How to Find ADU Permit Leads (Before Your Competitors Do)

What an ADU permit lead is — and why timing wins

An ADU permit lead is a record that a property owner has applied for (or been issued) a permit to build an accessory dwelling unit. Unlike a paid advertising click or a cold list, a permit filing is a documented action: the owner has engaged the building department and, in most cases, already has a design intent and a budget in mind.

That is why timing beats almost everything else. A permit application is a near-bottom-of-funnel buying signal. The window between the filing date and the point at which the owner locks in a builder, lender, or designer is often short. Reaching out in that window — rather than weeks or months later when the record finally surfaces through slow channels — is the difference between a warm conversation and a closed door.

Where ADU permits are actually recorded

Building permits are public records held by the local authority having jurisdiction — usually a city or county building or development-services department. Increasingly, jurisdictions publish this data on municipal open-data portals (platforms like Socrata and Esri ArcGIS), where permit activity is posted in structured, downloadable form.

Not every jurisdiction publishes openly, and those that do vary enormously: some expose a clean dataset with an explicit ADU subtype, others bury the signal inside free-text work descriptions, and many lack consistent fields like ZIP code or valuation. The data exists, but it is fragmented across each city's own system. You can see the breadth of where this data lives on our state-by-state coverage hub, including detailed pages for Los Angeles permit data and Portland permit data.

Manual methods — and why they don't scale

You can absolutely gather permit leads by hand. Most building departments let you search permit records through an online portal, and public-records or FOIA-style requests can pull bulk data where no portal exists. For a single city, a diligent person can keep up.

The problem is scale and freshness. Each portal has its own search interface, export limits, field names, and date formats. Monitoring even a handful of markets means repeating that work daily, deduplicating across systems, reverse-geocoding missing ZIPs, and reading descriptions to figure out which permits are genuinely ADUs versus reroofs, water heaters, or solar installs. By the time a manual process surfaces a lead, the timing advantage is often gone. Manual collection works for one market; it collapses across many.

How a permit-data feed works

A permit-data feed solves the scale problem by ingesting directly from those official open-data portals on a continuous schedule and normalizing everything into one consistent format. Igni pulls permit records with sub-24-hour freshness across 60 cities in 37 US states, all sourced from official municipal open-data portals.

Normalization is the hard part and the real value. Records from dozens of different systems get mapped to a common schema: consistent dates, standardized statuses, recovered ZIP codes, and a typed ADU classification (detached, attached, junior ADU, conversion, or unknown) inferred from each jurisdiction's structured flags and work descriptions. Instead of reading raw permit text city by city, you get a clean, comparable stream of ADU activity you can act on the same day it posts.

Filtering down to the leads you actually want

A raw firehose of permits is not a lead list — useful targeting is. A good feed lets you narrow by the dimensions that matter to your business: ADU type, project valuation, ZIP code or city, owner-builder status, and permit status.

For builders working in California, SB-9 and SB-10 flags are especially powerful: they let you focus on parcels in areas where lot splits or by-right duplexes may be in play, so you can spot eligible activity early. You can filter live activity in our permit dashboard and stack filters to match exactly the kind of project you take on — for example, detached ADUs above a certain valuation in a specific set of ZIPs.

Getting started

If you build or finance ADUs, the fastest path to a real pipeline is to stop scraping city portals by hand and start working from a normalized feed. Pick the markets you serve, set filters for the project types you want, and reach out while the permit is fresh.

Igni is live and contact-driven during its pilot — there is no public self-serve checkout yet. To see coverage in your markets and get access, request access and tell us which cities and project types you focus on.

Frequently asked questions