Building permits are public record — and the earliest signal that a project is about to start. Here are 3 ways to find them, and how to turn them into exclusive leads.
Skip ahead — see live permits →Building permits are public records. You can search your city's building-department portal directly (Seattle SDCI, Chicago Dept. of Buildings, SF DBI), pull the city's open-data API for the full feed, or use a tool like PermitRadar that aggregates those feeds into one filterable, daily-updated list by trade.
Every new build, addition, demolition, and major renovation files a permit before work starts. That makes a fresh permit the earliest public signal of a project — and because the data is public, the leads are exclusive: you're not bidding against 4 other contractors who bought the same shared lead from Angi or HomeAdvisor.
Every city building department lets you look up permits online — e.g. Seattle via SDCI, Chicago via the Department of Buildings, San Francisco via DBI. It's free, but you're searching one record at a time, with no trade filter and no alerts. Fine for a one-off; painful as a lead pipeline.
Most big cities publish permits as open data through Socrata APIs (e.g. data.seattle.gov, data.cityofchicago.org, data.sfgov.org). You get the full feed — but you need to write code to fetch, filter, and de-dupe it, and keep it running daily. Great if you're technical; a non-starter for most contractors.
PermitRadar does Option 2 for you: it pulls each city's live open-data feed daily, filters by trade and project value, and lets you export to CSV or get daily email alerts. You see new projects — address, scope, and value — the day they're filed. Browse the live feed free:
City-specific feeds: Seattle · Chicago · San Francisco
Angi and HomeAdvisor sell the same homeowner request to 3–5 contractors, so you start in a price war. Permit leads come from government records, so they're exclusive — and they catch the project earlier, when you can still win it on value instead of being the cheapest bid.
Yes — cities publish them through building departments and open-data portals, free for anyone to look up. That's what makes them a fair, exclusive lead source.
A tool like PermitRadar that pulls the city's live feed daily, filters by trade and value, and exports — so you see new projects the day they're filed instead of searching one at a time.
Yes. Building permits are public records published through official open-data portals. Using them for business development is completely legal — and common among successful contractors and suppliers.
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