Building Permits Scraper - Construction & Contractor Leads

Does it cover your city? Austin, San Antonio, New York (DOB NOW), Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, Cincinnati and Baton Rouge — 11 US cities, one call, one schema.

Scrape newly issued building permits and construction permits straight from the cities' official open-data APIs (Socrata, CKAN, Carto). Every construction job in America starts with a permit, and every city publishes a different schema on a different platform. This Actor normalizes all 11 onto a single flat record — permit number, permit type, work description, status, issued date, address, ZIP, lat/lng, valuation, owner name, contractor name and contractor phone — with the original city record attached under raw.

Contractor and construction leads: filter to your trade with permitTypes (roof, solar, HVAC, pool, remodel), pull the last 7 days, and work the list. Austin is the one city that publishes contractor phone numbers, so its rows are a dialable call list on day one; elsewhere you get a contractor name to match against a license board.

No HTML scraping, no proxies, no logins, no CAPTCHAs. Just the public APIs the cities built for this purpose.

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For AI agents and MCP clients

Returns issued building permits from 11 US cities on one normalized schema, filtered by issued date and, optionally, by keyword.

Minimal input that returns something useful:

{ "cities": ["austin"], "daysBack": 7, "maxItems": 200 }

You get one dataset item per permit, with city, permit_number, permit_type, permit_class, work_description, status, issued_date, applied_date, address, zip, lat, lng, contractor_name, contractor_phone, valuation, owner_name, source_url and raw (the untouched city record).

Cost: $0.02 to start a run, plus $0.005 per permit returned. The call above costs $0.02 if it finds nothing and $1.02 if it hits the 200-permit cap — set maxItems to bound the spend before you call.

Typical questions it answers: which contractors pulled permits in ZIP 78704 last week; new solar permits in Boston this month; how many new-construction permits Chicago issued in the last 30 days; which jobs in San Francisco have the highest declared valuation right now.

Supported cities

All 11 feeds below were verified live before shipping and are refreshed by their cities daily. "Permits/week" is an actual count for the week ending 2026-08-31, after the administrative permits described below are dropped — it will move week to week, but it tells you the order of magnitude you should expect.

City	Source	Permits/week	Lag
austin — Austin, TX	data.austintexas.gov · Issued Construction Permits	~1,150	same day
san-antonio — San Antonio, TX	data.sanantonio.gov · Permits Issued	~1,070	2–4 days
new-york — New York, NY	data.cityofnewyork.us · DOB NOW: Build Approved Permits	~3,600	same day
los-angeles — Los Angeles, CA	data.lacity.org · LADBS Building + Electrical + Mechanical	~2,750	1–2 days
chicago — Chicago, IL	data.cityofchicago.org · Building Permits	~730	same day
philadelphia — Philadelphia, PA	OpenDataPhilly · L&I Building Permits	~470	same day
boston — Boston, MA	data.boston.gov · Approved Building Permits	~650	same day
seattle — Seattle, WA	data.seattle.gov · Building Permits	~80	1–3 days
san-francisco — San Francisco, CA	data.sfgov.org · Building Permits	~380	same day
cincinnati — Cincinnati, OH	data.cincinnati-oh.gov · Building Permits	~200	1–3 days
baton-rouge — Baton Rouge, LA	data.brla.gov · Permits Issued	~160	1–3 days

Seattle and Cincinnati are building permits only (no separate trade-permit feed), which is why their counts look low next to their metro size. Los Angeles is three LADBS datasets merged into one city.

Administrative permits are dropped by default

Three of these registers are general permit registers rather than construction-permit feeds: they publish non-construction, administrative records in the same table as building work. Those rows have no job site scope, no valuation and no contractor to sell to, so the Actor excludes them in the query sent to the city, not after the fact — they never consume your maxItems budget and you are never charged for them. Set includeAdministrative: true to get the full register instead.

