We're building a free API of official STR permit data — what cities do you need?

Question

I run CivicDataForge. We pull official government STR permit/license records from 30 US cities and counties into one normalized API — not Airbnb listing data, the actual government registries.

Every record carries: permit ID, status (active/expired/revoked), address with coordinates, expiration date, property type, and a link back to the source. The data refreshes daily from city open-data portals (Socrata, ArcGIS, CKAN, CSV feeds).

Current coverage: Seattle, Orlando, Nashville, Austin, Houston, Denver, Chicago, San Diego, Philadelphia, Boston, Sacramento, Scottsdale, Albuquerque, Asheville, Louisville, and 15 more including Florida's Osceola County (Kissimmee) and Polk County (Davenport/ChampionsGate) with coordinates and parcel IDs enriched from county GIS layers.

The API is free. If your market publishes a machine-readable permit registry, we can usually add it in a day.

What jurisdictions would be most useful to you? We're building based on what operators actually need — drop your city and we'll check if the data exists.

Bryan Williams · Answer

@John Underwood — fair point. Experienced operators know their own permit requirements. The use case we're building for is more on the analysis side: investors underwriting a new market who want to see permit density by neighborhood before they buy, or operators tracking permit status changes across a portfolio without manually checking each city portal.

The "30 registries in one schema" part matters less if you're in one market you know well, and more if you're comparing across markets or building tools on top of the data. Appreciate the perspective — helps us calibrate who we're actually building for.

Bryan Williams · Answer

@Grant Woodward — Kansas City is live. Turned out to be easier than I expected: the city publishes the registry on its own GIS server, so we wired directly to the source.

What you can pull right now: 1,145 unique active STR permits (the city's layer actually holds 1,436 rows, but 291 are exact duplicates we collapse), each with permit number, address, parcel number, issue/expiration dates, and GPS coordinates (converted from the state-plane system the city uses).

It's free — pick "Kansas City, MO" from the city list and run it: apify.com/civicdataforge/str-permit-registry. Full coverage list here: civicdataforge.pages.dev/data/str-permit-data.

If you tell me what you're doing with it (density by zip, tracking expirations, checking specific addresses), happy to point you at the right fields.

Bryan Williams · Answer

@Grant Woodward — checked Kansas City, MO. Good news: the city publishes all 1,436 registered short-term rentals on their Parcel Viewer GIS layer (ArcGIS, under the Neighborhood Services department). Every record carries a permit number, status, address, zip, parcel number, issue date, and expiration date. The data is machine-readable and queryable.

We'll add it. KC uses Missouri State Plane coordinates so we need to reproject to lat/long, but that's straightforward. Should be in the registry within the next few days.

Anything specific you're trying to do with the KC data — permit density analysis, checking a specific neighborhood, monitoring expirations? Happy to prioritize the fields that matter most for your use case.

Bryan Williams · Answer

@Aaron Zimmerman — appreciate that. That's exactly the gap we saw: the data exists in public government portals, but finding it and making sense of 30 different schemas is a barrier for anyone who doesn't want to become a FOIA specialist. Glad it resonates.

Bryan Williams · Answer

@Mike Grudzien — live and queryable right now, not pre-launch. The API is an Apify actor that pulls directly from city open-data portals on each run.

Example of what a query returns today: run it against Orlando and you get 2,000+ vacation rental records, each with the DBPR licence number, status (Current / Suspended / Voluntarily Relinquished), expiration date, address with coordinates, and a link back to the state source. Run it against Denver and you get the city's Socrata-hosted registry with permit type, status, and address. Same normalized schema either way.

The landing page at civicdataforge.pages.dev/data/str-permit-data has the full jurisdiction list and links to the actor. Free to run — just pick your city and hit go.

Aaron Zimmerman · Answer

I don't have anything to add other than I think this is a cool project and helps out beginners

Mike Grudzien · Answer

Cool idea.  Is this "pre-launch advertising"?

Grant Woodward · Answer

Cool project. I would be interested in seeing this for Kansas City, Missouri.

John Underwood · Answer

I think most of us are already aware of permit requirements for our areas of interest.