Austin Change-of-Use Permits & Plan Review Leads

Austin's Development Services Department issues commercial building permits whose descriptions sometimes state a change of use in plain language — an office becoming a retail store, a bank becoming a daycare. This Actor finds those permits and extracts the previous use, the planned new use, and the exact sentence they came from, as a structured JSON report with a link to every official permit record. Run it for a date window and get a reviewable lead list instead of reading raw permit descriptions by hand — or switch to plan-review mode to see change-of-use cases while they are still under City review, typically weeks to months before a permit issues.

Who uses this

• Commercial real estate brokers and site selectors tracking tenant turnover
• Fire-protection/sprinkler, signage, hood/grease-trap, and restaurant-equipment vendors looking for build-outs
• Security and commercial cleaning companies prospecting new occupants
• Commercial insurance agents and lenders tracking occupancy changes on covered or financed properties
• Local market researchers tracking commercial activity
• Proptech platforms and AI agents that need a structured, queryable feed of use-change events

What you get

• priorUse and proposedUse, extracted from every explicit "change of use from … to …" phrase in the permit description
• evidenceQuote, the exact matched sentence, so you can verify the extraction yourself
• Address, issue date, published permit status, permit number, and record ID
• A link to the official City of Austin permit detail page for every record
• Deterministic summaries: exact-text counts by proposed use, by status, and by location — no LLM classification
• The complete original permit description for manual review

Coverage & freshness

• Source: City of Austin, Development Services Department, Issued Construction Permits (dataset 3syk-w9eu), published as updated daily per the city's dataset metadata.
• Only permits with permittype = 'BP' (Building Permit) and permit_class_mapped = 'Commercial' are queried. Residential-class permits, other permit types (electrical, plumbing, mechanical, driveway), and other cities are out of scope.
• Date window: startDate/endDate, inclusive, maximum 31 days; defaults to the last 7 UTC days when omitted. Permits back to 2000 are queryable.
• The query is capped at 2,000 source rows per run; a window that exceeds the cap fails with a request to shorten it, so a report is never silently truncated.

Pricing

$1.00 per successfully delivered report that contains at least one matched permit. A report with zero matches is delivered free — you are never charged for an empty result. Set a run budget of at least $1.

Quick start

Leave the input empty for the latest 7 UTC days:

{}

Or set a specific window (inclusive, max 31 days):

{
  "startDate": "2026-08-25",
  "endDate": "2026-09-24"
}

Earlier leads: plan-review mode

By default this tool reports issued commercial permits — but an issued permit typically lags its original application by weeks to months (the median for 2025 restaurant change-of-use cases was about 91 days). Set "stage": "inReview" to see the same lead much earlier, from the City's Plan Review Cases dataset, updated daily as applications are filed rather than only once a permit issues:

{"stage": "inReview"}

startDate/endDate work the same way in both stages (1–31 days, last 7 by default), but inReview filters by the date each case was applied for, not issued. It applies the same explicit "change of use from … to …" extraction, restricted to commercial cases, and returns cases still awaiting a decision alongside any already issued in that window — each flagged pendingReview: true or false. A pending record can still change scope or be denied before it issues; treat it as a lead to verify, not a confirmed project.

Privacy: this dataset carries applicant, owner and other individuals' names, phone numbers and mailing addresses. None are requested or returned. Only the property address and, where available, the applicant's and owner's organization names as published by the City (applicantOrganization, ownerOrganization) appear — individual name, phone and mailing-address fields are never selected. Organization names appear exactly as filed and may occasionally be a sole proprietor's trade name.

A live inReview run for August 26 – September 25, 2026 scanned 261 commercial plan-review cases and matched 8 explicit changes of use, 7 still pending. An excerpt:

Applied	Status	Address	Previous use	Planned use
2026-09-18	In Review	12200 N MOPAC EXPY SVRD SB	Various (Photo Studio)	Retail
2026-09-09	e-Prerequisite Review Pending	3001 S LAMAR BLVD BLDG G UNIT 200	Retail	Restaurant, incl. grease trap (3,500 SF)
2026-08-31	Prerequisite Review Approved	11116 MIDDLE FISKVILLE RD UNIT H	Warehouse	Food Sales

Pricing is unchanged: $1.00 per successfully delivered nonempty report, in either stage, regardless of how many records it contains.

Sample output

A live run for August 25 – September 24, 2026 queried 302 commercial building permits and matched 10 with an explicit change-of-use phrase. An excerpt:

Address	Previous use	New use	Issued	Permit
9500 S IH 35 SVRD SB BLDG L UNIT 700	Office	Retail (sports/collector cards)	2026-09-23	2026-124887 BP
3008 DAVIS LN UNIT 230	Fitness	Coffee Shop	2026-09-21	2026-123268 BP
2121 E 6TH ST UNIT 103	YMCA	Pilates Studio	2026-09-18	2026-117674 BP
1500 SAN JACINTO BLVD	Transportation Terminal	Restaurant (2131 SF)	2026-09-03	2025-086071 BP
4929 BURNET RD	fast food	coffee shop	2026-09-02	2026-112946 BP

evidenceQuote for the first row: "Change of Use from Office to Retail and interior Remodel of an Existing space includes new lighting for a retail sports and collector cards occupancy." Issue dates are permit dates, not business opening dates.

Use with AI agents / API / integrations

• Reachable through the Apify API (REST and the JS/Python clients); each run returns the report as one dataset item.
• Callable by any agent connected to Apify's MCP server, so an agent can run it and read the JSON directly.
• Schedule it on Apify Schedules for a recurring lead feed, and route new reports to Slack, email, a Google Sheet, or a CRM through Apify's integrations or Zapier/Make.
• One JSON report per run drops into a spreadsheet or database without extra transformation.

Limitations & interpretation

• Extraction uses fixed text rules, not an LLM. It only catches explicit "change of use from … to …" phrasing; other wording, or negated/conditional text ("no change of use"), is excluded. Check evidenceQuote to see exactly what matched.
• priorUse and proposedUse are free text from the permit, not standardized land-use codes.
• openingDate is always null and historicalTransitionObserved is always false: this is the currently published record, not proof of completed construction, a new tenant, or a scheduled opening.
• An empty records list means no supported phrase matched in that window — not that no property changes occurred.
• A permit with more than one explicit transition keeps every transition and sets multipleTransitions: true; the tool never guesses which one applies.

Data source & privacy

Sourced exclusively from official U.S. government open-data publications. Contains no personal contact data, and we do not append or link personal contact details to these records. Some property addresses may be residential or formerly residential.

Attribution: City of Austin, Development Services Department, Issued Construction Permits. City open-data terms. This service is not affiliated with the City of Austin.

Built and maintained with AI agents.

Support

For questions about this Actor, email matthew@goodlifegames.io.