Chicago Property Use and Occupancy Change Permits

The City of Chicago publishes building permits whose work descriptions sometimes state an explicit change from one use or occupancy to another — a business space becoming mercantile, a religious assembly hall becoming multi-family residential. 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 source record. Run it for a date window and get a reviewable lead list instead of reading raw permit descriptions by hand.

Who uses this

• Commercial real estate brokers and site selectors tracking occupancy 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 and residential-conversion activity
• Proptech platforms and AI agents that need a structured, queryable feed of use-change events

What you get

• priorUse and proposedUse, extracted from explicit "change (of/in) (use/occupancy) … from … (to/into) …" wording
• evidenceQuote, the exact matched sentence, so you can verify the extraction yourself
• Address, issue date, permit status, permit milestone, permit type, permit number, and record ID
• A link to the official City of Chicago open-data record for every match
• Deterministic summaries: exact-text counts by proposed use, by status, and by location — no LLM classification
• The complete original work description for manual review

Coverage & freshness

• Source: City of Chicago Building Permits (dataset ydr8-5enu), published as updated daily per the city's dataset metadata. Records run from 2006 to present.
• The dataset covers both residential and commercial permits; this Actor does not filter by permit class, only by the explicit change-of-use/occupancy wording.
• Date window: startDate/endDate, inclusive, maximum 31 days; defaults to the last 7 UTC days when omitted.
• The query is capped at 5,000 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": "2026-08-10",
  "endDate": "2026-09-09"
}

Sample output

A live run for August 10 – September 9, 2026 queried 3,108 building permits and matched 4 with an explicit change-of-use/occupancy phrase:

Address	Previous use	New use	Issued	Permit
1459 N TALMAN AVE	Religious Assembly (A-3)	Multi Family Residential (R2)	2026-08-21	101081518
1644 N DAMEN AVE	B-Business	M-Mercantile	2026-08-19	101086615
4301 S DR MARTIN L KING JR DR	B	E-2	2026-08-18	101077612
10538 S EWING AVE	Existing Retail Space	New Restaurant Space	2026-08-17	101068742

evidenceQuote for the first row: "CHANGE OF OCCUPANCY FROM RELIGIOUS ASSEMBLY (A-3) TO MULTI FAMILY RESIDENTIAL (R2)." Note that record: this dataset includes residential conversions, not only commercial-to-commercial changes. Issue dates are permit dates, not tenant move-in 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/in) (use/occupancy) … from … (to/into) …" wording, and deliberately excludes the contextual "change of use & … to …" construction; negated text ("no change in use") is excluded. Check evidenceQuote to see exactly what matched.
• priorUse and proposedUse are free text from the permit, not standardized occupancy codes.
• sourceStatus and sourceMilestone may be null because the City does not publish them for every permit type.
• openingDate is always null and historicalTransitionObserved is always false: this is the currently published record, not proof of completed work, a new tenant, or an opening date.
• An empty records list means no supported phrase matched in that window — not that no changes occurred. City scope is Chicago only, not Cook County or the metro area.

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. This dataset includes residential occupancy changes, so some property addresses are residential.

Attribution: City of Chicago, Building Permits dataset (ydr8-5enu). This service is not affiliated with the City of Chicago.

Built and maintained with AI agents.

Support

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