Contractor Lead Finder — Live Building Permits

Find the contractors who are actively working right now, ranked by how good a prospect they are.

Every day, US cities publish the building permits they issue — and most of those permits name the contractor doing the work. This Actor reads those official city feeds, works out which trade each job belongs to, and rolls thousands of individual permits up into a ranked list of businesses you can actually call.

You get contractors, not paperwork.

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Who this is for

• Suppliers and distributors selling to trade businesses — find the roofers, HVAC shops and electricians who just pulled permits in your territory.
• Marketing, web and software vendors selling services to contractors — a permit is proof a business is real, active, and spending money this month.
• Subcontractors looking for general contractors with live projects.
• AI agents doing sourcing or prospecting research — the output is clean, typed JSON with a documented schema.

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What makes this different

Most permit tools hand you permit rows. A permit row is an event. If you are selling something, you don't want 4,000 events — you want the 180 businesses behind them, sorted by which ones are worth a phone call.

That is the default output here. Each contractor comes back as one record:

{
  "contractorName": "A-Plus Energy Management",
  "leadScore": 82,
  "leadScoreReasons": [
    "6 permits in window (+31)",
    "direct phone on file (+20)",
    "$184,000 total job value (+10)",
    "most recent permit 2 day(s) ago (+15)",
    "identifiable trade: HVAC / Mechanical (+5)"
  ],
  "phoneFormatted": "(512) 450-1980",
  "primaryTradeLabel": "HVAC / Mechanical",
  "trades": [
    { "trade": "hvac", "label": "HVAC / Mechanical", "permits": 5 },
    { "trade": "electrical", "label": "Electrical", "permits": 1 }
  ],
  "permitCount": 6,
  "totalJobValue": 184000,
  "avgJobValue": 30667,
  "firstPermitDate": "2026-07-29",
  "lastPermitDate": "2026-08-14",
  "addressCity": "Austin",
  "marketsActive": ["Austin"],
  "samplePermitNumbers": ["2026-103853 MP", "2026-101120 MP"],
  "sampleWork": ["Replacement of complete existing central heat and air system..."]
}

The score is explained, not hidden. leadScoreReasons shows exactly how every point was earned, so you can argue with the ranking instead of trusting it blindly.

How the ranking works

Signal	Max points	Why
Permit volume in window	40	The strongest signal a trade business is real and spending. A shop pulling eight permits a month has payroll and a budget.
Reachability	20	A phone number on file. A lead you cannot call is worth much less.
Total job value	20	How much money is moving through the business.
Recency	15	A permit from last week beats one from three months ago.
Identifiable trade	5	Makes it possible to write a relevant pitch.

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Cities covered

City	Contractor name	Phone	Job value	Notes
Austin, TX	✅	✅ yes	partial	The best source in the country for this — the only verified city publishing contractor phone numbers
New York City, NY	✅	—	✅	Applicant business name + business address; very high volume
Louisville, KY	✅	—	✅	Coarser trade matching (no free-text work description)
Sacramento, CA	✅	—	✅	Current year only
Phoenix, AZ	✅	—	—
Seattle, WA	⚠️ ~9%	—	✅	Contractor named on only about 1 permit in 11
Denver, CO	✅	—	✅	Publishes with a multi-month lag; CC BY 3.0 credit attached to every record

Cities deliberately not included, and why. Philadelphia and Nashville both publish excellent permit feeds, but their open-data terms bar commercial republication without written permission, so they are switched off in code. Chicago's terms are bespoke and have not yet been read. This Actor only serves data it is allowed to serve — if you need one of those cities, ask, and it will be added the day the permission exists.

Adding a city is a config change, not a code change — see src/cities.js.

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Where the data comes from, and why you can use it

Official municipal open-data APIs only. No scraping. No terms-of-service grey area.

Every source is a documented, public API published by the city itself — Socrata/SODA, ArcGIS REST, or Carto SQL — and every source's actual license or terms were read before it was enabled. The read date and the source URL are recorded in the code and reported in every run summary. Three kinds of permission are accepted:

• Public-domain dedications — USGOV_WORKS (Austin), PUBLIC_DOMAIN (Seattle), PDDL (Louisville).
• Attribution licenses — CC BY 3.0 (Denver). The required credit line is attached to every record.
• Open-data statutes and city terms that permit redistribution — NYC Administrative Code § 23-502(d) ("without any registration requirement, license requirement or restrictions on their use"); Sacramento and Phoenix open-data terms (explicit grant to use, reproduce and redistribute; no commercial restriction).

Sources whose terms restrict commercial use, or whose terms have not been read, are shipped disabled and cannot be selected, even by editing the input. The license gate is enforced in code and covered by tests, not documented as an intention.

