Permitypermit history for a property addressProperty permit intelligence
What work has been permitted here,
and when.
Roofing, HVAC, electrical and plumbing. One address in, four dated answers out — each one saying where the date came from and how sure it is.
Address to answer
Residential Property Search
An address typed in, and the report that comes back: a year for roofing, HVAC, electrical and plumbing, each with the permit date it was taken from and how sure it is.
Recorded on a demonstration property made up for filming: the address and the owner shown are not real.
A real result
full permit coverage
| Date | Tags | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-18filed | roofing | Remove and replace 16 sq roof. Owens corning duration storm shingles |
| 2026-03-19filed | roofing | Re-roof |
A real result, not a mock-up — address withheld. 2 permits on record. Open this report as a PDF — address absent from the file, not covered over.
Who this is for
Who asks this question
Anyone whose decision changes when they learn the roof is twenty years old rather than two.
Underwriting, renewals and claims. Roof age decides whether a carrier writes it, and at what.
What was done, when, and whether it was permitted — before it becomes a disclosure argument.
Verify prior work on a property before you quote it: what was permitted, when, and which authority issued it.
Track what has actually been done across a portfolio rather than what the file says.
A permit history alongside the walkthrough, and a record of the work you cannot see.
Unpermitted additions and open permits, found before closing rather than after.
The twenty-minute problem
Permit records live in hundreds of separate county and city systems, each with its own search, its own login, and its own idea of what a date means. Checking one property is twenty minutes. Checking eight hundred is not something anyone does.
Permity answers in about a second, and will answer for a whole list from a CSV.
What it is worth knowing
A twenty-year-old roof decides a renewal. An addition that raised replacement cost by forty thousand dollars against a limit that never moved is a claim waiting to happen. Work done without a permit is a disclosure problem for whoever sells the house next.
All of it is in the permit record, and none of it is in the file in front of you.
How to read it
An empty cell means two opposite things
This is the part most permit tools get wrong. “No roofing permit” and “this county does not report roofing permits” look identical if you render both as a blank. One of them prices a policy. The other sends an inspector. We never collapse them.
A permit, and a year we can stand behind.
No permit, and this jurisdiction reports well. Real signal: probably no permitted work.
A permit exists with no usable date. Work happened; when is unknown.
This jurisdiction barely reports. Absence here is not evidence of anything.
A 2012 filing is not a 2012 completion
A permit record carries up to four dates and rarely all of them. We take the first that exists and always report which one it was, so you know whether a year means the work finished or only that somebody applied.
Measured on 100 Colorado roofing permits. The most truthful field is missing three times in four, so a single field will not do — and a 2012 filing is not a 2012 completion.
The neighbours fill in what a permit cannot
The honest weakness of any permit product is that unpermitted work is invisible. The street fixes it. When most of a block pulled a roofing permit the same year and one house did not, that silence is worth a question.
Where it stops
What it will not tell you
Unpermitted work leaves no record. A roof replaced without a permit is invisible here, and always will be. Absence of a permit is not absence of work.
Not every jurisdiction reports. Where coverage is thin we say so on the response rather than returning a confident blank.
We do not guess a year. Where a property has no permit for a trade but does have a build date, that inference is returned separately and labelled, never merged into the measured year.
A tool that is wrong once in the expensive direction never gets opened again. Read the API reference for exactly what each field means, or the questions page, which answers these three properly and shows a full report on a real house.
Coverage stated, not implied
little or no reporting
| Date | Tags | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 2024-11-08completed | electrical, telecom | Remove 15 rrhs, 12 antennas, install 9 antennas, 1 bbu, 12 rrhs, relocates 1 antenna |
| 2022-04-18issued | electrical, telecom | The scope of work being proposed with this project includes the following details: rooftop work: • remove (2) existing antennas • replace with (6) c-band antennas • install (2) dc9 squids additional equipment changes will take place inside the enclosed equipment shelter with no additional shelter footprint. |
| 2019-05-22issued | electrical, telecom | Remove & replace 6 new antennas, 2 per sector *remove and replace 6 remote radioheads (rrh), 2 per sector *remove 3 rrh's, 1 per sector |
| 2016-03-16issued | telecom | Comm- cell site |
A real result, not a mock-up — address withheld. 8 permits on record. Open this report as a PDF — address absent from the file, not covered over.
