How to Find Building Permit Data (Texas + Beyond)

Building permit data sits in plain sight, but it's spread across hundreds of city portals, each with its own search UI, its own field names, and its own definition of "recent." This guide walks through where the data actually lives, how to search it, and how to stitch a clean lead list together from sources that were never built to talk to each other.

Step 1: Know the four major portal vendors

Most US municipalities don't build their own permit software. They license one of four platforms. Once you recognize the platform, you know roughly how the search works:

• Tyler Technologies EnerGov — clean, modern UI. Used by McKinney, Frisco, Plano, Allen, Prosper, Celina, and many North DFW cities.
• Accela Citizen Access — older, complex. Used by Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Garland, Irving, and many Houston-area cities.
• OpenGov / ViewPoint Cloud — mid-modern. Spotty in Texas, common in California and Pacific Northwest.
• SmartGov / CitizenServe / eTRAKiT — smaller vendors used by mid-size cities. UI varies city-to-city.

Step 2: Find the right URL

Searching "[city name] building permits" almost always gets you to the right portal. Bookmark the URL — every Texas city's URL stays stable for years. If you find a portal URL that returns search results, you've cleared the first hurdle.

Watch for portals that hide behind a captcha or require account creation. Captchas are the city's anti-scraping measure; they're a hassle but they don't change your rights. Account creation is rare in Texas — most cities expose permit search anonymously.

Step 3: Search by date range, not by address

If you're prospecting, you want every permit in the last N days, not a specific address. On most portals, leave the address field blank, set a date range, and (optionally) filter by permit type. Common useful filters:

• Date filed (more useful than "date issued" — catches permits even before they're approved)
• Permit type or work class (e.g., "Re-Roof", "Mechanical", "Pool/Spa")
• Status (Issued, Applied, Final — "Issued" is the standard ready-to-work signal)
• ZIP code or council district (if your service area is sub-city)

Step 4: Export, or write down the URL pattern

A handful of portals let you export search results to CSV. Most don't. If you're doing this manually, copy the URL — most portals encode the search parameters in the URL, which means you can re-run the search next week with one click.

If you want every permit, every week, the manual approach falls apart around 3-4 cities. That's when most contractors either hire a virtual assistant or subscribe to a permit data service.

Step 5: Cross-reference with property data

A raw permit isn't a lead until you know something about the owner. In Texas, the county appraisal district (CAD) has the property's owner of record, mailing address, market value, and improvement details. Collin CAD, Dallas CAD, Tarrant CAD, Harris CAD, Travis CAD — each has a public search.

Permit + parcel match is the difference between "123 Main St pulled a roof permit" and "the owner of 123 Main St, current mailing address 456 Park Ave, $725k home, pulled a roof permit." RafterIQ does this match automatically on Collin County, with other CADs rolling out through 2026.

Step 6: Tag by trade

Permits aren't tagged by trade out of the box. A "Building" permit at $40,000 could be a re-roof, an addition, or a kitchen remodel — the work description tells you, but only if you read it. Auto-tagging takes a permit's type, description, contractor name, and value and assigns one or more trade tags: Roof, HVAC, Solar, Pool, Plumbing, etc. You can do this with rules + a couple hundred lines of code, or you can let a service do it.

Shortcuts

Most contractors who try the do-it-yourself approach get about 60 days in before the volume kills the workflow. At that point you have three options:

1. Hire a virtual assistant to pull and clean permits weekly (~$300-500/mo)
2. Build your own pipeline (a developer can wire this in a few weeks for $5-15k upfront)
3. Subscribe to a permit data service (RafterIQ Starter is $99/mo for Texas)

Bottom line

Permit data is genuinely public and genuinely findable — but volume, tagging, and cross-referencing are where most prospecting attempts fail. Decide early how much of the work you want to do yourself, and pick the right tool for that.