AI Reads Every Building Permit — And Finds The Five Contractors Who'll Pay You For It!

It finds recent US building-permit activity and surfaces the homeowners and projects behind it — people who've formally told their local authority they're about to spend money on their property. Instead of starting from a cold list, you start from a filed, funded, approved project that hasn't been assigned to anybody yet. Then it gives you the machinery to package those into a private batch, sell it to one contractor, and run the postcard campaign that follows.

Every permit is read by AI — the actual scope of work, not just the category — and scored for the other trades that project creates demand for. You get the primary trade plus four or five adjacent ones, each with a confidence score and a written reason.

So "Solar array on existing roof system as per plan" returns electrical at 92% (required — the array can't be energised without an interconnect), roofing at 78% (exposed — nobody arrays over a roof with five years left), battery at 66% (follow-on), and so on. Each one names why, and the relationship type: required by the work, exposed by it, an access window while the trades are already on site, commonly bundled, or a natural follow-on.

That's the difference between a permit list and this. A list tells you a job happened. This tells you which four contractors should be calling that house and what to say to them.

That job, yes — and you should know that going in, because most permit-data products won't tell you. In single-trade replacement work the contractor pulls the permit himself, usually days before the crew arrives. By the time it's public, it's sold.

Which is exactly why the product isn't built around selling that job. A name on the paperwork is a qualifier, not a dead end — it proves the project is real, funded, permitted and about to start. The roofer got the roof. He didn't get the gutters, and gutters are disturbed on nearly every tear-off. The GC got the kitchen remodel; the electrical and plumbing subs aren't named on that permit at all.

You can filter either way — no contractor listed for permits nobody has claimed, or contractor-on-file for confirmed live projects with unclaimed adjacent work. Both lists are useful, for opposite reasons.

Yes, and it's the most useful thing in the app. You can filter to "electrical is a recommended opportunity, confidence over 80%, applied in the last seven days, no contractor listed" — which returns permits that were never categorised as electrical at all.

That's a list an electrician cannot get anywhere else, from any competitor, at any price. It doesn't exist as a category in the public record — it only exists once something has read the descriptions and worked it out.

The property address, the permit number and type, the project description, the filing and issue dates, the permit status, the declared or estimated project value where the authority publishes it, the contractor already on file where one is listed, and the trade the app has classified it under — with a confidence flag when the description was vague.

Fields vary by jurisdiction, because councils publish different things. The app tells you which ones are thin on any given record rather than quietly leaving a blank.

Sources are refreshed daily, and the search screen tells you how current each council's data was when it answered. Freshness is also one of the four factors in the score — this week genuinely beats two months ago, because a homeowner who filed in the spring has usually hired somebody by now.

Permit search is focused on the United States. Coverage spans thousands of US cities across most states, though it varies by jurisdiction because authorities publish differently.

But you don't have to be in America to run this. You can operate the whole business from anywhere — searching, building batches, selling to contractors and posting cards are all done remotely. Plenty of people will run US brokerages from outside the US.

No — and this is worth understanding before you pick a market. Permit availability, detail and refresh speed differ between cities and counties because each authority decides what it publishes and how often. Some give you rich records daily; others are thinner or slower.

The app is upfront about it: every search names the councils that answered, how many rows each gave, and how current that source is. Run a few searches in your intended market before you build a business around it.

It means a committed minimum of five years of platform access from your purchase date, rather than a word that sounds generous and means nothing.

Here's the honest reasoning, because you deserve it rather than a marketing sentence. We've been doing this twelve years, and we still support products well past the five-year mark — that's our actual track record, not a claim I'm making to close you. But five years is a long time in software. Data sources change hands. APIs get deprecated. Privacy and contact law moves. Print providers rewrite their terms. Some of that sits inside our control and a good deal of it doesn't.

So we commit to what we can genuinely stand behind: five years minimum, advance notice if anything changes, and a full export of your account either way. I'd rather under-promise something I can keep than write "forever" and hope you never test it.

Everything you download — the twelve trade kits, the scripts, the templates, the calculator, the guide — is yours permanently regardless of what happens to the platform.

And on the arithmetic: one contractor client, worked properly, returns more in a single year than you'll spend on this in five. The five-year figure is about honesty, not about how long it takes to be worth it.

