US Building Permits Scraper — New Construction Leads

A building permit that was just issued is a construction job about to start — with the address, what is being built, what it costs and, in most cities, the contractor doing it.

This Actor reads the permit datasets six US cities publish as open data and returns one clean row per permit, whatever each city calls its own columns. Filter by issue date and you have this week's construction pipeline instead of a directory.

No API key, no login, no proxies.

What you get

The lead signal

• issuedDate — always ISO, whatever format the city stores it in
• address, locality, postalCode, and latitude/longitude where published

What is being built

• permitType, permitSubtype, workClass, status
• description — the scope of work in the city's own words: "SCOPE: ROOF REPLACEMENT. AREA: 6450 SQ. FT."
• declaredValue in USD — the cost the applicant declared

Who is doing it

• contractor and contractorPhone where the city publishes them
• owner — the property owner or their business

Provenance

• permitNumber, city, cityCode, recordDate, sourceDataset, sourceUrl, source

Coverage

City	Dataset	Permits in 2026	Cost	Contractor
New York City	DOB Permit Issuance	3,969,159 issued (all years)	—	99%
Los Angeles	Building Permits	41,204	yes	—
Austin	Issued Construction Permits	36,946	yes	91%
Chicago	Building Permits	20,170	yes	yes
San Francisco	Building Permits	14,413	yes	—
Seattle	Building Permits	4,239	yes	8%

Counts measured against the live portals on 25 August 2026.

Who uses this

• Building-material suppliers, roofers, solar installers, HVAC and landscaping firms — permits filtered by work type and value are jobs that have just been approved and not yet sourced.
• Subcontractors — contractor shows which general contractor won the job, so you approach the firm that now needs trades.
• Real-estate and property analysts — permit volume and declared value by ZIP code, as a leading indicator months ahead of completions.
• Insurers and lenders — verify that work at an address was permitted, and what it was declared to cost.
• Developers and AI agents — one schema over six portals, callable over the API or as an MCP tool.

Example output

{
  "permitNumber": "100999521",
  "city": "Chicago",
  "issuedDate": "2026-08-23",
  "permitType": "PERMIT - EASY PERMIT PROCESS",
  "description": "SCOPE: ROOF REPLACEMENT. AREA: 6450 SQ. FT.",
  "declaredValue": 132500.0,
  "currency": "USD",
  "address": "6605 N AVONDALE AVE",
  "contractor": "MARTINEZ VANESSA",
  "sourceDataset": "data.cityofchicago.org/ydr8-5enu",
  "source": "US city open-data portals (Socrata)"
}

Input

Field	What it does
cities	NYC, CHI, LA, AUS, SEA, SF. Empty = all six.
issuedAfter	The lead filter: permits issued from this date on. Empty = the last 7 days.
issuedBefore	Upper bound of the window.
minValue	Minimum declared cost in USD. New York publishes no cost column and is skipped when this is set.
query	Work description contains — roof, solar, kitchen, demolition. Not available for New York, which publishes no description column.
permitType	Permit type contains — electrical, new construction, alteration.
includeRaw	Attach the untouched city record as well.
maxItems	Safety cap across all cities. 0 = unlimited.

Roofing jobs over $50,000 approved this month:

{ "cities": ["CHI", "AUS", "SEA"], "issuedAfter": "2026-08-01", "query": "roof", "minValue": 50000 }

Everything permitted in Los Angeles last week:

{ "cities": ["LA"], "issuedAfter": "2026-08-18" }

Run it on a schedule

Save your filters as a Task, leave the dates empty so each run covers the last 7 days, and schedule it weekly. Attach an Apify integration and new permits land in Google Sheets, Slack, e-mail, a webhook, or Make and Zapier.

Deduplicate on permitNumber together with cityCode — permit numbers are unique per city, not nationally.

Use it from code or from an AI agent

Start runs and read the dataset over the Apify API or CLI, as JSON, CSV, Excel or XML. The Actor is also exposed as an MCP tool through the Apify MCP server, so an agent can answer "which roofing permits over $50k were issued in Chicago this week?" in one call.

Pricing

Pay per event: a small fee per permit exported. API calls only — no browser, no proxy — so platform usage on top is negligible. Use maxItems for a hard ceiling.

Where the data comes from

Each city publishes its permit register on its own open-data portal, all running Socrata. This Actor queries those endpoints directly; sourceDataset and sourceUrl on every row point back to the exact record.

Honest limits, every one of them measured against the live portals on 25 August 2026.

Six cities, not the whole country — most US municipalities publish nothing comparable. The portals refresh on each city's own schedule, so this is a daily-to-weekly feed, not real time.

The cities differ, and the differences are not cosmetic. New York publishes no declared cost and no description, so value and keyword filters cannot apply there and it is skipped when you set them. Its issue date is stored as US-format text rather than a date, so this Actor expands your window into the individual days it covers — which caps a single New York run at 400 days of history. Contractor coverage is 99% in New York, 91% in Austin and only 8% in Seattle; Los Angeles and San Francisco publish no contractor column at all, and those rows come back null rather than guessed.

A declared value is what the applicant stated on the application, not the final cost of the work. This Actor is independent and not affiliated with any city agency.

Related Actors

Same engine, same official-source approach:

• US Business Registry — newly registered companies by state, on the same Socrata protocol
• UK Public Tenders — Contracts Finder and Find a Tender in one run
• AusTender (Australia) — federal contracts, winners and expiry dates
• EU Tenders (TED) — European procurement notices and contract awards
• Swiss Public Tenders (simap.ch) — tenders and awards with prices and bid counts
• France Company Register — SIREN/SIRET, executives, official labels

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Italiano

Esporta i permessi edilizi rilasciati in sei città americane dai portali open data ufficiali: indirizzo, tipo di intervento, valore dichiarato, impresa e proprietario. Il filtro sulla data di rilascio lo rende una fonte di cantieri appena approvati: chi vende materiali, coperture, impianti o subappalti trova lavori assegnati da pochi giorni. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, Seattle, San Francisco.

Deutsch

Exportiert erteilte US-Baugenehmigungen aus den offiziellen Open-Data-Portalen von sechs Städten: Adresse, Art der Arbeiten, angegebener Bauwert, Bauunternehmen und Eigentümer. Über das Erteilungsdatum filtern Sie frisch genehmigte Bauvorhaben — Leads für Baustoffhandel, Dachdecker, Solar- und Haustechnikbetriebe.

Français

Exporte les permis de construire délivrés dans six villes américaines depuis les portails open data officiels : adresse, nature des travaux, coût déclaré, entreprise et propriétaire. Le filtre sur la date de délivrance fournit les chantiers fraîchement autorisés, avant que les fournisseurs et sous-traitants ne soient choisis.