🏗️ Seattle Building Permits Scraper

🚀 Export every Seattle DCI building permit in seconds. Filter by date, permit type, class, status, ZIP, or keyword, and pull permit numbers, costs, descriptions, housing units, contractor, lat/lon, and 27 more fields. No API key, no registration.

The Seattle Building Permits Scraper exports the live Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections permit catalog directly from the City of Seattle Open Data portal (Socrata SODA API). Every record returns 27 normalized fields, including permit number, permit class (residential, commercial, industrial, institutional, multifamily), permit type description, current status, applied/issued/expires/completed dates, estimated project cost, housing units added or removed, original address, latitude and longitude, contractor company, applicant name, related Master Use Permit ID, days out of corrections, review cycle count, and a direct link to the official DCI portal record.

The catalog covers every permit DCI has ever issued, going back decades, refreshed multiple times per day on data.seattle.gov. This Actor lets you slice that dataset by 17 permit types (New Construction, Addition/Alteration, Demolition, Tenant Improvement, Curb Cut, Relocation, Shoreline Exemption, and more), 24 status values, 7 property-use classes, ZIP code, applied-date range, and full-text keyword search.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Real-estate developers, contractors, architects, market analysts, journalists, GIS engineers, civic researchers, prop-tech startups	Lead generation, comparable-project benchmarking, permit pipeline tracking, contractor competitive intelligence, housing-supply analysis, FOIA-style civic research

📋 What the Seattle Permits Scraper does

Seven filtering workflows in a single run:

• 🏗️ Permit type filter. 17 DCI permit-type descriptions, from New Construction to Curb Cut.
• 🏘️ Permit class filter. Commercial, Industrial, Institutional, Multifamily, Single Family/Duplex, Vacant Land, or N/A.
• 📋 Status filter. 24 current-status values (Issued, Completed, Under Review, Canceled, Expired, and more).
• 📅 Applied date range. Inclusive appliedFrom and appliedTo in YYYY-MM-DD format.
• 📮 ZIP filter. Restrict to one Seattle ZIP code (e.g. 98101, 98115).
• 🔍 Keyword full-text search. Match permit number, description, or address.

Each record includes permit number, official DCI portal URL, permit class and mapping, type description and mapping, status, project description, key dates (applied, issued, expires, completed), estimated cost, housing unit deltas, address, ZIP, lat/lon, contractor company, applicant, related MUP, days out of corrections, and number of review cycles.

💡 Why it matters: Seattle DCI's portal is searchable but designed for case-by-case lookups, not bulk export. This Actor turns the city's open-data feed into a clean, filtered CSV or JSON of every permit that matches your filters, so analysts and contractors can build dashboards and pipelines without wrestling with Socrata SoQL.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: appliedDate, daysOutCorrections, dependentBuilding, description, estimatedProjectCost, expiresDate, housingCategory, housingUnits, housingUnitsAdded, housingUnitsRemoved, issuedDate, latitude, longitude, numberReviewCycles, originalAddress, originalCity, originalState, originalZip, permitClass, permitClassMapped, permitNumber, permitTypeDesc, permitTypeMapped, relatedMup, scrapedAt, statusCurrent, url. All 27 field names come from a real production run, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

⚠️ Good to Know: estimated project cost reflects what the applicant declared at the time of filing and is not necessarily the final spend. Housing-unit deltas are city-defined and apply to the parcel as a whole, not always to the single building described.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the Seattle Building Permits Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick a permit type, class, status, date range, ZIP, or keyword, and set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more public-data scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the City of Seattle or the Seattle Department of Construction and Inspections. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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