Where does the permit data come from?

Every permit comes from the city of Austin's public open-data portal — the same records the city publishes for anyone. We reproduce them and stamp the vintage.

How often is it updated?

Weekly. Each Monday we pull the trailing 21 days of issued permits, so late-posted permits are still caught.

PermitLeads / methodology

Methodology & sources

The audit trail is the product's defense. Every lead is a public record you can verify, and here's exactly how we get it and what we do to it.

Source data

Permits come from the city of Austin public permit dataset (open-data portal, Socrata SODA endpoint data.austintexas.gov/resource/3syk-w9eu.json…). It's the same record the city publishes for anyone. We add nothing to it; we select, classify, and format it. Permit data current as of 06/13/2026.

Refresh cadence

Every Monday we re-query the trailing 21 days of issued permits and upsert them keyed on the city's permit number. The 21-day window (wider than the 7-day "last week" headline) catches permits the city posts late; per-subscriber dedup guarantees you never see the same permit twice.

How leads are classified

Rules first. Each trade cut has deterministic rules based on the city's own fields — for example, demolition is the city's work_class = Demolition; a reroof is a building permit marked as a repair whose description says the roof is being removed and replaced (solar and fire-damage jobs are excluded). Precision is the priority: a wrong lead wastes your time, so a permit that doesn't clearly match a rule goes to a weekly review bucket, not into your feed.

What we never do

We never invent a value or a contractor. If the city left a field blank, we print "Not listed by the city," never a 0 or a guess.
We never claim a permit is a sale. It's a record that work was approved — what happens next is up to you.
We never editorialize about the businesses named in a record beyond the facts the city filed.

Corrections

Contractor data is reproduced exactly as filed with the city and can contain the city's own errors. If a record about your business is wrong, reply to any email from us and a human will correct or remove it promptly. The fastest permanent fix is with the city, since we mirror their record.