Construction Permit Leads — Scored Daily Call List

A permit is a signed statement that someone is about to spend money on construction. This actor finds those statements the day they are filed, sorts them by how worth calling they are, and hands you a call sheet.

Built for roofers, HVAC and plumbing contractors, foundation companies, restoration crews, solar installers, and the suppliers who sell to them.

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Two things you will not find in another permit tool

1. Houston, TX

The City of Houston stopped publishing Permit Activity Reports on 2025-12-01. There is no open-data feed, no CSV, no API — permits are exposed only through an interactive search portal. Every other permit scraper you can buy is a wrapper around Socrata open data, so none of them cover Houston at all.

This one drives Houston's actual reporting system and returns same-day permits with owner, address, valuation and work description. It is the hardest city in the country to get permit data from, and it is the fourth-largest metro in the country.

2. A call sheet, not a spreadsheet

Every run writes hot-leads.txt — plain text, best lead first, with a one-line reason for every score. You do not have to open the dataset to use this product.

==============================================================================
  CALL TODAY — permits scoring 75+
  generated 2026-07-29
==============================================================================

  1 lead(s) worth a call, out of 10 total this run.
  Cities: Houston, TX (1)
  Trades: Roofing (1)

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  #1   SCORE  76   ROOFING   Houston, TX
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  ADDRESS   : 7501 HARWIN DR BLD A 77036
  OWNER     : HARWIN WHOLESALE CENTER
  CONTRACTOR: -- not published by this city --
  VALUE     : $14,000 (estimated)
  ISSUED    : 2026-07-28
  WORK      : RETAIL ROOF OVERLAY 1-1-2-M-B 2021 IBC
  PERMIT    : C1-DUP/CHNG  #26058326
  WHY       : contractor not published by this city | est. $14,000 (city published no value)

Find it under Storage → Key-value store → hot-leads.txt, or straight off the run's Output tab. Set the threshold to 0 to turn the file off.

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What happens to each permit before you see it

Classified by trade	Tagged roofing, hvac, plumbing, electrical, foundation, remodel, new_construction, solar, pool, demolition, fence_deck. Reads the work description, not just the city's filing category — which matters, because most cities file everything as one generic type. A permit typed "Addition/Alteration" that says REPLACE ROOF STORM DAMAGE is a roofing lead, and you get it when you filter for roofing.
Tagged with every trade it qualifies for	Roof replacement, mechanical included is a real job for the roofer and the HVAC contractor. Both of them get it. The trades field lists all of them; trade is the primary.
Scored 0–100	Weighted heavily toward freshness, because a three-day-old permit already has four competitors calling it. Job size, whether a contractor is attached yet, and address quality also factor in. Scores are normalized across cities, so 75 means the same thing in Houston as it does in Chicago.
Filtered to your business	Your trades, your ZIP codes, your minimum job size.
Deduplicated across runs	Run it daily and you get only today's new permits — never the same row twice, and never billed for one twice.

Sort by lead_score descending and work top-down. That is the whole workflow.

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Coverage

Every city below was queried live and confirmed to be returning current data. A city is not listed until it passes that check.

City	Source	Freshness	Valuation	Contractor	Site ZIP
Houston, TX	Permit portal	Same/next day	Yes	Not published	Yes
Austin, TX	Open data	1 day	~10%, rest estimated	Yes	Yes
Baton Rouge, LA	Open data	1 day	~66%	Yes (39% owner-pulled)	Yes
Chicago, IL	Open data	1 day	Yes	Yes	Not published
Montgomery County, MD	Open data	1 day	Yes	Not published	Yes
New York City, NY	Open data	1 day	Yes	Yes	Yes
Norfolk, VA	Open data	1 day	Yes	Not published	Not published
Cincinnati, OH	Open data	2 days	Yes	Yes	~8% only
Seattle, WA	Open data	3 days	Yes	Often blank	Yes
Los Angeles, CA	Open data	4 days	Yes	Not published	Yes
New Orleans, LA	Open data	~7 days	Yes	Yes	~66%

That table is the product. Every column was measured against live data on 2026-07-29, not copied from a city's documentation, and every "Not published" is a field we checked for and did not find.

Five things worth knowing before you buy:

• Houston requires ZIP codes. Its report needs a search term and cannot be swept city-wide. The run will stop and tell you so rather than quietly returning nothing.
• Austin's valuations are mostly placeholders. The city publishes the field but fills it on roughly 10% of rows, and the median filled value is $1 — clerks typing past a required box. Those rows carry a trade-median estimate flagged valuation_is_estimated: true instead of a one-dollar job. Your minimum-valuation filter never discards a row on an estimated value, so you do not lose real leads to a field the city never really filled in.
• Chicago publishes no job-site ZIP. It publishes contact ZIPs, which are the contact's address, not the job. Mapping those would silently mis-target your ZIP filter, so the field is left empty and Chicago rows are excluded when a ZIP filter is set.
• Houston, Los Angeles, Norfolk and Montgomery County publish no contractor. A blank contractor there means the city does not collect it, not that the homeowner is still shopping — and the score and the call sheet both say so rather than pretending otherwise. Scores are normalized so those cities still reach the same 0–100 band.
• New Orleans runs about a week behind. Raise the lookback window to 10+ days for it, or it returns nothing. The run log names any city that came back empty and tells you why, so you are never left guessing whether a quiet day was real.

