Building permit data is issued across thousands of municipal building departments, municipal GIS portals, and county recorder systems. Realie aggregates building permit history — including permit numbers, issue dates, contractor details, job valuation, and permit status — across U.S. jurisdictions, making permit records queryable by API, CLI, or MCP server on a free tier or affordable monthly plan.
Obtaining building permit data for property diligence, contractor intelligence, or renovation tracking is notoriously fragmented because permits are issued at the municipality or county level via diverse systems (ArcGIS, CityView, Accela, PDF attachments, and web portals). Realie normalizes these disparate sources into a unified permits schema attached directly to the parcel ID. You can query building permit data by address, parcel ID, or county without managing thousands of separate municipal scraping routines.
Building permits are issued locally by city and county building departments rather than state or national registries. Format variations are extreme: one municipality publishes open JSON feeds, another exposes an ArcGIS FeatureServer, and a third publishes scanned monthly PDF logs.
Realie’s agent pipeline extracts and structures permit records from these diverse formats — parsing permit type (electrical, plumbing, structural, HVAC), status, job description, valuation, and contractor name — and maps them directly to the parcel identity.
You can query building permits via the REST API (`/api/public/property/parcelId`), the Realie CLI for terminal automation, or the Realie MCP server for direct query execution inside AI coding assistants like Claude, Cursor, and VS Code.
Permit records return alongside assessor records, tax history, and parcel boundaries in a single request, eliminating the need to stitch separate vendor feeds together.