Building permits are public records, but "public" does not mean "easy to use." Every city and county runs its own permitting system, publishes data in its own format, and uses its own labels for the same kinds of work. If you need permit data for a single town, you can usually get it by hand. If you need it for many jurisdictions — or you need it to stay current — the work compounds fast. Here are the four practical ways to get building permit data, and when each one makes sense.
1. Pull it from the jurisdiction's permit portal
Most mid-size and large jurisdictions run an online permitting portal (Accela, Tyler EnerGov, OpenGov, CityView, and others). You can search recent permits, and many portals let you export results to CSV or offer an open-data page.
Best for: a one-time look at a single city or county. Watch out for: export caps, inconsistent fields between portals, and the fact that "issued date" in one system means something different in another.
2. File a public-records request
If a portal does not expose what you need, you can request the records directly. In Florida, for example, the state's broad public-records law means agencies routinely fulfill requests for permit extracts, sometimes as a database dump.
Best for: deep history or fields not shown online. Watch out for: turnaround time, occasional fees, and receiving a raw export you still have to clean.
3. Scrape the portals yourself
When you need many jurisdictions on a schedule, teams often build scrapers. This works, but each portal is a separate integration that breaks when the site changes. You also inherit the data-quality problem: deduplication, address normalization, mapping dozens of local trade labels to a common taxonomy, and parsing dates that arrive in a half-dozen formats.
Best for: engineering teams with time to maintain pipelines. Watch out for: ongoing maintenance — the cost is not building it once, it's keeping it running.
4. Buy an aggregated, normalized dataset
The fourth option is to skip the collection problem entirely and buy a dataset that has already been gathered, deduplicated, and standardized into one schema. That is what PermitData does: permits, inspections, violations, and stop-work orders from hundreds of municipal sources, normalized so a roofing permit in Hillsborough County lines up field-for-field with one in Miami-Dade.
Best for: anyone who wants analysis-ready data without owning the plumbing. Watch out for: confirming coverage for the exact counties you need — which you can do in one message.
Which should you choose?
If you need one city, once, use the portal. If you need uncommon fields or deep history for one place, file a records request. If you have an engineering team and a long-term need across many jurisdictions, scraping can pay off. But if you want consistent, current data across counties without maintaining anything, an aggregated dataset is almost always faster and cheaper than it looks.
You can preview the exact data we deliver in the free Florida live demo, browse coverage by county and trade, or request a quote for your scope. Common questions are answered in the FAQ.