US Building Permits Monitor: Daily Construction Leads by Trade

New US building permits every day, from 9 official city and county open-data portals, filtered by trade, value and ZIP. Monitor mode, no API key, no contact scraping, $1.50 per 1,000.

Not affiliated with or endorsed by any government agency.

This Actor is a building permits scraper / construction leads API built on official open data (not city website HTML scraping). Trade tags are approximate keyword heuristics — always verify against permitType, workClass and description.

What you get

One normalized row per permit:

Field	Notes
permitKey	{source}:{permitNumber}
jurisdiction	e.g. New York City, NY
permitType / workClass / status	As published
tradeTags	Approximate: solar, roofing, hvac, electrical, plumbing, ev-charger, pool, demolition, new-construction, adu, addition-alteration, signage, windows-doors
isNewConstruction	true when new-construction ∈ tradeTags
description	Phones/emails scrubbed; max 2,000 chars
valuationUsd	Declared/estimated value (null if missing; Austin has none)
issuedDate / appliedDate	YYYY-MM-DD
address	Site address of the permitted work (property, not a person)
contractors	Business names only (legal suffix / trade-word filter)
ownerBusiness	Owner only if a business (never a person name)
sourceUrl + licence	Citation
changeType	new / updated in monitor mode

Why this Actor

• Official open-data APIs only (Socrata SODA 2.1) — no logins, CAPTCHAs or HTML scraping
• One schema across 9 areas
• Trade tags for roofing, solar, HVAC, pool and more (approximate)
• Valuation and ZIP filters
• Monitor mode (new + changed only)
• Per-source freshness in RUN_SUMMARY
• Privacy-safe (no owner names or phones — competitors sell contacts; we do not)
• MCP-ready

Coverage

Source	Dataset	Typical weekly volume	Valuation	Contractors	Lag
NYC	rbx6-tga4	~3,700	yes	business applicant	~3 days
Los Angeles	pi9x-tg5x	~1,400	yes	—	~1–2 days
San Francisco	i98e-djp9	~250	yes	—	~1–2 days
Seattle	76t5-zqzr	~125	yes	—	low
Austin	3syk-w9eu	~1,100	none	company name	low
Cincinnati	uhjb-xac9	~230	yes	company	low
Baton Rouge	7fq7-8j7r	~160	yes	company	low
New Orleans	rcm3-fn58	~320	yes	list	low
Montgomery County MD	commercial + residential	~180	yes	—	low

Chicago is not included in v1 (portal terms: indemnity, mandatory disclaimer, stop-right).

Known limits: trade tags are approximate; LA solar flags are sparse; Cincinnati descriptions are coarse; NYC Mechanical Systems filings often tag as addition-alteration rather than hvac.

How to use

Daily roofing / solar / HVAC leads (monitor + schedule)

1. Set tradeTags (e.g. ["roofing"]), monitorMode: true, pick a monitorId.
2. Schedule daily. Webhook the dataset to Slack, email, Make, n8n or Zapier.
3. Only new (and optionally updated) permits are returned and charged.

{ "tradeTags": ["roofing"], "monitorMode": true, "monitorId": "roofing-daily", "firstRunLookbackDays": 3, "maxItems": 200 }

• First run: loads the last firstRunLookbackDays days (default 3), not a big backlog. Set it higher (up to 30) if you want more history on day one.
• Later runs: only permits that are new since the previous run. lookbackDays (default 14) re-checks recent days for late-published permits, but never reaches back before your first run.
• Capped runs mix cities: when maxItems cuts a run short, rows are taken round-robin across cities (newest first within each city), so a 50-row all-city run returns a mix instead of only the city with the latest dates. Uncapped runs stay newest-first.
• Capped runs resume: if a run stops at maxItems or your spend limit, the status says "Returned X of Y+ new permits. Raise maxItems or your spend limit." The next run continues with the next permit not yet returned, so nothing is skipped and nothing you already received is charged again. Y is a lower bound when it ends in "+".
• Approximate cost: all 9 cities, no filters, is a few hundred permits per weekday; a trade filter like roofing is typically tens per day. At $0.0015 per permit, 100 permits ≈ $0.15 plus the $0.002 start fee.

