Building permit leads in Clay for $8 per 1,000

What you are building

One Clay table that fills itself with permits issued since the last run, one row per permit, with the address, work description, valuation and the contractor on the job. Each run returns only permits you have not received before, so re-running it every morning never charges you twice for the same permit. 1,000 permits cost $8.00 plus a $0.02 start fee per run.

The data comes from US Building Permits API (make_no_mistakes/us-building-permits-scraper on Apify), which reads each city's official open-data portal and normalizes all 16 onto one schema.

Step by step

1. Create an Apify account and copy your API token

1. Sign up at apify.com. The free plan includes a small monthly platform credit, enough to test this recipe on a few hundred permits.
2. In Apify Console, open Settings → API & Integrations and copy your Personal API token.
3. Open the actor page once and run it from the browser with the default input (Austin, last 7 days, 100 permits, about $0.82). That confirms the account works before Clay is involved.
4. Set a sensible Maximum cost per run on the actor. It must be at least $0.02 + $0.008 × the permits you expect, about $4.02 for 500. If it is lower, the run stops early and its status line says so.

2. Connect Apify in Clay

1. In Clay, go to Settings → Connections → Add Connection, choose Apify, paste the token and give the connection a name. (You can also do this the first time you add an Apify column; Clay prompts you to Add account.)
2. Runs started from Clay use your own Apify account, so the per-permit charge lands on your Apify bill. Clay may still count the action against your Clay plan, depending on how your plan meters integrations.

3. Make a small control table: one row per feed

Create a table called Permit feeds with three text columns and one row per city group you want to watch:

Each row is one independent daily feed. The Delta store name is what lets the actor remember what it already sent you for that row, so give every row its own.

4. Add the Run Apify Actor column

1. In the control table, click + Add, search for Apify and choose Run Apify Actor.
2. Pick your Apify connection and the actor make_no_mistakes/us-building-permits-scraper.
3. Paste the input below. Keys stay in quotes. Where you see a column name, insert that column's token with / and do not put quotes around the token itself; Clay fills in the value per row.

{
  "cities": [ /City ],
  "daysBack": 3,
  "maxItems": 500,
  "permitTypes": /Keywords,
  "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
  "deltaStateName": /Delta store
}

If you would rather not use tokens, these are the complete inputs for the two most common feeds, ready to paste as-is. Both validate against the actor's published input schema.

Dialable contractor leads (Austin and Raleigh only). These are the only two of the 16 cities that publish contractor phone numbers (about 92% and 80% of rows). contractorPhoneOnly drops phone-less permits before they are written, so you are never charged for them.

{
  "cities": ["austin", "raleigh"],
  "daysBack": 3,
  "maxItems": 500,
  "permitTypes": "roof, solar, hvac",
  "contractorPhoneOnly": true,
  "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
  "deltaStateName": "clay-austin-raleigh-phones"
}

Everything new in a set of cities (no phone filter). Leave contractorPhoneOnly off for the other 14 cities: with it on they return nothing, because their feeds have no phone column.

{
  "cities": ["chicago", "nashville", "denver", "cincinnati"],
  "daysBack": 3,
  "maxItems": 500,
  "onlyNewSinceLastRun": true,
  "deltaStateName": "clay-midwest-south-feed"
}

5. Run it daily

• Turn off Autoupdate on the Apify column if you only want runs when you ask for them, and re-run the column each morning, or use scheduled runs if your Clay plan includes them.
• Delta mode makes re-runs safe: re-running the same row twice in a day returns nothing new and costs only the $0.02 start fee.
• Prefer to schedule outside Clay? The same input works in an Apify Schedule, n8n or Make; see the actor docs.

6. Fan the permits out into a Permits table

The Apify column returns the run's dataset, a list of permits, into one cell. Click into that cell to see the items, then use Clay's Write to Table to send each list item to a second table, Permits, as its own row. Map the fields like this:

Which cities to target

Counts are real permits per week for the week ending 2026-08-31, after administrative records (garage sales, tent permits and similar) are dropped. Use the slug in cities.

For contractor outreach, start with the cities that name the contractor on nearly every permit: Austin, San Antonio, New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, Baton Rouge, Denver, Nashville and Raleigh. For homeowner-side signals (where work is happening, at what value), Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle still work, but there is no contractor to enrich.

Enrichment waterfall ideas

All of these run on Clay's own providers in the Permits table. We do not supply contact data; the permit is the trigger, Clay does the rest.

Contractor to decision maker

1. Clean the name. A formula column that strips suffixes like "INC", "LLC" and "(RAMCO)" from contractor_name gives better matches.
2. Company domain. Run Clay's company-name-to-domain enrichment on the cleaned name, with the city as a hint. A Google search column on "name + city" is a cheap fallback for small contractors.
3. Decision maker. Find People at the company, filtered to titles like Owner, President, Founder, General Manager, Operations Manager.
4. Contact. Clay's work-email waterfall on the person. For Austin and Raleigh you already have the company phone from the permit.
5. Roll up before you send. Group by contractor so a roofer with 14 permits this week gets one message about all 14, not 14 messages.

Other plays that work with these fields

• Busiest contractors by trade. Filter permitTypes to roof, count permits per contractor per week, and hand the top of the list to a supplier's reps.
• Big jobs for general contractors. Filter Job value above $250,000 in New York, Chicago, Boston or Nashville, then enrich the contractor and the owner LLC.
• Owner LLCs in New York and Chicago. owner_name is often a property-holding company. Enrich the company, not a person, to reach the property manager or developer.
• Installer share by ZIP. Solar permits by installer and ZIP show who is winning a neighborhood, which is a talking point for any agency pitching a solar installer.

Honest comparison with Shovels

Shovels is the permit data provider most GTM teams use inside Clay, connected through Clay's HTTP API column. It is a stronger product in several ways, and you should know which before you pick.

Pick Shovels if your clients are outside these 16 cities, if you need standardized permit categories across markets, contractor-level history and quality metrics, or resident data. Pick this recipe if your clients are in these cities, you mostly need fresh permits and the contractor's name, and you would rather pay about $8 per 1,000 permits than a monthly subscription. Shovels pricing is from shovels.ai/pricing, checked October 3, 2026.

Want to try it on a real client first?