PermitRooster

Overview

PermitRooster sends local contractors the new building permits in their area every morning, sorted for their trade. A landscaper gets the new homes and pools, a gutter company gets the new homes and additions, and every permit says why it fits that trade. It starts in Nashville and Davidson County.

Challenge

A building permit means a homeowner is about to spend real money, and the first contractor who shows up usually gets the job. Cities publish every permit for free, but in raw open-data feeds nobody in the trades has time to dig through. Meanwhile paid lead sites sell the same homeowner to several contractors at once.

Solution

Every morning PermitRooster pulls the city’s public permit records, reads what’s being built, and matches each permit to the trades that will want it: new homes to landscaping, gutters, blinds and fences; new pools to fences and landscaping; teardowns as an early sign a new home is coming. Contractors pick a trade and their ZIP codes. Before building it, I scanned the free Socrata and ArcGIS open-data portals and found 69 US and Canadian cities and counties whose permit feeds passed a daily freshness check, so the same approach can follow demand to new cities. A daily job is watching those feeds for two weeks to see which stay reliable.

Current status

In development. permitrooster.com is live with a working lookup of real Nashville permits, refreshed every morning, and free-trial signups are open. The daily 7 AM email is being built next.

Vision

A morning head start for every contractor in every city that publishes its permits, without buying shared leads.