City	Excluded types	Share of the feed
San Antonio	Garage Sale, Tree Affidavit Permit, Across the Street Banner, Temporary Weekend Sign, Feather Sign, Avenue Sign, Event Sign, Inflatable Sign	~10% (1,376 of 12,585 permits over 60 days)
Philadelphia	Operations Permit (temporary tents and canopies, fireworks displays)	~0.6%
Baton Rouge	Tire Business, Short Term Rental, Complaint, Code Violations, Stop Work Order, Donation Box, Sign Permit (Political Campaign), Occupancy Permit (Special Event)	~2%

Permits that involve actual physical work are deliberately kept, even where the name looks administrative: permanent sign and billboard erection, San Antonio tree-removal permits, Philadelphia zoning permits and certificates of occupancy, Baton Rouge occupancy and re-roof permits. Garage sales are the single biggest offender — San Antonio issues about 3,800 a year.

One other thing to know about San Antonio: its work_description is the city's PROJECT NAME field, which for small permits is often just the address repeated.

Why other big metros aren't here: Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Denver, Miami, Fort Worth, Nashville and Mesa were all tested and rejected. Their open-data permit feeds are either discontinued, frozen years in the past, or served only as ArcGIS layers that no longer respond. Shipping a city that silently returns zero rows is worse than not shipping it, so they're excluded until their feeds come back.

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Input

{
  "cities": ["austin", "san-antonio"],
  "daysBack": 7,
  "maxItems": 1000,
  "permitTypes": "roof, solar",
  "includeAdministrative": false
}

Field	Type	Default	Notes
cities	array of enum	["austin"]	Any of the 11 keys in the table above.
daysBack	integer	7	Days of issued permits counting back from today (UTC). Max 365.
startDate	string (ISO)	—	Earliest issued date, YYYY-MM-DD. Overrides daysBack.
endDate	string (ISO)	today	Latest issued date, YYYY-MM-DD.
maxItems	integer	1000	Cap across all selected cities combined, split evenly between them so no single city eats the whole budget. Unused allowance rolls forward. 0 = unlimited.
permitTypes	string	—	Comma-separated keywords. A permit is kept when any keyword appears in its permit type, permit class or work description (case-insensitive).
includeAdministrative	boolean	false	Include the non-construction records some registers mix in — San Antonio garage sales and tree affidavits, Philadelphia tent/fireworks permits, Baton Rouge business and short-term-rental licences. Off by default; see the table above.

The date filter always runs against the issued date, not the application date.

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Output

One item per permit. Every item carries all 18 fields; anything the city doesn't publish is null rather than missing, so the dataset exports cleanly to CSV or a database without ragged columns.

{
  "city": "Austin, TX",
  "permit_number": "1995-014830 BP",
  "permit_type": "Building Permit",
  "permit_class": "Residential",
  "work_description": "Add Bedroom & Level Portion Of Exist Foundation",
  "status": "Active",
  "issued_date": "2026-08-31",
  "applied_date": "1995-05-08",
  "address": "4907 SHOAL CREEK BLVD",
  "zip": "78756",
  "lat": 30.3230315,
  "lng": -97.74450439,
  "contractor_name": "Butlin Homes, Inc.",
  "contractor_phone": "5127732944",
  "valuation": 11000.0,
  "owner_name": null,
  "source_url": "https://abc.austintexas.gov/web/permit/public-search-other?t_detail=1&t_selected_folderrsn=629045",
  "raw": { "permittype": "BP", "work_class": "Addition", "tcad_id": "0227000414", "...": "..." }
}

raw holds the untouched city record (minus geometry blobs and internal index columns), so nothing a city publishes is lost even if this Actor's normalized schema doesn't have a home for it.

What each city actually fills in

Field coverage is a property of the city, not of the scraper. Measured on every permit issued in the 10 days ending 2026-09-02, with includeAdministrative off:

City	Contractor	Contractor phone	Valuation	Owner	Applied date	Lat/lng	ZIP
Austin	94%	92%	37%	17%	100%	56%	100%
San Antonio	98%	—	3%	—	100%	95%	96%
New York	100%	—	100%	100%	100%	100%	100%
Los Angeles	—	—	100%	—	60%	99%	100%
Chicago	98%	—	86%	98%	100%	98%	97%
Philadelphia	87%	—	—	95%	—	100%	100%
Boston	95%	—	100%	—	—	98%	100%
Seattle	—	—	100%	—	93%	100%	91%
San Francisco	—	—	100%	—	100%	100%	100%
Cincinnati	99%	—	100%	—	100%	99%	99%
Baton Rouge	100%	—	100%	80%	100%	100%	99%

