.

What you enter:

What	Example
Keyword	roofing
Cities	Austin, San Francisco
Since date	2026-03-01 (last 60 days)
How many results	50 per city

What you get back:

City	Address	Description	Cost	Date
Austin	4501 Guadalupe St	REROOF - ASPHALT SHINGLES	$8,200	2026-03-20
Austin	1200 Barton Springs Rd	COMPLETE ROOF REPLACEMENT	$15,000	2026-04-01
San Francisco	2847 24th St	RE-ROOF EXISTING DWELLING	$12,500	2026-03-28

Every address on this list has a brand-new roof. That's the #1 objection gone before you even knock on the door. According to Shovels.ai's research, permit-based outreach yields 20–30% higher engagement than purchased lead lists.

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3. Analyze renovation activity by neighborhood for real estate investment

Before buying a rental property or flipping a house, you want to know: is this neighborhood getting investment, or is it stagnant? A surge in building permits — especially kitchen remodels, additions, and major renovations — signals rising property values.

Search across an entire city to see where the construction activity is concentrated:

What you enter:

What	Example
Keyword	renovation or alteration
Cities	New York City
Since date	2026-01-01 (this year)
How many results	200

What you get back:

Permit #	Description	Address	Borough	Cost
B2026-01234	GENERAL CONSTRUCTION - RENOVATION	350 Fifth Ave	Manhattan	$250,000
B2026-02567	INTERIOR ALTERATION TO DWELLING	456 Atlantic Ave	Brooklyn	$85,000
B2026-03891	KITCHEN AND BATH RENOVATION	78 E 3rd St	Manhattan	$120,000

200 permits mapped by borough or ZIP code show you where renovation money is flowing. More permits in a neighborhood = more investor confidence = potential price appreciation. Real estate analysts at enterprise firms pay ConstructConnect $299–600+/month for this kind of construction intelligence.

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4. Monitor new permits weekly to stay ahead of competitors

Set up a weekly scheduled run with a recent "since" date and the Actor will only return new permits filed since your last check. This is how contractors stay ahead — while competitors are cold-calling from bought lists, you're reaching homeowners the week their permit is filed.

What you enter:

What	Example
Keyword	plumbing
Cities	All 8 sources
Since date	2026-04-10 (last 7 days)
How many results	50 per city

Use Apify's built-in Scheduler (or Make/Zapier) to run this automatically every Monday:

What you get back (each week):

City	Address	Description	Date
NYC	88 Greenwich St	PLUMBING WORK - NEW INSTALLATION	2026-04-12
Austin	3400 S Congress Ave	PLUMBING ROUGH-IN - NEW CONSTRUCTION	2026-04-14
Seattle	1501 Pike Pl	PLUMBING REPAIR - COMMERCIAL	2026-04-11

Fresh leads every week, automatically. The alternative — manually checking 8 different city portals — would take hours. Here it costs about $0.81 per weekly run across all 8 cities.

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5. Use it from ChatGPT, Claude, or no-code automation

Ask your AI assistant "find all solar permits filed in Austin this month" — it runs this Actor and returns real government permit data. Also works as a standard "Run Actor" step in Make, n8n, and Zapier.

Connect the Apify MCP server once in your assistant's settings (see the developer section below), and from then on you just ask questions in plain English:

What you enter (a plain-English question, not a form):

What	Example
Keyword	solar
City	Austin
Since	This month

The assistant queries Austin's official open data portal and returns the permits:

What your assistant gets back:

Address	Description	Cost	Date
7800 Shoal Creek Blvd	SOLAR PANEL INSTALLATION - RESIDENTIAL	$22,000	2026-04-05
1100 S Lamar Blvd	SOLAR PV SYSTEM - COMMERCIAL	$85,000	2026-04-08

You can follow up naturally — "which ones are residential?" or "sort by estimated cost" — and your assistant filters without re-running the Actor.

