How to look up a building permit in Austin, and find the contractor's phone on it

The City of Austin publishes every permit it issues, every day, with the contractor and in most cases a phone number. The difficulty is volume: the feed is mostly water heaters and fences, and the records that matter to a commercial reader are a few hundred a month inside it. Here is where the feed lives, what each field means, and how to find the records worth a call.

Where the permits live

The City of Austin's Development Services Department issues permits through Austin Build + Connect (AB+C), the portal where applicants file. Two public surfaces come off it:

• The public search on AB+C. Search by address, permit number or applicant. One record at a time, with the plan review history, inspections and the people on the application. Good for one address; useless for "what filed this week".
• The open data portal. The dataset called Issued Construction Permits (dataset id 3syk-w9eu on data.austintexas.gov) is the whole feed: building, electrical, mechanical and plumbing permits, each with the issue date, address, council district, description of work, square footage, valuation and the contractor. It refreshes daily and it is free to download or query.

Groundbreak reads the open data feed every morning and the land-use cases alongside it. Every Austin permit on the site links back to its row in the city's dataset.

What the record carries

A City of Austin permit row has more on it than most cities publish. The fields worth reading:

• Permit type and class. Building (BP), electrical (EP), mechanical (MP), plumbing (PP). A new commercial building shows up as a BP with a work class of New; a tenant improvement is Remodel on a commercial BP. The trade permits (EP, MP, PP) follow the BP by weeks and name the trade contractor, not the GC.
• Description of work. Free text from the application. The filter that does the most work: "new 12-story mixed use", "shell building", "core and shell", "tenant finish out", "foundation only".
• Valuation. The applicant's declared job value. The city feed carries it on about a quarter of permits (the rest show zero), so a missing value is not a small job. Sort by it, but do not filter by it.
• Contractor and phone. The contractor of record, the company name as the applicant typed it, and a phone number on about 76 percent of permits in the last 90 days. No email.
• Square footage, units, stories. Present on new construction, usually blank on remodels.
• Issue date, applied date, expiration. The applied date is the earlier signal: a permit applied for in March and issued in July tells you the job was being planned in winter.

Reading it as a lead

The permit tells you three things a sub or a supplier wants: the job is real, who is running it, and roughly when it starts.

The GC is named the day the building permit issues. That is the last moment the job is "open" for most trades. A mechanical sub reading the BP the day it issues has a few weeks before the MP is pulled by a competitor. Reading the EP after it is pulled tells you who won, which is a different kind of useful.

The phone is the phone. It is the number the contractor gave the city on the application, usually the main office line or the project manager's cell. It is public record. Groundbreak shows it on the Pro plan and keeps the name free, because a name is a search and a number is a call.

The valuation is a floor, not a size. A $0 permit on a 40,000 square foot shell is still a 40,000 square foot shell. Read the description and the square footage before you skip it.

The earlier records: site plans, zoning cases, TDLR

The building permit is late for anyone selling design, engineering, pre-construction services or the first trades on site. Three public records run ahead of it in Austin, and all three are on every Groundbreak project file.

Site plan cases (SP-). The site development permit the city reviews before any building permit on a commercial or multifamily site. Filed months ahead, with the applicant, the agent (usually a civil engineer or land-use consultant) and the parcel. See the glossary on site plans.

Zoning cases (C14-). A rezoning for height, density or use goes to the Planning Commission and then City Council. It is public from the day it is filed and it can run a year ahead of a permit. See zoning cases.

TDLR registrations. Every Texas project with an estimated construction cost of $50,000 or more registers with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation for an accessibility (Architectural Barriers) review. The registration names the owner and the design firm and states the estimated cost, and it is filed before the permit. It is statewide, so it catches projects in Round Rock, Pflugerville or Kyle that have no city feed. See TDLR registration.

What Austin does not publish

Texas does not disclose sale prices, and Travis County publishes no deed feed. Groundbreak tracks owner changes off the Travis Central Appraisal District roll, so a parcel that changed hands shows the buyer and the seller but never a price. There is no notice of commencement in Texas, and no public construction loan feed for Travis County. A vendor quoting an Austin sale price or loan amount got it from a broker or a press release. The full list of what the city and county publish, and what no one can get, is on the coverage page.

Who this is for, and who it is not

If you need the permit history on one address, the Austin Build + Connect public search is free and complete, and the open data portal will give you the whole feed as a spreadsheet. Someone who checks Austin a few times a year needs nothing more.

If you work residential remodels or single-family, the city feed serves you and Groundbreak does not add much: the database is read for commercial and multifamily work. If you bid public work from plan rooms, Dodge or ConstructConnect carry the bid documents and we do not; see the comparisons. The feed becomes worth having as a database when you sell into Austin commercial jobs week to week and want the site plan, the TDLR registration and the permit on one project with the team on it. For that reader, the Austin development database carries all four records matched to the project, with the contractor's phone on the Pro plan. The most active contractors and largest permits this month tables are free.