A dash means the city does not publish that field at all, so it is null on every row:

• Philadelphia and Boston publish no application date. Neither the Philadelphia L&I permits table nor Boston's approved-permits resource has an application/filed-date column — only issued, expiration and completion dates. There is nothing to map.
• Austin's lat/lng gap is Austin's. 44% of Austin's issued permits ship with no coordinates at all — the rows are missing latitude, longitude and the location object, so there is no other key to fall back to. Every other city geocodes 95–100% of its rows.
• Valuation is a percentage of rows carrying a number, not a number above zero. Austin, San Antonio and Baton Rouge all publish 0 on a meaningful share of their trade permits. Austin's 37% is up from 14%: where the city leaves total_job_valuation empty the Actor now sums the per-trade component valuations (building, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, medical gas, and their remodel variants) instead of reporting nothing.
• Los Angeles and Seattle are the only cities whose applied-date coverage is partial rather than all-or-nothing.

Austin is the only city that publishes contractor phone numbers. If dialable leads are the point, Austin is the city to start with. For the rest you get a contractor name to match against a license board or a business directory.

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permit_number is not a unique key. Several cities issue one number per job or project and then publish one row per trade or address under it: New York (one job, separate Plumbing / Sprinklers / Standpipe rows), San Antonio (one commercial project, separate electrical / plumbing / mechanical rows), Cincinnati (one project, separate Building / HVAC / Excavation rows) and San Francisco (one permit, one row per street address it covers). Every such row is a distinct source record and is returned. Deduplicate on permit_number + permit_type + address if you need one row per trade, or on permit_number alone if you need one row per job.

What people use this for

Contractor lead generation. A permit for a new roof is a buying signal for gutters, solar and siding. Filter to your trade with permitTypes, pull the last 7 days, and work the list. Austin's contractor phone numbers make it a dialable call list on day one.

Building-material and equipment sales. New-construction and addition permits with a declared valuation tell a supply rep which jobs are about to need product and roughly how big they are. Sort valuation descending, filter by zip, and route by territory.

Real-estate and investment research. Permit velocity by ZIP is one of the earliest available signals of where capital is actually landing — visible months before it shows up in sales comps or assessor data. lat/lng are populated well enough in most cities to map directly.

Market and competitive analysis. Group by contractor_name to see who is winning work by trade, neighborhood and job size, and how that shifts quarter over quarter.

Compliance and monitoring. Watch permits at addresses or ZIPs you care about and get told when someone pulls one.

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How it works

• Queries each city's official API directly — Socrata SoQL ($where / $order / $limit / $offset, 1,000 rows a page), CKAN datastore_search_sql, or the Carto SQL API.
• Cities are scraped independently inside their own try/except: one city's outage doesn't take down the run, and per-city counts are logged either way.
• Failed requests retry three times with exponential backoff.
• Results are de-duplicated by permit number within each city.
• A RUN_SUMMARY record is written to the default key-value store with the resolved date range and the item count per city.

Runs comfortably in 256–1024 MB. A single-city week is a few seconds of compute.

Refresh cadence

Every source refreshes daily. Most publish same-day; San Antonio typically lags 2–4 days, and a few of the smaller feeds lag 1–3 days, so a daysBack of 2 can legitimately return zero rows for those cities. daysBack: 7 on a daily schedule is the reliable pattern.

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Data source and attribution

All data comes from public municipal open-data portals published by the cities themselves. This Actor only reads documented public API endpoints — no HTML scraping, no authentication, no proxies.

Permit records are public records. Licensing follows the source portal (San Antonio, for example, publishes under CC-BY). Attribute the originating city when you redistribute, and check the source portal's terms for your use case. source_url on every item points back to the record or dataset it came from.

The cities are the system of record. If a permit looks wrong, it looks that way in the city's feed too — this Actor does not correct, infer or enrich, it normalizes.

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Pricing

Priced per event: a small flat fee when a run starts, plus a per-permit charge for each record written to the dataset. You pay for permits you actually receive.