How to use Austin building permit data to find customers
Austin publishes every issued construction permit as open data. How contractors can query it by ZIP, what reroof, pool, fence and new-build permits tell you, the traps in the data, and the shortcut.
The City of Austin publishes every construction permit it issues as open data, updated daily, free to anyone. For a contractor it is a record of who just built, who just added a pool, and who has not touched their roof in decades. Here is how to use it, what we learned building a ranking on top of it, and the traps.
Where the data is
The dataset is “Issued Construction Permits” on data.austintexas.gov (id 3syk-w9eu). It has a Socrata API you can filter in the URL. For example, residential permits issued in 78704 since 2025:
https://data.austintexas.gov/resource/3syk-w9eu.json?$where=original_zip='78704' AND issue_date >= '2025-01-01'&$limit=1000
The fields that matter: issue_date, work_class (New, Addition, Remodel…), permit_type_desc, permit_class_mapped (residential or commercial) and the free-text description, which is where the real information lives.
What each kind of permit tells you
- New home: landscaping, sod, gutters, fencing and window work follow within a year or two.
- New pool: a fence or barrier, pavers or decking, and landscaping. In 78704, 270 homes have a recent pool permit.
- Reroof: the moment for a solar installer — 285 homes in 78704 reroofed recently with no solar permit.
- No reroof for decades: a weak roofing signal, because only about 7% of 78704 homes have any reroof permit on record. Combine it with hail reports before acting on it.
The traps we hit
- Descriptions are inconsistent. “Fence” shows up in pool-barrier text; “demo” covers a kitchen wall as often as a whole house. Classify from the text and check your rules against a few hundred real rows.
- Commercial and residential share the dataset. Filter on
permit_class_mapped, then drop anything that is not a dwelling. - Addresses need normalising. “W”, “West” and unit numbers split one house into several; key on a cleaned street line plus ZIP.
- Absence is not evidence of age. State the record (“no reroof permit since 1997”), never the conclusion.
xwdj-i9he) and NOAA hail reports. One record is a hint; two independent records agreeing is a lead.The shortcut
We do this for 78704 every week — permits, 311, hail and aerial imagery — and rank every home for 15 trades. The ranked list is public on Find customers; a free account reveals three homes with address, owner of record and an aerial photo.
Common questions
Where is Austin’s building permit data?
On data.austintexas.gov as “Issued Construction Permits” (3syk-w9eu), with an API filterable by ZIP and date.
Which Austin permits are useful for finding customers?
New homes, new pools, recent reroofs without solar, and — weakly — long gaps since the last reroof.
What are the traps in permit data?
Inconsistent descriptions, mixed commercial and residential rows, unnormalised addresses, and unpermitted work.
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