The City of Toronto publishes building permit data through its Open Data portal. It's a public dataset, updated on a rolling basis, covering every permit filed with the city's Chief Building Official. The data exists. Plenty of contractors don't know about it, and most of the ones who do haven't taken the time to understand what's actually in it.
This is a plain-language breakdown of the key fields, what they tell you, and where the data runs out.
Address. The civic address of the property where the permitted work will happen. This is the street number and street name — not a postal code or ward number. Useful for exactly what you'd think: knowing where to show up, what the neighbourhood looks like, and roughly what kind of property you're dealing with.
Permit type. Toronto classifies permits broadly — Building, Plumbing, Electrical, Sign, and a few others. Most contractors are interested in Building permits (which cover structural work, additions, alterations, re-roofing) and Plumbing permits (drain work, fixture installation, sanitary lateral replacement). Trade permits issued directly to a licensed tradesperson tend to be more actionable than building permits issued to a GC, because the homeowner is more likely to be managing the relationship directly.
Work description. A free-text field that gets filled in by the permit applicant or the intake clerk. The quality here varies. A well-filled description might say "replace existing asphalt shingles on main dwelling, approx. 2,400 sq ft" or "sanitary lateral replacement from foundation to property line." A poorly-filled one might say "plumbing work" and leave it at that. You get enough to qualify the lead in maybe 70% of cases. The rest require a phone call or a drive-by to assess.
Application date. The date the permit application was submitted to the city. This is the most important field for lead generation. The application date tells you how fresh the opportunity is. A permit filed yesterday is a live lead. A permit filed three weeks ago has likely already been resolved.
Issued date. The date the city formally issued the permit — meaning it was reviewed, approved, and the applicant can now legally proceed. For trade permits, this can happen within a few days of application. For complex building permits involving new construction or major alterations, issuance can take weeks or months.
Status. The current stage of the permit in the city's workflow. This is where most of the nuance lives.
The status field is what separates leads worth pursuing from ones that have already moved on. The most common statuses you'll encounter are:
"Application Received" / "Not Started" — The permit has been filed but not yet reviewed or approved. This is the earliest stage. Work cannot legally begin yet. From a lead-generation standpoint, this is the most valuable status. The homeowner is in the window between deciding to do the project and picking a contractor. You can reach them before they're committed.
"Permit Issued" — The city has approved the permit and the applicant can proceed. Work may or may not have started. If you catch an issued permit within a few days of the issue date, there may still be an opportunity — particularly for larger projects where the homeowner is coordinating multiple subtrades. After a week or two, assume the work is underway.
"Inspection Passed" / "Closed" — The project is complete and has passed final inspection. No opportunity here unless you're looking for referrals or repeat work with the same owner.
The practical read: application-stage permits are the best leads. Recently-issued permits are still worth a look. Anything closed is history.
Toronto's open data feed is not real-time. The city updates the dataset on a daily basis, but there's typically a 24 to 48 hour lag between when a permit is filed at the counter or submitted online and when it appears in the public data.
That lag doesn't kill the lead opportunity — it just means you need to move fast once you see it. A permit that appears in the feed this morning was likely filed yesterday afternoon or the day before. If the application date is today or yesterday and you reach out today, you're likely within the first 48 to 72 hours from when the homeowner committed to the project.
That's a good window. Most homeowners spend a week or two collecting quotes before making a decision. The problem is that roofers, plumbers, and renovation contractors who aren't working with permit data are getting to those homeowners through referrals and Google — which means they may have already called two or three contractors by the time you get to them. Being in that conversation early is the entire point.
The permit data does not include the homeowner's name or contact information. Addresses are searchable through the land registry for ownership data, but that's a separate step. Nova Essentials handles that matching as part of the service — the raw city data doesn't do it for you.
You also can't reliably infer contractor selection from the permit data. A permit being issued doesn't tell you whether the homeowner has already picked a contractor for the work. It tells you the project is approved and can proceed. Whether they've signed with someone is something you find out by making contact.
Estimated project value isn't in the data either. The permit fee schedule is public, and you can work backward from the fee to a rough construction value in some cases, but it's an estimate with meaningful error. Better to use the address, property type, and work description to make your own judgment on job size.
The Toronto Open Data permit dataset is a CSV that gets refreshed daily. It contains tens of thousands of records spanning active permits, closed permits, old permits, permits for commercial properties, permits for properties you'd never touch. Filtering it down to residential permits in your trade category, sorted by application date, deduplicated, and formatted into something you can actually act on — that's the work.
Most contractors don't have time to build and maintain that pipeline themselves. That's what Nova Essentials does: pull the data daily, filter it to the permit types and geographies that are relevant to residential trade contractors, and deliver the leads in a format you can work from immediately.
Nova Essentials processes Toronto's open building permit data every day and surfaces the residential trade permits worth acting on — by neighbourhood, work type, and application date. Seven days free, $29/month after.
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