Postcards, and that's it. 79¢ each through Thanks.io, 89¢ through Lob, paid directly to them on your own account — never marked up by us. On a 25-card batch that's about twenty dollars.

Everything before printing is free to do: search permits, score them, build a shortlist, find contractors, send an offer. The campaign builder deliberately keeps the postcard steps locked until a contractor has accepted, so you never spend on printing for a deal that hasn't closed.

No, and in practice almost nobody does. Print is a line item inside what you charge the contractor, exactly as it is at any direct-mail agency — folded into a setup fee, or covered by the monthly retainer.

Look at the scale of it. A common structure is a $2,000 setup and $397 a month to run the campaign. Print on a batch is twenty to forty dollars. Your contractor is not scrutinising forty dollars inside a four-hundred-dollar retainer that's bringing him jobs — he's asking whether you can take on more of his area.

The batch pricing framework and the trade kits cover how to structure it either way. But it's your business and your call — nothing in the product forces a pricing model on you.

Not on Broker Edition. $397 is one-time and the platform keeps working — three contractor portals, up to 10 contractors a month, three campaigns, your monthly search allowance. The only ongoing costs are printing, which you pay your printer, and data access after the first 45 days as described above.

Pro is genuinely optional. It exists for people who outgrow 10 contractors, not as a wall you eventually hit.

Broker Edition includes full commercial rights — you can absolutely use it to generate and sell leads, run campaigns and build a service business. It also gives you three contractor portals — up to 10 contractors a month, so the contractors you sell to each get their own branded login showing only their jobs.

What it's licensed for is one business — yours. If you want separate sub-accounts for partners, other brands or client agencies to operate independently, that's what the Agency License adds.

Both, and the second is where the real business is. Selling a batch is a transaction. Selling a contractor a monthly campaign — a fresh batch, the cards, the tracking and the replies — is a retainer, and it's the same work you were doing anyway.

The trade kits and the pricing framework cover positioning it either way. Most people start by selling batches and move to managed campaigns once a contractor has bought twice.

Genuinely varies — by trade, by market, by job values in the batch, and by whether you're selling a one-off list or a managed campaign. I'm not going to print a per-lead number here and have you treat it as a forecast.

What you get instead is the batch pricing calculator, which works from the trade and the declared project values in front of you, plus trade-by-trade guidance on what those markets typically support. You set the price. We don't set it and we don't take a cut of it.

No. It surfaces opportunities and gives you the machinery to work them — the search, the scoring, the blurred offer, the cards, the codes, the tracking. Results depend on your offer, your niche, your market, your outreach and your timing, exactly as they would in any business.

Anyone promising you guaranteed appointments from a data product is selling you something else.

Building permits are published by authorities as public record — that's the entire point of the filing. PermitPlus reads what those authorities publish. And the landing page a homeowner reaches after scanning says plainly that the permit is public record, rather than pretending the card arrived by magic. Being open about the source is both the honest approach and, in practice, the one that earns more replies.

The blur. He sees trade, area, job values and how recent each filing is — enough to judge the batch. The homeowner's name, the street, the town, the ZIP and the permit number stay covered until he accepts and you approve the handover. He can't go around you because he can't see who to go around you to.

And if he accepts then goes quiet, withdraw the offer and the leads return to your pool immediately, free to offer elsewhere.

No, and yes. There's nothing to install and nothing to configure — which is precisely why data access is included for the first 45 days rather than making you go and open API accounts before the product does anything.

Training included: the full user guide walking every screen from first search to a homeowner picking up the phone, a first-week plan that gets an offer out inside seven days, all twelve trade kits with phone and email scripts, the cold-call and voicemail scripts, the blur explanation, the batch pricing calculator, a contractor agreement template, and the "your first five contractors" playbook.

Yes. Two payments of $227, thirty days apart. You get full access immediately on the first payment — nothing is held back until the second clears. The split costs $57 more than paying once ($454 versus $397), which is the only difference between the two options. Everything else, including the founding rate lock and lifetime licence, is identical.

Because this is the founding cohort and I want to onboard this group properly, which stops being possible at scale. It isn't a countdown timer dressed up as scarcity — it's the number of people I can give real attention to while the product is this new. When the seats are gone the price goes to $497 and the monthly to $67.