Building permit leads for contractors and home services
A permit is the first public record that money is committed to a property. Before the dumpster arrives, before the neighbors notice, the filing is sitting in a county system naming the property, the work, and usually the contractor of record. For roofing, HVAC, electrical, plumbing, solar, security, and restoration teams, that filing is the earliest moment a rep can act.
Recordpipe builds building permit leads for contractors as a working feed, not a research tool. You define the trades and territories; the pipeline collects new filings across your counties, filters them to your work, and delivers ranked rows into your CRM. A reroof permit two streets from an active job is a same-week door knock. A pool permit is a fence, electrical, and landscaping lead. A new-construction permit is every trade at once. The feed's job is to put those in front of the right rep while the project is still deciding.
Commercial permit data for building products, solar, and finance
The same records work upstream of the trades. Commercial permits expose projects at the stage where specifications, suppliers, and financing are still open:
- Building-products distributors can target permits by work class and declared valuation band to find projects that will buy material in volume.
- Solar sales teams can work both sides — new construction where solar can be designed in, and commercial reroofs where it rides along.
- Equipment finance and construction lenders can read permit activity as demand: the contractor of record on a growing permit count is a borrower about to need machines and working capital.
- Commercial insurance agents can treat major renovation permits as re-quote events — the building changing means the coverage should.
One pipeline can serve all of these as separate filtered views, each team seeing only its slice.
One schema across every county you sell in
Permit data's dirty secret is that no two jurisdictions publish it the same way. Field names differ, work classifications differ, formats differ, and cadence differs — some sources move daily, others in batches. Reconciling that by hand across a real sales territory is a full-time job that never ends, which is why most teams either work one county or give up.
The pipeline does the reconciliation. Every jurisdiction in your territory lands in one schema: same field names, same type classifications, same status vocabulary, whether the row came from a big-city system or a rural clerk's batch file. Deliveries arrive daily where counties publish daily and as weekly rollups where they do not, with each row carrying its source publication date. Adding a county later is a scope change, not a rebuild.
From permit record to ranked, CRM-ready lead
A permit record is not yet a lead. The AI analysis layer closes that gap: it classifies free-text work descriptions into your trade categories, flags the signals you care about — valuation class, owner-pulled versus contractor-pulled, remodel versus new construction — and scores every row against the profile of jobs you actually win. Rows that clear your bar are pushed by webhook or API into your CRM, already assigned to the right territory; the rest never waste a rep's morning.
The infrastructure behind this processes over one million public records nightly, but your feed is scoped individually: your counties, your trades, your thresholds, your field schema. Scoping is $500, credited, and delivers a sample built from your own counties within 5 business days, so you see real rows before committing to a contract, which is fixed-price from $5,000.
What a delivery looks like
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| permit_number | Jurisdiction's permit identifier |
| issue_date | Date the permit was issued or filed, as published |
| permit_type | Normalized class — building, electrical, mechanical, plumbing, solar, demolition |
| work_description | Free-text scope from the filing, plus AI-classified trade category |
| valuation_class | Declared project value band, where the jurisdiction publishes it |
| property_address | Site address of the permitted work |
| owner_name | Property owner as published in the record |
| contractor_of_record | Licensed contractor named on the permit, where published |
| status | Applied, issued, finaled — normalized across jurisdictions |
| fit_score | AI ranking against the jobs you have defined as your target |