Every job leaves a paper trail.
We read it first.
PermitFeed reads Southern California's building permits overnight and hands your trade the ones worth a phone call, scored and explained, by sunrise.
The good work almost never comes off the bid board. By the time a project is posted for bids, the walkthroughs have happened, the shortlist is written, and eight bidders are sharpening the same pencil. All that is left to compete on is price, because the timing was public and everyone got it at once.
The contractors who win get there earlier. They call while plans are still warm, while the scope can still move, while a relationship can still matter. Getting there early is not a talent. It is an information problem, and it has a paper trail.
Nearly every commercial project announces itself weeks or months before anyone advertises it. A permit gets filed at city hall, on the public record, carrying an address, a scope, and a declared value. The intent is right there in black and white, months before the invitation to bid goes out.
The catch is that "public" does not mean "readable." Southern California files through separate city portals, each with its own system, its own export quirks, and its own idea of what a description field is for. One or two are still 1990s-era systems, because that is what the city runs. Reading all of them every night, and knowing which handful of lines matter to a fire protection contractor and which matter to a glazier, is a full-time job nobody staffs.
Between the late news and your first coffee, PermitFeed sweeps every city on the coverage list, collects each new filing, and reads it. Not keyword-matches. Reads. Every filing is scored against what each of eighteen trades actually sells, and the few that clear the bar arrive with a written explanation of why they matter and how to open the conversation. By the time your competitors are pouring coffee, the morning's calls are already ranked on your board.
If a source breaks in the night, it gets flagged that same night rather than quietly skipped, and the city says so on the coverage page. A gap you can see is worth more than a number that never moves.
A keyword alert treats a permit like a haystack and your trade like the word "needle." The same filing means different things to different desks, and a system that cannot tell the difference wastes your morning proving it.
That difference is the product. A restaurant conversion is a strong morning for the mechanical contractor and the fire protection desk, and a wasted dial for the roofer. PermitFeed holds a separate bar for every trade it covers, so a high score in your feed means high for you, not high in general.
Every qualified lead arrives with the reason it matters and a way into the conversation, written in plain words. The research is done before you knew to ask.
When a lead deserves an hour instead of a minute, Deep Research builds the full file: the property's history, the players, and where your scope fits.
Pipeline, instant alerts, saved searches, exports that land clean in your CRM, and seats for the crew that you add and retire yourself. The lead is the start; the desk is the point.
Southern California first, block by block, done properly. Thin national coverage sells better than it works. We chose the version that works.
Every lead traces to a public filing you can verify. The counters on this site are live counts from the working database, not marketing rounding.
Sheets, marks, and stamps, because our users read plans for a living. Software should speak the language of the people it works for.
The habit that reads permits at night also writes up what the record turns out to say. That goes in Field Notes: what a code line, an ordinance, or a fifty-year-old specification is quietly doing to somebody's scope right now. No pitch in them. It is the same reading, published, and it is the fairest test of whether we are worth your morning.
Cedar gone grey: what a Bungalow Heaven reroof is allowed to be
The statute governing what goes back on a Craftsman bungalow keys to a five-year weathering test, and the shake that passes it is not the shake that came off.
Open note →What Uptown Whittier learned at 7:42 a.m.: the 1987 quake and the brick buildings still waiting for a retrofit
That morning became a landmark lesson in why unreinforced masonry fails, and thousands of those buildings across Southern California are still standing, still vulnerable, and still waiting on the retrofit the quake proved they need.
Open note →Five hours a day, seven days a week: who holds the switch on your customer's battery
The state pays two dollars for a kilowatt-hour at the hour it picks, and the discharge decision belongs to the aggregator. ELRP A.4 enrollment ends December 31, 2027.
Open note →212 nanometres: the smoke below what MERV 13 measures
California requires MERV 13 and the filter test stops at 300 nanometres, while wildfire smoke peaks by count at 212. The gap is the whole story.
Open note →These numbers are pulled from the working database the moment you loaded this page.
PERMITS TRACKED59
CITIES NIGHTLY5,381
QUALIFIED · 90 DAYS
PermitFeed is a small shop, and it runs like one of the good ones: the pipeline runs every night, the operator reads the run report every morning, and problems get fixed the day they appear. Prices are posted on the pricing page instead of behind a demo call. Plans run month to month and you cancel from your own account, with no save-the-sale phone call in the way. Six-month and annual terms are discounted, and if you change your mind inside the first thirty days of one, the days you used are billed at the monthly rate and the rest comes back. The product earns the next month or it does not.
What we will not do: pad coverage we cannot stand behind, invent testimonials, or show you a number we cannot trace to a public record. The trades run on reputation. So do we.
"You're reading city hall's filings. Is that even allowed?"
RESPONSE: Permits are public records; publishing them is the whole idea. Public has just never meant convenient. We read what anyone could read, faster than anyone can.
"What stops you selling the same lead to the guy across town?"
RESPONSE: Nothing does, and any service that tells you otherwise is selling you a story about a public record. What actually decides it is who calls first and what they know walking in. That is the part we work on: you get the filing the morning after it posts, with the scope already read and the angle already written. Exclusivity on a public document was never the advantage. The head start is.
See what filed in your cities last night.
Seven days free. No card to start. Your trade, your patch, tomorrow at sunrise.