US Building Permits Scraper

Extract building-permit records from US & Canadian city open-data portals — permit number, type, work description, status, issue date, address, reported cost, and coordinates. One permit per row, ready for a construction-activity model, spreadsheet, or database.

Built for real-estate funds and REITs, building-material suppliers, contractors, proptech, and analysts who treat permit volume as a leading construction-activity signal.

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Why use this actor

• No account, no login, no API key required.
• Huge volume in one run — pull a whole city, or a date slice across many cities (millions of permits available across the supported portals).
• Filter before you pull — restrict to a date range so you only get (and only pay for) what you need.
• Rich, structured detail per permit — type, work description, status, address, reported cost, and coordinates where available.
• Stable JSON output ready for pipelines, CRMs, spreadsheets, or databases (download as JSON, CSV, or Excel).

How it works

1. You pick one or more cities from the list (or point the actor at any other city's open-data table you know).
2. (Optional) Add a date filter to narrow the pull.
3. The actor collects every matching permit — number, type, work description, status, issue date, address, reported cost, and coordinates — and de-duplicates as it goes.
4. Results stream into your dataset, ready to download as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

You don't manage any scrapers, accounts, or infrastructure — just pick cities and press Run.

Use cases

Track construction activity in a market Pull a city's permits filtered to the last 12 months and chart new-construction volume month over month — an early read on local building activity before it shows up in official statistics.

Find leads for building-material & trade suppliers Filter permits by work description (e.g. roofing, electrical, new construction) to build a list of active projects and the addresses behind them.

Feed a real-estate or lending model Join permit counts and reported construction cost by ZIP to a property model to flag neighborhoods with rising development.

Input

Field	Type	Description
cities	multi-select	Pick built-in cities (Chicago, NYC, LA, San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, Seattle, and more).
customDatasets	list	Optional — point at any other city's open-data table by domain + dataset id.
where	string	Optional date/field filter, e.g. issue_date > '2026-01-01T00:00:00'.
appToken	string	Optional free token from the data portal — speeds up very large pulls.
pageSize	integer	Records fetched per request (default 1000).
maxItemsPerDataset	integer	0 = all.

Output — one record per permit

{
  "_input": "chicago",
  "_source": "S1-socrata",
  "_scrapedAt": "2026-06-03T10:00:00Z",
  "recordType": "PERMIT",
  "city_key": "chicago",
  "permit_": "100123456",
  "permit_type": "PERMIT - NEW CONSTRUCTION",
  "issue_date": "2026-02-14T00:00:00.000",
  "work_description": "...",
  "street_number": "1234", "street_name": "N State St",
  "reported_cost": "250000"
}

Field	Type	Description
city_key	string	Which city the permit is from.
permit_type	string	Permit category (field names vary slightly by city).
issue_date	string	When the permit was issued.
work_description	string	What the work is.
reported_cost	string	Declared construction cost where available.

(Each city's portal uses its own column names; all fields are passed through as-is.)

Known limits

• Public government open-data — no account needed. Very large pulls run faster with a free portal token (optional input).
• Each supported city's table uses its own column names, passed through verbatim.
• Verified across Chicago (837k+), New York (3.9M+), Austin (2.3M+), Los Angeles (392k+) and more.