US Building Permits Scraper — Multi-City Construction Leads

Get freshly issued building permits from 6 major US cities in one run, in one clean schema. Solar installers, roofers, HVAC companies, suppliers, and lead-gen teams use new permits to reach property owners and follow contractor activity the week work is approved — weeks before traditional permit-lead brokers deliver their lists. This Actor pulls directly from each city's official open-data portal (no fragile HTML scraping), normalizes every record into the same analysis-ready JSON, and returns permits issued as recently as yesterday for most cities.

Cities covered (v1)

City	Source (official open data)	Typical freshness	Contractor info	Geocodes
New York City	DOB NOW: Build — Approved Permits	1–3 days	✅ name + license	✅
Chicago	Chicago Data Portal — Building Permits	1–2 days	✅ name	✅
San Francisco	DataSF — Building Permits	1–2 days	— (not published)	✅
Austin	Austin Open Data — Issued Construction Permits	1–2 days	✅ name (most)	partial
Seattle	Seattle Open Data — Building Permits	1–2 days	partial	✅
Los Angeles	LADBS — Permits Issued 2020–Present	~2–4 week lag (city-side)	— (not published)	✅

More cities are added on request — open an issue with the city you need.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
cities	array	all 6	Any of nyc, chicago, la, sf, seattle, austin
issuedSince	string	last 7 days	YYYY-MM-DD; only permits issued on/after this date
maxRecordsPerCity	integer	500	Hard cap per city, 1–5000
permitClass	string	all	residential / commercial; unclassified permits are always included

Tip for LA: because the city publishes with a lag, use issuedSince ≥ 30 days back or you may get zero LA records (the other five cities are day-fresh).

Output

One JSON object per permit, identical schema across all cities:

{
  "permit_id": "B200473293",
  "city": "Chicago",
  "state": "IL",
  "permit_type": "PERMIT - EXPRESS PERMIT PROGRAM",
  "permit_class": "unknown",
  "work_description": "TUCKPOINTING AND UNIT MASONRY REPAIR / REPLACEMENT: 800 SQ. FT.",
  "status": "ACTIVE",
  "filed_date": "2026-06-04",
  "issued_date": "2026-06-08",
  "address": "4700 W MONTROSE AVE",
  "zip_code": "60641",
  "latitude": 41.961,
  "longitude": -87.741,
  "valuation": 12000.0,
  "contractor_name": "ACME MASONRY LLC",
  "contractor_license": null,
  "owner_name": "LLC 4510 CLARK",
  "source_dataset": "https://data.cityofchicago.org/resource/ydr8-5enu",
  "source_record_url": null,
  "fetched_at": "2026-06-09T18:00:00+00:00"
}

Fields a city doesn't publish are null (see the coverage table above) — your pipeline gets a stable schema either way.

Cost of a typical run

Pulling permits from official JSON APIs is fast and cheap: a full 6-city run capped at 500 permits/city (~3,000 records) completes in well under a minute on the smallest memory setting. You pay per permit scraped — see the pricing tab. A typical weekly all-cities pull costs a few dollars; there are no proxy surcharges because government open-data portals don't block.

Known limitations

• LA lags ~2–4 weeks behind real issuance (the city's publishing cadence, not ours).
• permit_class is unknown where a city doesn't classify permits (NYC, Chicago); the permitClass filter never drops unclassified records.
• SF and LA do not publish contractor names in their permit datasets.
• Valuation is missing on permit types some cities don't cost (e.g., many trade permits).
• Data quality is the city's: occasional missing geocodes (Austin ~50%) or typos pass through as-is; we normalize structure, not truth.

Changelog

• 0.1 (2026-06-09) — initial release: NYC, Chicago, LA, SF, Seattle, Austin; unified schema; residential/commercial filter; per-city caps with graceful partial-failure handling.