Trust
Our data & sources
Every permit in the digest comes from a city's own free public open-data portal. Nothing bought, nothing scraped from private pages, nothing invented. Here is exactly where each city's permits come from — and how fresh each feed is.
Our pledge
- 1We only use free public open data. Every permit is published by the city itself, on its own open-data portal.
- 2Every permit links back to the city's own record. Open any permit in the digest and you can verify it yourself, in seconds.
- 3We show freshness honestly. Weekly or stale — the table below says so, and the dashboard shows the same badge per city.
Sources — 4 cities
Scroll sideways for the full table →
| City | Portal | Freshness | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago, IL | data.cityofchicago.org ↗ | Weekly | 511 permits in the last 7 days (dataset updated Oct 26, 2026). |
| Seattle, WA | cos-data.seattle.gov ↗ | Weekly | 91 permits in the last 7 days (dataset updated Oct 26, 2026). |
| Los Angeles, CA | data.lacity.org ↗ | Weekly | 1118 permits in the last 7 days (dataset updated Oct 26, 2026). |
| Minneapolis, MN | services.arcgis.com ↗ | Weekly | 1017 permits in the last 7 days (dataset updated Oct 30, 2026). |
Portal links go to each dataset's page on the city's open-data portal. Los Angeles publishes no contractor field, and Minneapolis publishes no ZIP (we derive it from the property address) — gaps show as “Not published” rather than a made-up value.
How it's built
- Daily checks of each city's Socrata open-data API — the same API the city publishes for the public.
- Grouped count(*) totals, so the numbers on the landing page and the dashboard always agree.
- Trade tagging by keyword on the permit's own text — type and description — so you only see the jobs you can do.
- Contractor names from the permit's own contact fields (Chicago's general contractor moves between contact slots, so we scan them all).
- A permit is never padded into a list: if there are no new permits in your ZIPs, the digest says so.
What we don't do
- No scraping of private or login-only pages — if a portal isn't open data, we don't use it.
- No bought lists, and no leads sold to five contractors at once.
- No padding lists with old permits to make a slow week look busy.
- No fake values: where a city publishes no valuation, we show “Not published”.
- No selling your email — the digest and account mail only, unsubscribe anytime.
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