Contractor guides & tips

Demolitions, new builds, and gut renos all need bins — and they all announce themselves in the permit feed first. How rental companies in Toronto & NYC find customers before the phone rings.

A new-build permit is a purchase order that hasn't been placed yet. How lumber yards, window dealers, and roofing suppliers use permit data to find buying contractors first.

A plain-language breakdown of the NYC DOB feed: work types, the owner and applicant fields, what the permittee license type tells you, and how to turn it into leads across all five boroughs.

Every General Construction permit filed with the DOB is a GC who's about to need a mechanical sub. Here's how to find HVAC jobs in NYC by spotting GC-led permits the day they're issued.

In NYC, licensed plumbers pull their own permits — so the DOB feed is a direct line to fresh plumbing jobs and GC-led projects where the plumbing scope is still open. Here's how to work it.

A cold call is a guess. A permit lead is a declared intention to spend money. Here's why the difference in timing changes your conversion rate entirely.

Building permits are public records. There's a right way and a wrong way to reach out — here's how to do it professionally and stay on the right side of CASL.

Not all permits move at the same speed. Trade permits and interior alterations can go from filed to issued in days. New builds can sit for months. Know the difference.

Drain work is almost always permitted directly by the plumber — no GC buffer between the data and the homeowner. Here's what the permit tells you and why the window closes fast.

Re-roofing permits show up 3–10 days before a homeowner has locked in a contractor. Most roofers don't know this. The spring permit rush in Scarborough and Etobicoke is real and it's underused.

A plain-language breakdown of the permit feed: the fields that matter, what status codes mean, why the 24–48 hour lag matters, and what the data can't tell you on its own.