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How to use (no code required)

1. Click "Try for Free" at the top of this page
2. Type a trade keyword — HVAC, solar, roofing, plumbing, electrical, demolition, renovation, or anything else that appears in permit descriptions
3. Choose which cities to search (default: all 8 sources)
4. Optionally set a "since" date to get only recent permits
5. Click Start — results appear in the Dataset tab within seconds, ready to download as Excel, CSV, or JSON

That's the whole workflow — keyword, cities, start, download. The Actor queries official government open data portals (Socrata APIs) and returns the raw permit records. No login, no API key, no developer setup required.

The $5 free Apify credit you get on signup covers ~2,500 permit records — enough to build a real lead list for your trade before spending anything.

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What you get back

Each permit comes back as one row in a table. The exact fields vary by city (each government portal uses its own schema), but here's what you'll typically see:

• Permit number and permit type (Building, Electrical, Plumbing, Mechanical, etc.)
• Work description: what's being done (e.g. "INSTALL NEW HVAC SYSTEM FOR COMMERCIAL TENANT")
• Address: street number, direction, street name, city
• Status: Issued, Complete, Under Review, etc.
• Estimated cost of the work
• Issue date and/or filing date
• Contractor name (when available in the source data)
• Borough or district (NYC, Chicago)

Every row also includes metadata: which city the permit came from, the source URL (direct link to the government data portal), when it was scraped, and which keyword matched.

Download the table as Excel, CSV, or JSON. For contractor lead gen, the most useful columns are address, work description, estimated cost, and issue date — that's everything you need to reach a homeowner who just permitted work in your trade.

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Coverage

All data comes from official US government open data portals powered by Socrata. These are public records — no authentication required at the source.

Source	Records	Government portal
New York City	917,000+	NYC Open Data
New Jersey (statewide)	2,680,000+	NJ Open Data
Austin, TX	2,350,000+	Austin Open Data
San Francisco, CA	1,290,000+	SF Open Data
Chicago, IL	832,000+	Chicago Open Data
Honolulu, HI	432,000+	Honolulu Open Data
Seattle, WA	189,000+	Seattle Open Data
Cincinnati, OH	174,000+	Cincinnati Open Data

Total: 8.8 million+ permit records across 8 sources. The US issues ~1.5 million new residential building permits per year (Census Bureau, 2024), valued at $385 billion. There are 3.8 million construction businesses in the US. This Actor covers 8 of the largest and most active permit markets.

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Pricing

Pay per permit. No subscription.

Billing is simple: you pay a small fee each time you kick off a run, plus a per-permit fee for each record the Actor returns.

What triggers a charge	Cost
Actor start (each run)	$0.005
Each permit record	$0.002

To give you a feel for what this looks like in actual dollars for real-world use:

Real-world cost examples:

Scenario	Permits	Total cost
Quick check: HVAC permits in one city	50	$0.105
Weekly lead list: one keyword, all 8 cities	400	$0.805
Neighborhood analysis: 500 renovation permits in NYC	500	$1.005
Full trade scan: 1,000 permits per city, all cities	8,000	$16.005

The cost scales linearly. No tier thresholds, no surprise jumps.

$5 free Apify credit = ~2,500 permits — enough to build a real lead list before paying anything.

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How this compares to the alternatives:

The typical HVAC or roofing contractor pays $115–280 per lead through Google Ads and lead services. Permit data gives you the same homeowners — verified by the government — at a fraction of the cost:

Tool	Price	What you get	What you don't get
ConstructConnect	$299–600+/mo	Construction project data, bid tracking	Per-permit lead lists, no pay-per-use option
Dodge Construction Network	$500–1,000+/mo	Bid intelligence, project forecasts	Expensive for individual contractors, no per-permit pricing
Shovels.ai	$599/mo API access	170M+ permits, 2,000+ jurisdictions	Monthly commitment, developer-focused
Construction Monitor	~$96/mo per city	Permit alerts, contractor reports	Locked to one city per subscription
Socrata API (direct)	Free	Raw permit data, no cost	You need to find each city's dataset ID, build queries, handle pagination, normalize schemas — hours of dev work
Google Ads (HVAC leads)	$115–153 per lead	Inbound calls from homeowners	No address, no permit details, no targeting by trade
This Actor	$0.005/run + $0.002/permit	8 cities combined, all trades, pay-per-use, no dev work	—

No annual contract. No subscription. No seat minimum. $5 free credit covers ~2,500 permits.

