Construction Permit Leads — Trade-Scored Building Permit Monitor

Get new building permits, classified by trade and scored as sales leads, delivered every morning.

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

---

Why this instead of a raw permit dump

Most permit tools hand you a spreadsheet of every record the city published and leave you to sort it. That is not a lead list, it is homework.

This actor does four things to each permit before you see it:

Classifies the trade	Reads the work description and tags it roofing, hvac, plumbing, electrical, foundation, remodel, new_construction, solar, pool, demolition, fence_deck. Handles the messy real strings — REPLACE ROOF STORM DAMAGE, RE-ROOF, ROOF OVER EXISTING all resolve to roofing.
Scores the lead 0–100	Weighted heavily toward freshness, because a three-day-old permit already has four competitors calling it. Job value, whether a contractor is already attached, and address quality also factor in.
Filters to your business	Your trades, your ZIP codes, your minimum job size.
Remembers what it already sent you	Run it daily and you get only today's new permits — never the same row twice.

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

---

Coverage

Every city below was queried live on 2026-07-28 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	—	Yes
Chicago, IL	Open data	1 day	Yes	Yes	No
New York City, NY	Open data	1 day	Yes	Yes	Yes
Austin, TX	Open data	1 day	Estimated	Yes	Yes
Seattle, WA	Open data	3 days	Yes	Sparse	Yes
Los Angeles, CA	Open data	3 days	Yes	—	Yes

Three caveats worth knowing before you buy:

• Austin publishes no valuation column at all. Every Austin row carries a trade-median estimate flagged valuation_is_estimated: true. Your minimum-valuation filter never discards a row on an estimated value, so you do not lose real leads to a blank field.
• 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 has no data feed whatsoever. The City stopped publishing Permit Activity Reports on 2025-12-01 and now exposes permits only through an interactive search. That is exactly why Houston data is hard to find anywhere else.

A note on why this list is short: many well-known "open permit datasets" are frozen archives. Dallas's endpoint returns HTTP 200 and looks healthy — its newest record is from December 2019. San Francisco's building-permits feed is a contacts table with no addresses or descriptions. Neither is listed here, because a run that finds nothing is worse than a city that is missing.

Output

One row per permit:

{
  "lead_score": 78,
  "trade": "roofing",
  "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": "",
  "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 is empty 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.

---

Recommended setup

Roofing contractor in southwest Houston:

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

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

---

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.

Worked example. A Houston roofer running daily with the setup above typically sees 8–25 qualifying new roofing permits per day. At the per-lead event price shown on this listing, a full month of daily runs bills for roughly 240–750 delivered leads. 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.

---

FAQ

Where does this data come from? Public municipal permit records. Building permits are public records in Texas 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 Austin? Austin is a direct data feed. Houston has no feed at all — the actor has to drive the city's search portal in a real browser. Expect a Houston run to take a few minutes. That is also why Houston data is hard to get anywhere else.

Some valuations look like round numbers. Those are estimates, and they are marked valuation_is_estimated: true. Austin publishes no valuation field, and many cities leave it blank on trade permits. Rather than drop those leads or show $0, the actor fills in a trade median. Your minimum-valuation filter never discards a row on an estimated value, so you do not lose real leads to a blank field.

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 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 the ones worth the most, because nobody else bothers.