← All posts · May 10, 2026 · 6 min read

How to find home builders pulling permits in your county

If you sell into new single-family construction — lumber, roofing, HVAC, plumbing, concrete, paint, flooring, doors and windows, or any related trade — your sales cycle starts when a builder pulls a permit. Get there early, and you're bidding on the next 50 homes. Get there late, and the trim contractor is already in your seat.

This post walks through the practical question that comes up almost every week in trade-sales conversations: how do I actually find which builders are pulling permits in my county, right now? No abstractions — just the data sources, the filters, and the pitfalls.

The four data sources you actually have

There are four real sources for residential permit information in the US. Each has tradeoffs:

1. US Census Bureau Building Permits Survey (BPS)

The authoritative aggregate. Every US county reports monthly — 1-unit, 2-unit, 3-4 unit, 5+ unit categories. It's free, public, and reliable, but it's county-month aggregate only. No individual builder names, no addresses, no permit numbers. Use this to know how active a county is, but not who specifically to call.

2. County permit portal feeds

Some counties (especially larger ones running Accela or ArcGIS) publish per-permit records — date issued, address, declared value, contractor of record. Hillsborough, FL is a strong example: their county ArcGIS endpoint has every residential permit with the licensed contractor attached.

The catch: every county has a different portal, different schema, different API or sometimes no API at all. You can scrape one county and feel productive, then realize the next 67 counties in your service area each need their own scraper.

3. State contractor-license registries

Most states publish their licensed-contractor database. Florida's DBPR registry is the cleanest — 140,000+ active licenses with company name, license number, qualifier, primary address, and license type (CGC, CRC, CBC, etc.). You can match a contractor name from a permit to a full company record, which gives you the address and phone to actually reach out.

Without this, "Lennar Homes, LLC" on a permit is just a string. With this, you know it's CGC1517613, based in Miami, and you can pick up the phone.

4. New-home aggregators (Zonda, Hanley Wood, NewHomeSource)

These are the paid alternatives. They license MLS data plus their own builder relationships, so they have sold-vs-unsold lot status and pricing that public records can't give you. They also cost $15,000–$30,000 per market per year, which puts them out of reach for most trade contractors.

The real question isn't "which source is best" — it's "which combination gets me to a usable call list this week, without quitting my day job."

How to combine these into a usable workflow

The cleanest minimum-viable workflow for a trade operator looks like this:

1. Start with BPS to find your high-volume counties. Filter to the counties inside your drive-time service area where 1-4 unit residential is actively being permitted. This narrows your hunting ground from 3,000 counties to maybe 5-20.
2. Use county permit portals for the per-permit detail. For each priority county, find the public permits search (Accela, ArcGIS, or a custom CMS) and pull contractor names from the last 90 days.
3. Cross-reference contractor names against the state license database. Look up each name in DBPR (Florida) or the equivalent — you'll get the company address, phone, and license history. That's your call list.
4. Sort the call list by recent permit volume. A builder with 20 permits in the last 90 days is your priority. A builder with 1 permit is interesting but lower urgency.
5. Track outreach and follow-ups. The hardest part isn't finding the builders — it's not losing them in your inbox.

The common mistakes

Filtering only by company name keyword. "Lennar Homes Tampa LLC" and "Lennar Homes Florida LLC" are two different licensed entities owned by the same parent. If your sales workflow treats them as separate accounts, you'll have two BAMs calling the same buyer. Normalize by canonical brand name (strip "Tampa", "Florida", "Inc", "LLC").

Ignoring license type. A CRC (Certified Residential Contractor) license is for residential builds. CGC (Certified General) covers both. CFC, CAC, CCC are trade licenses (plumbing, AC, etc.). Filter to GC + residential types to find actual home builders, not the HVAC subs.

Treating one permit as one home. Some permits are "applicable to multi-unit" — a permit for a 4-unit attached row gets 4× the dwelling-unit count. The Census BPS "units" field handles this correctly; raw permit-portal data often doesn't.

Confusing issued vs CO. "Issued" is when the permit was approved (start of cycle). "CO" is certificate of occupancy (end of cycle). Roofers care about issued (you're 4-6 weeks out from a roof going on). Foundation contractors care about issued too. Final-touch trades like flooring care about CO — different lag times. Filter accordingly.

Or skip all of that

PermitFocus does this entire workflow for every US county, every week, automatically. We pull from US Census BPS, county ArcGIS feeds, and the DBPR registry, normalize the data, deduplicate by canonical builder, and rank the builders in your subscribed states by trade-fit and recent permit-pull velocity. You see a prioritized list. You make calls.

You can see a live sample report for Hillsborough County with no signup. Or browse any of the 3,022 US counties we track directly.