Yes. Building permits are public record. New York City’s Department of Buildings publishes every permit it issues on NYC Open Data and refreshes the dataset daily; Chicago’s building permit dataset holds 848,840 records and Austin’s 2.4 million, all searchable by address without an account. What is public is the permit: the address, the work type, the valuation, the dates and the filing contractor. What is not attached, outside a few cities, is a verified way to reach the person who awards the work.
That gap is the whole subject of this guide. It covers where permits are published and how to see who pulled one near you, on three portals walked through; what a permit does and does not tell you; how to turn a permit into a decision-maker contact; how early to reach out by permit type; and where the line sits between doing this yourself and having the records read for you.
Why permits are a lead source at all
Most lead sources are reactive. Someone searches, fills a form, or gets resold on a generic list, and by then the project is already in motion and you are one of five callers. A permit is different. It is a public, timestamped record that a specific project exists at a specific address, filed weeks or months before most of the trade work is scoped. If your business sells B2B accounts rather than one-off jobs, that lead time is the whole point. It lets you reach the owner or general contractor while the scope is still open instead of after the award.
Permits are also structured. A permit carries fields you can filter on: work type, valuation, square footage, dates and the filing party. A commercial roofer wants reroof and new-building permits above a valuation threshold. A demolition contractor wants demo filings. A mechanical subcontractor wants new-building and major-alteration permits in a service radius. The data supports precise targeting if you know where to pull it.
Who pulled a permit near me: three portals walked through
There is no national permit database. Coverage is fragmented across cities and counties. These three show the range, from the richest municipal system in the country to a typical open-data city.
New York City. The Department of Buildings publishes permit issuance and job filings on NYC Open Data, with the permit issuance dataset at 3,990,703 rows and marked for daily update, and the DOB NOW job-filing dataset at 963,215 rows. Search by address, house number and street, or by borough and block. Each row carries the job type, the work type, the filing and issue dates, the filing contractor with a phone number, and, unusually, the owner’s name and business name. The phone belongs to the permittee, the contractor or expediter who filed, not to the owner. If you only work in New York, our free NYC permit search runs the address lookup for you.
Chicago. The city’s data portal publishes building permits, 848,840 records at the time of writing, with the permit type, issue date, street address, a description of the work, the estimated cost and the named contacts on the filing. Filter by permit type and a date range, then by ward or community area, and export the result.
Austin. The city publishes issued construction permits on its open data portal, 2.4 million rows covering building, electrical, mechanical and plumbing permits, with the permit type, issued date, address, description and the contractor of record. The pattern repeats across most Socrata-based portals: filter, sort by date, export.
The habit that matters is the same on all three: filter to the last 30 days, sort newest first, and read the description of work, because that is where “interior fit-out, 4th floor” or “full roof replacement” sits.
Sources by state: where permit data lives
Three source types cover most of the country.
Open data portals. Hundreds of larger cities publish permits on public open data platforms, many on Socrata (the platform behind NYC Open Data, DataSF and the Chicago portal). They let you filter, export CSV and often hit an API. They are the fastest path to bulk permit data where they exist.
Building department systems. Many cities and counties run their own permit search on the building or development-services site. Some expose an API; most offer a search form and downloadable reports.
County and city records offices. In smaller jurisdictions, permits live with the county or municipal building department and may only be available by request, in-person lookup or periodic bulk release. This is where coverage thins and lag grows.
| Source type | Example | Access | Freshness | Coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open data portal (Socrata) | NYC Open Data, DataSF, City of Chicago, Austin | Filter, CSV export, API | Daily to weekly | Larger cities |
| Municipal permit system | NYC DOB NOW, LA Building & Safety | Web search, some APIs, reports | Daily to weekly | City by city |
| County records office | Most non-metro counties | Records request, portal, in person | Batch, can lag | Broad but uneven |
| Statewide aggregator | Select states only | Portal or API | Varies | Partial, state-dependent |
Coverage is the honest caveat. A contractor working in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or San Francisco can pull rich, current permit feeds. A contractor working across a mix of mid-size counties will find some jurisdictions on portals, some on clunky search forms, and some behind a records request. For a state-by-state map, see permit data by state.
What permits reveal, and what they don’t
A permit is precise about the project and, in most cities, silent about the person.
What a permit reveals:
- The property address and, usually, the block and lot or parcel ID
- Work type: new building, demolition, alteration, mechanical, plumbing, electrical
- Valuation or estimated cost of work
- Square footage or scope details, depending on jurisdiction
- Filing and issue dates
- The filing contractor or expediter of record
What a permit does not reveal, outside cities like New York that name the owner on the filing:
- A verified email or phone for the owner or decision-maker
- Who inside the owning entity actually awards the contract
- Whether the trade work you sell has been awarded yet
- Contact details for anyone beyond the filing party
That gap is the problem with treating raw permit data as a lead list. The filing contractor is often a GC or expediter, not your buyer. The owner may be an LLC with no contact attached; where the filing carries a phone, it is the permittee’s. You know a project exists; you cannot yet reach the person who signs your contract. Closing that gap is enrichment.