Large projects over $1M

{ "minValuationUsd": 1000000, "issuedWithinDays": 7, "maxItems": 500 }

Austin is skipped with a warning (no valuation column).

New construction in your ZIPs

{ "newConstructionOnly": true, "zipCodes": ["78702", "78757"], "issuedWithinDays": 30 }

Input highlights

Input	Default	Notes
sources	all 9	NYC, LA, SF, Seattle, Austin, Cincinnati, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Montgomery MD
issuedWithinDays	7	1–90
tradeTags	—	Approximate keyword tags
minValuationUsd	—	Excludes null valuations; skips Austin
zipCodes	—	5-digit
monitorMode	false	New (+ updates) only
lookbackDays	14	Covers NYC lag (never before the monitor's first run)
firstRunLookbackDays	3	Days loaded on a monitor's first run
maxItems	50	0 = no limit
timeBudgetSeconds	120	Partial results with truncated=true
socrataAppToken	—	Optional secret; raises Socrata rate limits for very large jobs

Pricing

Event	FREE	BRONZE	SILVER+
permit (primary)	$0.0015	$0.0014	$0.0012
Actor start	$0.002	$0.002	$0.002

Minimum max total charge per run: $0.02. Platform memory start fee: at the 512 MB default you pay one start event ($0.002). Raising memory above 1 GB charges $0.002 per GB.

Examples (FREE): default 50 rows ≈ $0.077; weekly solar (~213) ≈ $0.32; weekly ≥$1M (~303) ≈ $0.46.

Use as an MCP tool

Endpoint: https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=optimistprime/us-building-permits-monitor

Example agent call:

{ "sources": ["austin"], "tradeTags": ["pool"], "issuedWithinDays": 7, "maxItems": 10 }

Prompts:

• "Find new roofing permits issued in Los Angeles this week with a declared value over $20,000."
• "Which contractors pulled permits for projects over $1M in NYC in the last 7 days?"
• "List new pool permits in Austin ZIP 78757 this month."

Privacy

We never fetch or output owner, applicant or contractor person names, phones, licence numbers, emails or contractor home addresses. Business names are kept only when they pass a business-marker filter (LLC, Inc, Construction, Roofing, Electric, …). Site addresses are kept — they identify the property being permitted.

Data sources & licences

Official city/county open-data portals (public domain, PDDL, CC0 or NYC Open Data Law). Attribution is carried on every row in licence.

If you are a data owner and want a dataset removed, open an issue.

FAQ

Why no homeowner names or phone numbers? Privacy. You get the site address and contractor company (when published and business-marked). We do not sell contact data.

Why is Austin missing valuation? The Issued Construction Permits dataset has no valuation column.

How fresh is NYC? Typically ~3 days behind the calendar date.

Can you add my city? Candidates for v1.1 include Chicago (if terms allow), Marin, Cambridge, Norfolk, Calgary, Edmonton and NJ open-data portals.

Is this a scraper? It reads official open-data APIs (SODA). No city website HTML scraping, no CAPTCHA bypass. Store search may still call it a building permit scraper / construction leads tool.

Ready-to-run examples

Each example is a published task: open its page and click Try, or paste the JSON into Input.

Example	Task	Sample run	Rows
New solar permits (weekly)	new-solar-permits-weekly	2k47b8ERNNIwAodCu	175
New roofing permits (weekly)	new-roofing-permits-weekly	gBPdmVCp8U2VzvJzt	883
Construction permits over $1M (weekly)	construction-permits-over-1m-weekly	dBqlIFEfbASnueDXK	199

Times and row counts from real runs on Oct 5, 2026 (FREE-tier prices); results change as city portals update.

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.