See a sample report (PDF)
- A county that stopped publishing — Unincorporated Boulder County, where the record stops in May, printed on the face of the report, rather than left to read as a clean history.
- A jurisdiction that reports thinly — Jefferson County, where an empty cell means "not reported here" rather than "no work done": the distinction the whole product exists for.
- The Denver card on this page, as a report — The same real lookup printed above: a Denver parcel in Adams County, where two trades are measured and two are not reported at all. Four of the eight permits on record are listed.
- The Longmont card on this page, as a report — The same real lookup printed above: a Longmont property with full permit coverage, two roofing permits on record and three trades where the answer is a measured nothing.
Real reports from sanitised inputs. The property is named by county, never by street — the address is not in the file at all.
What it does
Beyond one address at a time
A lookup is the start. The rest is what turns it from something you check into something that tells you what changed.
Upload a CSV and get a table back, your own columns carried through. Nobody wants one roof age — they want to know which of eight hundred renewals are sitting on twenty-year-old roofs before somebody else notices.
Download a template, drop in your addresses, get a CSV with four dated answers per row.
A signed, expiring link an underwriter, a client or a buyer can open. This work runs on forwarding documents to people who will never log in to your software.
Seven days by default, re-issuable, and the PDF renders from the stored data so it can never disagree with it.
Every dated answer names the authority standing behind it and how far that authority has published.
On the report, under the trade it belongs to, with the contractor named on the permit where the county records one.
On the map in the Permity app for iPhone and iPad, tap a house to see its address, then look up its permit history only if you want it. Moving the map, searching and tapping houses spend nothing.
The Look up button says what it costs before you tap it. How roofer mode works
Point it at every address you already service and let it tell you what changed. An addition that raised replacement cost against a limit that never moved is a liability sitting in your own file.
Existing customers, so no cold-contact problem and no new data to buy.
Zapier
A private Zapier app, shared on request
Permity has its own Zapier app. It is private, so it is not in Zapier’s directory: ask and we email you an invitation that adds it to your Zapier account. It works with any CRM that connects to Zapier, including:
And general CRMs such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho CRM and HighLevel, or any other app on Zapier. Names and logos belong to their owners, and showing them here does not mean any of them endorses Permity.
Use Momentum or NowCerts? They are one system (Momentum AMP is NowCerts under its current name), and it has no Zapier app yet. So we connect Permity to it through Zapier’s Webhooks step and Momentum’s own API, which needs API access on your Momentum account.
Want a walkthrough? Book a demo.
Integrations
It already works with what you use
No SDK to wait for. One authenticated POST, or our private Zapier app, from wherever your work already happens.
The private Permity app, shared on request. Or, with no invitation, Webhooks by Zapier → Custom Request: nested fields flatten, so trades.roofing.year arrives as Trades Roofing Year.
POST https://permityusa.com
/v1/permits/lookup
X-API-Key: $PERMITY_KEY
{"address": "{{address}}"}HTTP → Make a request, then a Router on status. The parsed body is a collection, so {{2.trades.roofing.year}} addresses it directly.
Method POST Body Raw / JSON Parse Yes Router ok | ambiguous | else
Anything that speaks HTTP. Signed webhooks, idempotency keys and a delivery log for when something goes wrong at 2am.
const r = await fetch(url, {
method: "POST",
headers: { "X-API-Key": key },
body: JSON.stringify({ address }),
})Capabilities
There is an API, and it is the same answer
Everything the screens do is one authenticated POST away. Built for the tools this work actually runs on, with no SDK to wait for.
- One endpoint for a lookup. Address in, the full trade summary and permit history out.
- Batch a CSV of addresses and get a table back, your own columns carried through.
- Signed PDF reports at an expiring URL, ready to forward to someone without an account.
- Webhooks with an HMAC signature and a delivery log, so you can see every attempt.
- Idempotency keys, because low-code tools retry and you should not pay twice.
- Zapier through our private app, shared on request, or a plain HTTP step that works for anyone. Make through the same HTTP step.
- Honest status codes: a negative result is a 200, and a lapsed subscription is not an error.
Try it on a house you know
It is how everyone tests this, and the fastest way to find out whether it is worth anything to you.