A note on why this list is not longer: most "open permit data" is a frozen archive. Sweeping 19 candidate feeds to add the five newest cities here, 12 failed — Dallas's endpoint returns HTTP 200 over data whose newest record is from December 2019, Kansas City stops in 2024, Providence in 2020, and Fort Worth is not a Socrata host at all despite listing a permits dataset. Norfolk's feed contains permits dated five months in the future, which will fool any tool that measures freshness with a plain MAX(date).

None of those are listed here. Be skeptical of any permit tool advertising a large city count — ask which of those cities returned a row this week.

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Output

One row per permit:

{
  "lead_score": 78,
  "trade": "roofing",
  "trades": ["roofing", "remodel"],
  "issued_date": "2026-07-27",
  "valuation": 28000,
  "valuation_is_estimated": false,
  "address": "1234 Beechnut St, Houston TX 77072",
  "zip": "77072",
  "work_description": "REPLACE ROOF STORM DAMAGE",
  "permit_type": "Building Permit",
  "permit_number": "26-0891234",
  "contractor_name": "",
  "contractor_published": false,
  "owner_name": "SMITH JOHN",
  "source_city": "houston_tx",
  "source_url": "https://www.houstonpermittingcenter.org/sold-permits-search",
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-27T13:04:11Z"
}

Export to CSV or Excel, or push straight into your CRM via the Apify API.

Reading lead_score

Score	Meaning
75–100	Call today. Fresh, real money, often no contractor attached yet.
50–74	Worth a call or a mailer this week.
25–49	Marketing list, not a phone list.
0–24	Old, tiny, or missing an address.

contractor_name empty with contractor_published: true means the homeowner pulled the permit themselves and has not hired anyone. If you sell to homeowners, these are your best rows and the score reflects that. If you sell to contractors, flip on Only permits with a named contractor to invert it.

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Recommended setup

Roofing contractor in southwest Houston:

cities:            houston_tx
lookbackDays:      2
trades:            roofing
minValuation:      8000
zipWhitelist:      77072, 77036, 77081, 77074, 77099    <- required for Houston
requireContractor: false
onlyNew:           true

Anywhere else — no ZIPs needed:

cities:            chicago_il, nyc_ny, seattle_wa, los_angeles_ca
lookbackDays:      2
trades:            roofing, hvac
minValuation:      10000
onlyNew:           true

Then Schedule it daily at 6:00 AM. You get that morning's new permits before you leave the yard.

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Pricing

Pay per event. You are charged for new leads actually delivered — not for rows scraped, not for duplicates you already received, not for permits your filters excluded.

That distinction is the whole cost story. Tools that bill per raw row re-bill you for the same permits every single morning; a daily schedule with this actor bills you once per permit, ever.

Worked example. A Houston roofer running the setup above typically sees 8–25 qualifying new roofing permits a day — roughly 240–750 delivered leads over a month of daily runs, or $12–$37/month. Dedicated permit-lead services start around $300/month and run past $2,000. If your average roof job is $14,000, the arithmetic is not close.

Set a max cost per run in the Console and the actor stops cleanly when it reaches your cap — it will never quietly overrun your budget.

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FAQ

Where does this data come from? Public municipal permit records. Building permits are public records by statute.

Is this legal? Yes. The actor reads only public, logged-out pages and never creates an account, never logs in, and never bypasses any access control. It also rate-limits itself so it does not burden city servers.

Why is Houston slower than the other cities? The open-data cities are direct feeds. Houston has no feed — the actor queries the city's reporting system once per ZIP per day, pacing itself between requests. That is also why Houston data is hard to get anywhere else.

Houston returned fewer records than the city says exist. Houston's report format suppresses repeated values on grouped sub-permits at the same site, and those are not recoverable from the output. The run log prints the exact capture rate on every query — typically 75–100%. No other tool reports this, because no other tool covers Houston.

Some valuations look like round numbers. Those are estimates, flagged valuation_is_estimated: true. Many cities leave valuation blank on trade permits, and some — Austin especially — accept 0 or 1 to satisfy a required field. Rather than drop those leads, show $0, or price a roof replacement at one dollar, the actor substitutes a trade median and says so. Your minimum-valuation filter never discards a row on an estimated value.

A permit is classified under the wrong trade. Send the exact work_description and the correct trade. Classification is rule-based and deterministic, so a reported miss becomes a test case and a fix in the next release rather than a shrug.

Can you add my city? Ask. Cities with a live open-data feed can be added quickly. Cities with only a search portal take longer but are usually worth the most — because nobody else bothers.