Building permit leads, every Monday, from the city's own records
Cities publish the building permits they issue. I pull the commercial ones each week, filter them, clean them, and send you a spreadsheet. Same machine under every metro: weekly pull from the city's open data, commercial filter, clean and dedupe, CSV + Excel with a cover sheet that states the date range, the row count, and what the source does not contain.
Here's the thing most sellers won't tell you: every city's feed is different. What one city publishes, another one blanks. So each metro gets its own product, priced to what its feed is actually worth — and each page says exactly what that feed does and doesn't include, before you pay.
The two metros so far
| Philadelphia | Chicago | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Contractor activity — who's pulling permits this week, by trade | Full project leads — the project, what it's worth, and who's building it |
| Project address | Not published since March 2020 — blank in every official feed | On 100% of commercial rows |
| Job value | Does not exist in the feed | Reported cost on 74% of commercial rows, median $147,440 |
| Contractors | Contractor name on 88% of commercial rows | Named general contractor on 65% of commercial rows; about 2.9 named contractors per row |
| Typical weekly rows | About 245 | About 90 |
| Filters possible | Trade only | Trade, community area, minimum reported cost |
| First drop | $35 | $45 |
| Four Mondays | $115 | $165 |
| Full Quarter (12 drops) | $315 | $445 |
Why the prices differ
Chicago's feed has the project address, the reported job value, and the contractors on the job. Philadelphia's has contractor names, trades, and counts — no location, no value. The price difference is the data difference, and both pages say so openly. A buyer who reads both learns the feeds differ by city, which is simply true.
What every drop has in common
- Drops go out Monday, covering permits issued the previous Monday to Sunday
- CSV + Excel, with a cover sheet stating the exact date range and row count
- Thin week, thin count — I don't pad lists to hit a number, and I never backfill with old permits or residential rows
- No phone numbers or emails — neither city's feed publishes them, and I don't invent them
- Source named on every cover sheet, so you can check any row against the city's own site
Other metros
Philadelphia and Chicago are the standing weekly pulls. New York is next on the build list. For any other metro, ask before ordering — I'll tell you straight whether that city's data supports a weekly drop and what it includes. If it can't support one, I won't sell it.
Order
Orders go through Fiverr. Start with a single drop — $35 for Philadelphia, $45 for Chicago — and see a real week before you commit to a quarter.
Questions first? [email protected]