50 HVAC permits for $0.105 vs one Google Ads lead for $115. That's the math.

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Connect to your tools

Use this Actor from any of the major no-code and automation tools. You don't need to write any code — each tool has a built-in Apify connector:

Platform	How to connect
Make.com	Search "Apify" → "Run Actor" → use Actor ID lentic_clockss/us-building-permits-scraper
n8n	Add Apify node → "Run Actor" → same Actor ID
Zapier	Apify integration → "Run Actor" trigger
ChatGPT / Claude / Cursor	Connect via Apify's MCP endpoint — your AI assistant calls this Actor directly inside a chat
LangChain, Python, custom code	Via Apify SDK or direct API call

The most common setup for contractors: Make or Zapier on a weekly schedule — "every Monday at 7am, search for new HVAC permits in Chicago from the past week, then email me the results as a spreadsheet." Configure once, fresh leads every week.

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When to use something else

This Actor is built for searching US building permits by trade keyword across 8 specific cities. For anything outside that scope, here are the tools that fit better:

If you need...	Use this instead
Permits from cities not in this list	Socrata API directly, or Shovels.ai for 2,000+ jurisdictions
Real-time bid tracking and project forecasts	ConstructConnect or Dodge — they're built for general contractors bidding on commercial projects
Historical permit data for property valuation	BuildFax — they specialize in property-level permit history reports
Local business contacts (contractors by phone)	Google Maps Scraper — searches Google Maps for contractors by trade and city
Company registration and licensing data	Global Company Search

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FAQ

Q: Where does this data come from? A: All data comes from official US government open data portals (Socrata). These are public records published by city and state governments. The Actor queries the same APIs that power each city's open data website.

Q: How fresh is the data? A: Each run queries the live Socrata API at run time. The freshness depends on how often each city updates its portal — most update daily or weekly. Use the "since" date filter to get only recently filed permits.

Q: Which cities are covered? A: New York City, Austin TX, San Francisco CA, Chicago IL, Seattle WA, Cincinnati OH, Honolulu HI, and New Jersey statewide. That's 8.8 million+ permit records across 8 sources.

Q: Can I search for any trade? A: Yes. The keyword searches permit descriptions, so you can search for HVAC, solar, roofing, plumbing, electrical, demolition, renovation, kitchen, pool, or any other term that appears in permit filings.

Q: Why do field names vary between cities? A: Each city government designs its own data schema. NYC uses permit_number and borough, Chicago uses permit_ and direction, Austin uses permit_num and original_address1. The Actor returns the original fields from each source plus standardized metadata fields (_city, _city_key, _source_url, _scraped_at, _keyword).

Q: How is this different from just using Socrata directly? A: You can query Socrata APIs for free, but you need to know each city's dataset ID, build SoQL queries for each schema, handle pagination, and normalize the different field names yourself. This Actor does all of that in one click — type a keyword, pick your cities, and download results.

Q: Can I use this for lead generation? A: That's the primary use case. HVAC, solar, roofing, and plumbing contractors use permit data to find properties where work was just permitted. A 5-year-old HVAC permit means the system is due for maintenance. A recent roofing permit means the home is ready for solar panels. This is public data published by governments for transparency.

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→ Browse all Actors: apify.com/lentic_clockss

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Also Available

• Direct API: https://opendata.best/api/v1/data — use with any HTTP client and your API key
• Postman Collection: Fork and test — pre-built requests with example responses
• GitHub: Collection source files — import JSON into any API client