US Building Permits Scraper 🏗️

Issued building & construction permits from major US cities — NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin — straight from official city open-data portals. No API key, no proxy.

Pull fresh, structured building permit records across the biggest US markets in one run: address, permit type, status, work description, issue date, estimated cost, contractor/owner, and geo-coordinates. Filter by date, ZIP, permit type, status, or a full-text keyword like solar, roof, pool or demolition.

Perfect for contractor & trade lead generation (solar, roofing, HVAC, remodeling), construction-market intelligence, real-estate and property research, and competitor monitoring.

Data comes from each city's official Socrata open-data portal — public, non-personal permit records. No key required (an optional free Socrata app token raises rate limits).

---

Supported cities

City	State	Source portal
New York City	NY	data.cityofnewyork.us
Chicago	IL	data.cityofchicago.org
San Francisco	CA	data.sfgov.org
Los Angeles	CA	data.lacity.org
Austin	TX	data.austintexas.gov

One normalized schema across all of them — mix and match cities in a single run.

Features

• ✅ No API key, no proxy — official open-data APIs, very low maintenance.
• ✅ Lead-gen ready — pull permits issued in the last N days, filter by ZIP or keyword.
• ✅ Full-text search — keyword searches every column (e.g. solar finds solar installs regardless of city schema).
• ✅ Normalized output — same fields for every city; optional raw record included.
• ✅ Newest first — results ordered by most recent activity.

---

Input

Field	Description
Cities	Which cities to pull (default: all five).
Issued after / before	Date range (YYYY-MM-DD) on the permit's issue/activity date.
Keyword	Full-text search across all columns (solar, roof, pool, demolition…).
Permit type contains	Filter by permit-type text (where the city exposes it).
Status contains	Filter by status text (where the city exposes it).
ZIP codes	Restrict to specific ZIPs (where the city exposes a ZIP column).
Max results per city	How many permits to fetch per selected city.
Include raw record	Add the original city record under raw.
Socrata app token	Optional free token for higher rate limits.

Example — fresh solar leads this month

{
  "cities": ["la", "austin", "sf"],
  "keyword": "solar",
  "issuedAfter": "2025-06-01",
  "maxResultsPerCity": 500
}

Example — recent NYC permits in specific ZIPs

{
  "cities": ["nyc"],
  "zipCodes": ["11214", "11215"],
  "issuedAfter": "2025-01-01",
  "maxResultsPerCity": 1000
}

Output

{
  "city": "Los Angeles",
  "state": "CA",
  "permit_number": "26016-10000-06158",
  "permit_type": "Bldg-New 1 or 2 Family Dwelling",
  "permit_status": "Issued",
  "description": "Install a 25.96kW DC commercial solar system",
  "address": "554 S SAN PEDRO ST",
  "zip": "90013",
  "neighborhood": "Downtown",
  "issue_date": "2026-07-09",
  "estimated_cost": 75000,
  "contractor_name": null,
  "owner_name": null,
  "latitude": 34.045,
  "longitude": -118.245,
  "permit_url": null,
  "source_domain": "data.lacity.org",
  "dataset_id": "pi9x-tg5x"
}

Field availability varies by city (e.g. Chicago has no ZIP/status column; NYC carries permittee/owner names; LA carries an estimated valuation and a solar flag).

Run it on a schedule

Schedule a daily run with issuedAfter set to yesterday to get a steady feed of new permits — pipe them to Slack, Google Sheets, a CRM or a webhook for a continuously refreshed lead list.

Notes & limitations

• Official city Socrata open-data APIs — public, non-personal permit records.
• Coverage = the cities listed above (the biggest open-data markets); more can be added.
• Some filters only apply where a city exposes the matching column (documented above).
• Data freshness depends on each city's own publishing cadence.

---

Keywords

building permits, construction permits, permit scraper, US building permits, contractor leads, solar leads, roofing leads, HVAC leads, remodeling leads, NYC permits, Chicago permits, San Francisco permits, Los Angeles permits, Austin permits, DOB permits, construction data, real estate data, property data, open data, Socrata, lead generation, construction intelligence.