The enrichment step
Enrichment turns a permit into a lead. It has three parts.
Match the address to the owner entity. The permit gives you an address and often a parcel ID. You resolve that to the owning entity through property and tax records: the LLC, REIT, management company or individual that holds the property. This is where a permit stops being an address and becomes a company.
Identify the decision-maker. An entity is not a person. Inside a management company or ownership group, one role awards trade contracts: a director of construction, a facilities lead, an owner’s rep, a principal on a smaller deal. Enrichment identifies the actual person who makes the call, not the front desk.
Verify the contact. A name without a working channel is not a lead. This step confirms a deliverable email and, where listed, a company phone number. Verified decision-maker email on every lead. Company phone where listed. That verification separates a lead you can act on today from a records dump you have to chase.
Done well, enrichment is the difference between “there is a new-building permit at this address” and “here is the director of construction at the ownership group, verified email, filed last week.” The first is data. The second is a lead.
Timing windows: how early to reach out by permit type
Permit type tells you where a project sits in its lifecycle, which tells you how early you are and how wide your window is.
Demolition permits are the earliest signal. A demo filing almost always precedes new construction or a gut renovation on the same site. If you sell into what comes after the teardown, a demolition permit is the widest possible lead time.
New-building permits come next. A new-building filing means the project is real and funded but most trade scopes are still open. For structural, envelope, mechanical and roofing work this is the sweet spot: early enough to influence the scope, late enough that the project will happen.
Alteration and renovation permits arrive later. By the time an alteration permit is filed, the scope is often set and some trades are already picked. There is still opportunity, but the window is narrower.
| Permit type | Where in the lifecycle | Lead-time window | Reach out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Demolition | Before construction | Widest | Immediately on filing |
| New building | Early, scopes open | Wide | Within days of issue |
| Major alteration | Mid-project | Moderate | Within the first week |
| Minor alteration / MEP | Late, scopes often set | Narrow | Fast or skip |
The practical rule: pick the earliest permit type that reliably precedes the work you sell, and build your outreach to fire on that filing. A verified contact reached three weeks before the RFP is a different conversation than a bid submitted against four competitors.
Doing it yourself, or having the records read for you
You can build this yourself. Whether you should depends on how many jurisdictions you cover and how much of your week you want to spend on data plumbing.
Doing it yourself makes sense when you work in one or two metros that both publish clean permit feeds, someone can maintain the exports and the enrichment, and your volume is low enough that manual matching is tractable. Pulling weekly permits from a single open data portal and enriching the highest-valuation filings by hand is a workable process for a focused local operator.
Having it read for you makes sense when you cover multiple jurisdictions with uneven data, you cannot afford the lag of manual matching, or the enrichment and verification work is eating time you should spend selling. The cost of doing it yourself is not the data. The data is free. The cost is the labour of pulling fragmented sources, matching addresses to owners, finding the right person, verifying contacts, and doing it every week without letting the feed go stale.
| Way to get permit leads | What you get | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| Open data portals, worked by hand | Every permit in the jurisdictions that publish one | Free; your hours on the matching and verification |
| Permit lead services | Permit records, usually with the filing party, sometimes enriched; see the comparison of permit lead services for each vendor’s published price | Published per vendor, or price on request |
| FieldClients | Permits, demolition and planning filings in your area, read daily, each matched to the account and the decision-maker, sent only where they fit what you told us at setup | $800, $1,400 or $2,000 a month by area size; month to month, no setup fee |
The FieldClients row has a limit worth stating: it is built for companies selling to accounts, not for homeowner jobs. Tell us your area on the Check your market form and within 24 hours you get your exact rate and 3 to 5 sample leads from your own area, before you pay anything.
Permits are one signal, not the only one
Permits are strong, but they are not the earliest signal for every trade. Depending on jurisdiction, violations, facade inspection cycles and ownership changes can surface work before a permit is pulled. Commercial roofing is a clear case, where facade filings and inspection deadlines often precede the reroof permit. The point is not that permits are the only source. The point is that permit data is public, structured and predictive, and most contractors leave it on the table because turning it into a reachable decision-maker is work.
Where this leaves you
Permit data tells you a project exists before your competitors know. It will not hand you the person who awards the work, and it will not verify their contact for you. That last mile, matching the permit to the owner, finding the decision-maker and verifying the channel, is what turns a public record into a lead you can close. If you would rather have the permits in your area already matched to a verified decision-maker, see construction leads.