How to track a competitor's building permits (alerts in under 5 minutes)

Every building permit is a public announcement: this company just won this job, at this address, for roughly this much money. Most contractors never read those announcements. The ones who do know exactly which neighborhoods their competitors are working, what they're charging, and which homeowners just became warm prospects for a follow-up trade.

This guide shows three ways to get notified every time a specific company pulls a permit — from a free email digest to a real-time push into your CRM.

Why you'd want this

• Canvass the same street. A competitor's roofing permit means a homeowner nearby just saw a crew, a dumpster, and a yard sign. Their neighbors are primed.
• Spot pricing and volume trends. Permit valuations and counts tell you whether a rival is growing, shrinking, or moving upmarket.
• Follow a builder you sub for. Alerts on a GC you work with means you see their new projects the week they're filed.
• Win orphaned customers. When an installer exits a market, their install base needs service. (Solar has a dedicated query for this — see below.)

Option 1: Free email digest (no code)

On the PermitStack search page, type the company's name into the Contractor filter — optionally narrow by city or category — and click Save Search. Pick daily or weekly, and every new permit that company pulls lands in your inbox. Matching is case-insensitive and partial, so abc roofing finds "ABC ROOFING LLC". This works on the free plan.

Option 2: Real-time webhook (for CRMs and apps)

On the Developer plan ($49/mo) and above, register a webhook with a contractor_name filter and PermitStack POSTs a signed JSON payload to your endpoint within about a minute of a matching permit landing in our data:

curl -X POST "https://api.permit-stack.com/v1/webhooks" \
  -H "X-API-Key: pk_your_key" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://your-crm.com/hooks/permits", "contractor_name": "ABC Roofing"}'

Every payload includes the contractor of record, the address, the work description, and the permit value. If you use GoHighLevel, Zapier, Make, or n8n, the CRM integration guide walks through wiring this into a pipeline with no custom code.

Option 3: The orphan-recovery play (solar)

For solar specifically, GET /v1/plays/orphan-recovery?installer=... returns every PV permit a named installer filed in a territory — their entire local install base. When an installer folds or gets acquired, those systems still need service, repowers, and battery retrofits. Any play can also be saved as a recurring email digest.

An honest note on coverage

Contractor names come from the permit record, and not every jurisdiction publishes them — across our data, a bit under half of permits have a linked contractor, and the share varies a lot by city. Alerts fire on what's actually in the record, so a competitor working mostly in cities that don't publish contractor names will be underrepresented. Check the coverage page for the jurisdictions you care about; our data-quality labeling is deliberately blunt about this kind of thing.

Bonus: see who dominates a market before you pick a target

Not sure which competitor to watch? Two places to start: contractor profiles rank companies by permit volume, work mix, and cities served, and per-ZIP activity reports show recent permit volume and replacement-age housing stock for every ZIP where an exclusive lead territory is open.