Building permit leads for contractors

A building permit is issued by a municipal or county building department when an owner or contractor is authorised to build, alter, demolish, or install mechanical, plumbing or electrical systems at a specific address. The record carries the address, a work description, an estimated value, filing and issue dates, the permit type, and the contractor of record where one is named.

It is public because permitting is a government act. Larger cities publish permits on open-data portals with an API and daily refresh; smaller jurisdictions publish through a search form or a records request, sometimes weeks late. There is no single national permit database, so coverage is assembled city by city.

What a permit does not contain is a way to reach the person who awards the work. Matching the address to the owner entity, then to the person who signs contracts, then to a verified email, is the difference between permit data and a permit lead.

• City open-data portals. NYC Open Data (DOB job filings and permits), Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and hundreds of other cities on Socrata or ArcGIS, with CSV export and an API, often refreshed daily.
• Building department systems. NYC DOB NOW, LA Building and Safety, and county development-services sites with their own search and, sometimes, an API.
• County records offices. Most non-metro counties: records request, portal or in-person lookup, published in batches.
• UK planning and building control. Local planning authority registers and the Planning Portal; building-control notices from the council or an approved inspector.

Demolition permits are the earliest signal because they precede everything on a site. New-building permits come next, then major alterations. For the trade named on the permit, the contractor is usually already chosen, so the permit is a late signal. For every adjacent trade and for the owner account itself, the permit is early: the scope is open, the vendor list is empty, and the person who will award it can be reached now.