Guides, tutorials, and insights on building with permit data.
We measured valuation, contractor, filing date and issue date across the largest U.S. building permit sources. Few publish all four. What that means before you buy or build on any permit dataset.
Read more →Median permit turnaround by trade, measured on real permits: mechanical and HVAC work clears in about a week, new construction takes months. The spread, and what it means for lead timing.
Read more →Accela Citizen Access, Tyler EnerGov and CentralSquare Click2Gov publish permits through portals, not APIs. How PermitStack normalizes those jurisdictions into one REST API, each labelled with its data-through date.
Read more →Get an email or webhook the moment a named contractor pulls a permit, anywhere in our coverage. Free email digests, webhooks with CRM delivery on Developer and up, and the solar orphan-recovery play.
Read more →Permit API or Bulk Data Export? They solve different jobs, and picking the right one takes two minutes. A plain-English guide matched to what you're actually trying to do, with a quick decision table.
Read more →Does a building permit include the owner's name? Usually not. What's actually in permit data, why owner contact info is a separate and harder dataset, and how to get each one.
Read more →Every issued building permit is a homeowner spending money on their property right now — with the address, scope, date, and owner of record attached. Here's why permits are such a strong buying signal, the three ways to get them, and how to turn them into booked jobs.
Read more →A filed roof permit is a homeowner actively investing in their roof — a first-party, public-record lead, not a resold aggregator contact. How to use roof and re-roof permits as a lead source, work storm-season timing, and reach the owner of record.
Read more →A door-to-door playbook: use permit data to find homes that just pulled a solar, roof, or pool permit, cut a territory on a map, and knock the neighbors of every fresh install — with the owner of record and contractor on each record.
Read more →A two-week-old permit is a cold lead. Here's how to get new and changed permits as soon as they are ingested — webhooks vs polling, the /v1/permits/events delta feed, and piping permits into your CRM or Zapier. Plus why Shovels.ai documents no webhooks and SignedOff covers only ~44 jurisdictions.
Read more →Most permit data vendors hide pricing behind a "contact sales" form. Here's an honest, dated breakdown of what building permit data actually costs in 2026 — PermitStack's published $29–$499 ladder and free tier versus Shovels.ai's published ~$599 paid floor and the quote-only incumbents.
Read more →Roof age is one of the most predictive variables in property underwriting — and permits give a hard, dated roof-replacement signal by address, refreshed nightly for most sources and years fresher than aerial imagery. How it works, where it wins, and where it has honest gaps.
Read more →If you sell solar installations and you're still buying $80-$150 leads from aggregators, you're paying for prospects who already said yes to seven other contractors. Here's the playbook for using building permit data to find homeowners before your competitors do — including the four-step lead-gen workflow and real CAC math.
Read more →Building permit data has been locked away in thousands of municipal portals. Here's how to access 117M+ permits across 8,000+ U.S. cities in 48 states and DC through a single API — with Python, JavaScript, and curl examples.
Read more →Solar companies spend thousands on leads. Building permit data shows you exactly which homeowners just installed panels or filed roofing permits — the highest-intent prospects in the market.
Read more →Permit data is the earliest public signal of construction activity — often weeks before work begins. Here's how investors use it to spot emerging neighborhoods and renovation waves.
Read more →Before hiring a contractor, check their track record. PermitStack's contractor search lets you see permit history, project types, and activity across multiple cities programmatically.
Read more →Both provide building permit data via API, but they serve different markets. Here's an honest comparison of coverage, pricing, features, and developer experience.
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