Building Permits Feed — Austin & Chicago

Get clean, structured building-permit data for Austin, TX and Chicago, IL as JSON, CSV, or Excel — no scraping, no parsing government HTML, no dealing with clunky open-data portals. Pick a city and a date range and get back ready-to-use permit records in one consistent shape: address, permit type, valuation, contractor, owner, status, and more.

Built for contractors, roofers, solar installers, real-estate investors, and researchers who want fresh permit activity as sales leads or data — without paying enterprise prices.

Why use it

• Clean, consistent output. Every permit — from any supported city — comes back in the same tidy schema, with the full raw source record attached so you can trust and audit the data.
• Fresh leads. Filter by issue date to pull just-issued permits — the signal that a property owner is about to spend money.
• Fair, usage-based pricing. Pay only per result you actually get. No subscriptions, no minimums.
• Straight from the official source. Data comes directly from each city's official open-data portal, so it's authoritative and current.

What you get

One record per permit, with these fields:

permit_id, issue_date, jurisdiction, address, latitude, longitude, permit_type, work_description, valuation, contractor_name, contractor_license, owner, status, source_url, raw

Example output

{
  "permit_id": "2025-151496 EP",
  "issue_date": "2026-01-31T00:00:00.000",
  "jurisdiction": "austin-tx",
  "address": "9113 BELL MOUNTAIN DR, AUSTIN, TX, 78730",
  "latitude": 30.37875914,
  "longitude": -97.82761222,
  "permit_type": "R- 434 Addition & Alterations",
  "work_description": "Addition of 470 sqft on the first level ...",
  "valuation": null,
  "contractor_name": "River City Electric",
  "status": "Inactive Pending Revision",
  "source_url": "https://abc.austintexas.gov/web/permit/public-search-other?..."
}

Input

Field	Required	Example	Notes
jurisdiction	yes	austin-tx	austin-tx (Austin, TX) or chicago-il (Chicago, IL) — more coming
dateFrom	yes	2026-01-01	Permits issued on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD)
dateTo	yes	2026-01-31	Permits issued on or before this date (YYYY-MM-DD)
permitType	no	residential	Filter by permit class (case-insensitive match)
minValuation	no	50000	Only permits with declared valuation at or above this (USD)
maxResults	no	1000	Cap on how many records to return

How to use it

1. Set your date range (and any optional filters).
2. Run the actor.
3. Download the results as JSON, CSV, or Excel, or pull them via the Apify API into your own app or spreadsheet.

Good to know

• Coverage: Austin, TX and Chicago, IL. More cities are planned — follow the actor for updates.
• Owner data: Chicago records include the property owner and the contractor; Austin exposes the contractor but not a property owner. Fields a city doesn't provide come back empty (the unified schema is the same for every city).
• Valuation: Not every permit has a declared dollar valuation, so the valuation field is sometimes empty. When present, it's the city's declared job/reported cost. The minValuation filter only returns permits that have a valuation at or above your threshold.
• Data sources: City of Austin Open Data ("Issued Construction Permits") and City of Chicago Open Data ("Building Permits") — both official Socrata portals.

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