openpermits/0.1

Our crawler

If you found openpermits in your server logs, that is us: OpenPermits, a HomeReceipt company, collecting public building-permit and zoning records. Here is how we behave, and how to reach us.

  • We prefer official open-data endpoints (ArcGIS, Socrata, published reports) to portal pages.
  • We send at most two requests per second to any host, back off on errors, and cool down when a server struggles.
  • Crawls are incremental: we ask only for what changed since the last run.
  • We never bypass logins, CAPTCHAs or access controls. Where a portal can't be read politely, we file a public-records request instead.
  • We publish only what the jurisdiction publishes, and never pass on the names or phone numbers of residents.

Contact us

To ask us to slow down, stop, use a different endpoint, or remove a record, email data@openpermits.ai. A request from a jurisdiction to change how we crawl it takes effect as soon as we read it. To correct or remove a record, see record correction and removal.