US Building Permits Scraper (Chicago, LA, Austin, Seattle)

Building permits as the cities issue them, from the official open data of Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin and Seattle: permit number and type, work class, status, application and issue dates, site address and ZIP, coordinates, declared job value, work description, and the people on the permit — contractors (with phone numbers in Austin), owners and other contacts in Chicago, applicants in Austin — plus a link to the city's record where one is published.

Filter by date, permit type, words in the work description (solar, pool, ADU, reroof), minimum value and ZIP. No key, no login, no proxy.

What it is for

• Contractor and supplier leads — every new-construction or renovation permit over $100k issued this month.
• Trade-specific prospecting — solar, roofing, pool, EV charger jobs by their description.
• Market tracking — construction activity and value by city and type.

Input

field	what it does
cities	chicago, los_angeles, austin, seattle — one search each.
dateType	issued (default, issued permits only) or applied.
dateFrom / dateTo	YYYY-MM-DD. Default: the last 30 days.
permitTypeContains	Words in the permit type (each city names types its own way).
descriptionContains	Words in the work description.
minValuation	Declared job value in dollars (see note 2).
zipCodes	ZIPs or prefixes (not available for Chicago).
sortBy	Newest or oldest first.
maxItems	Per city, default 200; 0 = all.

Things about this data worth knowing

1. Seattle's list includes permits that were never issued

Seattle publishes applications too: 52,782 of its records have no issue date. With dateType: "issued" (the default) only issued permits come back; applied searches by application date and includes the rest.

2. A value filter removes trade permits in Austin

Austin records a job value only on building permits. Its electrical, plumbing, mechanical and driveway permits — 3,260 of about 4,000 issued in September 2026 — have none, so minValuation leaves just building permits there. Los Angeles stores the value as text; the Actor compares it as a number.

3. Contractors are named unevenly

Austin names a contractor on almost every permit (1,386 of 1,500), with a phone number; Chicago on about 3 in 10 (it lists owners, architects, tenants and contractors in up to 15 contact slots, all returned in contacts); Seattle on under 1 in 10; Los Angeles' dataset has no contractor field.

4. Cities publish at different speeds

On 25 September 2026 the newest issue date was the 23rd in Chicago, Austin and Seattle, and the 19th in Los Angeles. Each city's summary shows newestDateInData.

Output

One BUILDING_PERMIT row per permit (same fields for every city, the city's own record under source) and one SEARCH_SUMMARY per city.

{
  "recordType": "BUILDING_PERMIT",
  "city": "chicago",
  "permitNumber": "101046020",
  "permitType": "PERMIT - SIGNS",
  "issuedDate": "2024-09-18",
  "address": "7529 N CLARK ST",
  "valuation": 5500,
  "description": "INSTALLATION OF A WALL SIGN ON THE FRONT ELEVATION",
  "contractor": {"role": "CONTRACTOR-ELECTRICAL", "name": "3 S SUPPLY COMPANY", "city": "HOMER GLEN", "state": "IL", "zip": "60491"}
}

Speed

1,000 permits per request, one request per second: 1,500 permits from each of two cities took 9 seconds.

Limits

• Four cities for now. New York City was evaluated and left out: its permit dataset stores dates as text, which rules out date filtering.