Igni for General Contractors — Construction Leads

The problem

• Referrals and repeat business are high quality but hard to scale on demand — you need a repeatable source of new work between them.
• Bid boards and shared lead lists are often sold to several contractors at once, so you compete on price and speed before you even talk to the owner.
• Permit records are the clearest signal of a real project, but they're buried in dozens of different city portals with no consistent format.
• By the time a project surfaces through slow channels, the owner has often already picked someone.

Permit filings are a documented buying signal

Unlike a paid 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. That makes it a near-bottom-of-funnel signal — far warmer than a name pulled from a generic list.

The practical advantage is timing. Reaching an owner in the short window between filing and awarding the job lets your outreach be specific and useful — referencing the kind of project they just started — rather than a generic pitch. For the mechanics behind the permit itself, see our contractor's guide on how to get a building permit.

One normalized feed instead of dozens of portals

You can gather permit leads by hand for a single city, but it collapses across many: 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 and deduplicating across systems.

Igni solves the scale problem by ingesting directly from official municipal open-data portals on a continuous schedule and normalizing everything into one consistent format — consistent dates, standardized statuses, recovered ZIP codes — across 60 cities in 37 US states. You work from one clean, comparable stream instead of a stack of browser tabs. See where the data lives on the state coverage hub.

Filter to the work you actually take on

A raw permit feed isn't a lead list — targeting is. Igni lets you filter by permit type, project valuation, ZIP code or city, owner-builder status, and permit status, so you can match the kind and size of job you want. A remodeler can focus on residential filings in their service area above a minimum valuation; an ADU-capable GC can also filter by typed ADU classification.

That focus keeps your outreach efficient: you're contacting owners whose project actually fits what you do, not working through everything a city issued. Preview live activity in the permit dashboard.

Sourced from official open data, accessed by contact

Every record traces back to a city's official open-data portal, so the data is a public record you can rely on rather than an opaque purchased list. Igni's value is the normalization and typing on top of that source, not the source itself — which stays fully verifiable.

Igni is contact-driven during its pilot: there's no public self-serve checkout yet. To see coverage in the markets you serve and get access, tell us which cities and project types you focus on, and we'll discuss fit. Compare lead sources in our blog post on construction lead sources for 2026.

The filters that matter for you

Frequently asked questions