A building permit is a public record that someone is about to spend money on a building. For a roofer, a solar installer or a materials supplier, that is a lead with a date, an address and a budget attached - and it is published by the city itself, for free, before the work starts.
A purchased contact list tells you who exists. A permit tells you who has just committed to a project, what kind, and roughly what it is worth. The timing is the whole value: a permit issued on Monday is a job that has not been quoted yet, while the same project reaches a list broker months later, if at all.
It is also a cleaner way to prospect. Cities publish permits as open data precisely so they can be used, so nothing here depends on scraping a site that would rather you didn't, and the records are about projects and contractor businesses, not private people.
Useful fields, in the order they matter for sales: the permit type and description (is this your trade?), the estimated valuation (is it worth your time?), the issue date (how fresh?), the address and coordinates (is it in your area?), and the contractor business that pulled it - which maps your competitors as much as your prospects.
Every city publishes differently. Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle and New York each have their own open-data endpoint, their own field names and their own idea of what a permit type is called. Checking five portals by hand every morning is the part nobody keeps doing after week three, and a re-download tells you nothing about what is new since yesterday.
Building Permit Monitor reads all five cities' official open-data APIs, filters on your trade's keywords, permit types and a minimum project valuation, and remembers what it already reported - so a daily schedule stays quiet until a permit you care about is actually issued, rather than handing you last week's list again.
roof and
reroof in one city, daily.solar and
photovoltaic - every hit also shows which contractor won
the job.Coverage is five US cities today - Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle and New York City - and the output carries the contractor business but never the homeowner or applicant, so it is safe to put in a CRM. How that guarantee is enforced.