Austin Commercial Building Permits & Contractor Activity

Find recently issued commercial building permits in Austin's official public Issued Construction Permits dataset. It is intended first for construction suppliers researching contractor activity.

The Actor returns source permit records; a permit is not a distinct construction project, a qualified lead, or evidence of demand. It does not enrich records, infer commercial use from address text, or claim exclusivity, guaranteed freshness, or complete territory coverage.

What it does

• Verifies the official Austin Socrata schema before querying.
• Filters by inclusive issue-date calendar window, source commercial/residential classification, permit type, contractor trade, description keywords, and presence of a contractor company name.
• Delivers permit records to the run's default dataset in JSON or CSV export formats.
• Writes RUN_SUMMARY, SCHEMA_METADATA, and an optional CONTRACTOR_SUMMARY to the run's default key-value store.
• Limits a run to 1–5,000 delivered permit records. Reaching the cap is a successful, explicitly truncated result; request, record, duplicate, or pagination errors are reported as incomplete.

The contractor summary groups the exact source company and trade values found in delivered records. Its counts describe activity within those delivered permit records and are not counts of distinct projects or leads. The summary has no separate charge.

Pricing

Launch pricing is $0.003 per delivered permit record ($3 per 1,000). Only visible permit records use the permit-record pay-per-event. Platform usage and the contractor activity summary are included; there is no separate summary charge. Source counts, discarded duplicates, and diagnostics are not charged. Customer spending limits can stop a run after a partial delivery; RUN_SUMMARY preserves the delivered count and reason.

Example input

{
  "startDate": "2026-09-30",
  "endDate": "2026-10-06",
  "permitClass": "Commercial",
  "permitTypes": ["BP", "MP"],
  "contractorTrades": ["General Contractor"],
  "requireContractor": true,
  "includeContractorSummary": true,
  "maxResults": 100
}

issue_date is a source date-only value. The dates are inclusive calendar boundaries interpreted in America/Chicago; the Actor does not claim UTC timestamp precision. Defaults are the latest seven calendar dates and Commercial with a 100-record cap.

Small real output sample

{
  "source_record_id": "2025-143684 BP",
  "issue_date": "2026-10-05T00:00:00.000",
  "source_permit_type": "BP",
  "source_class": "Commercial",
  "work_description": "Adding a Ramp to Interior Area for Staff Personal for Existing Grocery Store",
  "project_address": "2400 S CONGRESS AVE",
  "contractor_name": "Trusted General Contracting",
  "contractor_trade": "General Contractor",
  "project_valuation": null
}

This is a small observation sample, not a promise that every future record has the same completeness. Missing source values remain null.

Exports and interpretation

Open the run's default dataset and choose JSON, CSV, or another Apify-supported export. Open RUN_SUMMARY for source counts, delivered rows, truncation, errors, pagination, and resource diagnostics. Open CONTRACTOR_SUMMARY for run-local contractor activity. Compare contractor names and supporting permit IDs as activity indicators, not as project counts or qualified leads.

For a step-by-step workflow, see TUTORIAL.md. For release status and private verification, see LAUNCH_READINESS.md.