LeadFiling is a tripwire service for Chicago construction and business activity. We watch the city's public records every morning, detect what changed since yesterday, and alert you to the changes that match your trade and territory — so you call first, not fifth.
See pricing Start the 14-day Foreman trialEvery day the pipeline polls three free Chicago open-data feeds, diffs them against yesterday's snapshot, and sends you only the new rows that match your trade and territory filters.
We query ydr8-5enu (building permits), r5kz-chrr (business licenses), and 22u3-xenr (building violations) on data.cityofchicago.org — free, public, no key required.
New rows are detected by each feed's natural key — permit number, license ID, violation ID — and scored against your trade and territory filters. Noise stays out.
A filtered digest lands in your inbox before the workday starts — plus near-real-time or real-time push on paid tiers. You get a bid list by 7 AM, not a phone book.
Every record below comes straight from the City of Chicago's open-data portal. We don't sell you the data — we sell you being first to know.
The lead feed. Permit number, type, status, address, contractor name and license, estimated cost, issue date. A roofer who sees yesterday's roof-replacement permits in his ZIPs has a bid list by 7 AM.
The "new business opened yesterday" feed — filtered to application_type='ISSUE'. Business name, owner name, address, license description, issue date. New businesses need insurance, payroll, merchant services, marketing.
The distress feed. Violation code, address, status, date — the paper trail of distressed properties before they show up on any list. Built for investors and wholesalers.
Labeled as such: these figures are from an internal test run of the LeadFiling pipeline on Chicago open data — real rows, not projections. Sample figures will shift day to day; the point is the mechanism works: poll, diff, alert.
Permit chasers. A trade-filtered morning email of new permits in your territory is a standing bid list — contractors already pay $150–300 per lead elsewhere.
New permits mean upcoming material orders; new business licenses mean new accounts to open. Lumber yards, roofing distributors, supply houses.
Insurance brokers, payroll, merchant services, marketing agencies targeting new businesses. The license feed is literally "a new business opened yesterday, here's the owner name and address."
Violations are the paper trail of distress before it hits any list. The enrichment add-on closes the owner-phone gap for this segment.
Chicago's public feeds give name + address only — no phone numbers, no email addresses. The base subscription gives you the fastest, best-filtered version of that public signal. Verified phone numbers and owner contact details are sold separately via the enrichment add-on. We never charge for a guess: if no verified phone is found for a record, the credit is refunded. Coverage is Chicago only.
14-day Foreman trial. No credit card. Auto-downgrades to free — never auto-charges.
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