A building permit is a clear sign that work is about to start. Someone has a project, a budget and a timeline. For roofers, solar installers, HVAC and pool companies, remodelers, material suppliers and equipment rental businesses, new permits are some of the most targeted leads around.

This guide covers where permit data comes from, why collecting it by hand is painful, and how to pull it from five major US cities with the Building Permits Scraper on Apify.

The problem

Many cities publish permits on open-data portals, but every city uses its own dataset, field names and update schedule. One city calls it "work description," another calls it "permit type," and valuation fields vary in format. Comparing or combining cities means cleaning up each source separately.

The manual way (and why it hurts)

You could visit each city's portal, filter by issue date, export a CSV, and then line up the columns in a spreadsheet. Then you'd search the descriptions for "roof" or "solar" and repeat it all next week.…