Every record carries an _attribution array with one entry per source: the source name, link, license, the credit line the city asks for, and the retrieval time. If you republish results, carry that credit forward — for Denver, NYC and Louisville it is a condition of the license, not a courtesy.

Accuracy disclaimer: cities do not warrant the completeness or accuracy of their permit data, and neither does this Actor. It republishes what the city published. Verify anything you intend to rely on.

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Input

Field	Type	Default	Notes
cities	array	["austin"]	Which city feeds to query
outputMode	string	"contractors"	contractors = ranked lead list · permits = raw permit rows
trades	array	[] (all)	16 trades: roofing, solar, hvac, plumbing, electrical, pool, remodel, addition, newConstruction, demolition, windowsDoors, fenceDeck, foundation, siding, signage, fireSprinkler
daysBack	integer	14	7–30 is the useful range for outreach
minJobValue	integer	0	See caveat below
requireContractor	boolean	true	Permits with no named contractor cannot become leads
requirePhone	boolean	false	Effectively limits results to Austin
zipCodes	array	[]	Restrict to specific job-site ZIPs
maxResults	integer	50	Hard cap on results and therefore on cost. 50 contractor leads cost at most $2
socrataAppToken	string	—	Optional free token; raises rate limits

Caveat on minJobValue: trade permits (electrical, plumbing, mechanical) frequently carry no declared valuation, and Phoenix publishes none at all. Setting a minimum above 0 filters those out entirely. Leave it at 0 unless you specifically want large projects.

Example — roofers and solar installers in Austin, last 3 weeks, phone required

{
  "cities": ["austin"],
  "trades": ["roofing", "solar"],
  "daysBack": 21,
  "requirePhone": true,
  "outputMode": "contractors",
  "maxResults": 150
}

Example — every trade across four cities, raw permit rows

{
  "cities": ["austin", "nyc", "louisville", "phoenix"],
  "daysBack": 7,
  "outputMode": "permits",
  "maxResults": 1000
}

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Pricing

You are billed per result delivered — never per permit scanned. A run that reads 5,000 permits and finds 60 contractors bills 60 results.

maxResults is a hard ceiling on both output and cost. The default is 50, so a first run with default settings costs at most $2 for results. Raise it when you want the full list.

Zero results costs nothing for results, and neither does a run that fails — the only charge in those cases is Apify's automatic Actor-start fee, a fraction of a cent.

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Fresh leads every week, on autopilot

New permits are issued every day, so last month's list goes stale. Save your input as a Task, then add an Apify Schedule (for example, every Monday at 7 am) and set daysBack to 7. Each Monday you get only the contractors who pulled permits in the past week, ranked and ready to call. Apify can email you when the run finishes.

Use it from your own tools

Everything on this page is also an API. Start a run and fetch the results from your CRM, a spreadsheet, n8n, Make or Zapier with the Apify integrations, or from code through the Apify API. AI agents can call it as a tool through Apify's MCP server. The output is typed JSON with a documented schema, so it drops straight into a pipeline.

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Output notes for developers

• Every record carries _attribution (one entry per source, with license and credit line) and _retrievedAt.
• A RUN_SUMMARY record is written to the key-value store with per-city row counts, timings, license tier and review date, any per-city errors, and the exact date window used.
• Missing values are null, never "", "N/A", or a placeholder. City junk values (" ", "N/A", "78727-____") are normalized away.
• Phones are E.164 (+15124501980) plus a display form ((512) 450-1980).
• Dates are ISO YYYY-MM-DD. Three different upstream date formats — ISO strings, epoch milliseconds, and MM/DD/YYYY text — are normalized for you.
• Money is a number, never a string, despite every upstream API returning strings.
• If one city's API fails, the run continues with the others and records the failure in RUN_SUMMARY.sources[].error. If no city can be served, the run fails cleanly with an explanation and charges nothing.

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Limits and honest expectations

• Contractor phone numbers exist in Austin only. Every other city publishes a name, and sometimes a mailing address. If your workflow depends on phones, Austin is your city.
• Seattle names a contractor on roughly 9% of permits. That is the city's data, not a bug here.
• Denver runs months behind. Good for market research, bad for fresh outreach.
• Trade classification is keyword-based on the text the city publishes. Where a city publishes no work description (Louisville, Denver), classification is coarser. Each record reports its own tradeConfidence so you can filter on it.
• A permit is evidence of activity, not an endorsement. It tells you a business is working and spending. It tells you nothing about whether they want what you are selling.

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Questions

Open an issue on this page, or ask for a city you need. Replies within 2 business days.