Get a name to call from this week's Miami-Dade and Orlando permits

Every remodel, every addition, every re-roof and every tenant build-out in these two jurisdictions becomes a public record before the first truck arrives. Address, work type, declared value, the contractor of record, the date it issued. It is published, it is free, and almost nobody in your trade reads it.

Price out what not reading it costs. A two-person crew you keep on payroll at $1,400 a day is $28,000 across four idle weeks, twenty working days between the job that finished Friday and the one you have not found yet. In those same four weeks Miami-Dade County and the City of Orlando published roughly 4,300 permit records between them, each one an address where somebody has already decided to spend money and has already paid a government to say so.

By the end of this page you will have three things: a filter set to your trade, your value band and one or both of those jurisdictions, so what reaches you on Monday is jobs rather than a data dump. A way to read a single permit line the way an estimator reads it, so you know in ten seconds whether the call is worth making. And a call that names the permit number, which is the difference between a conversation and a voicemail. The Florida paperwork the resulting job needs is cited to the 2025 Florida Statutes so you can check any of it in a minute.

Start with the two jurisdictions that actually publish rows

There is no statewide Florida permit feed. That belief is widespread and it costs people weeks: contractors go looking for "Florida permits" the way a Texan looks for state data, find nothing, and conclude the records are closed. They are not closed. They are local, and they are local one issuing authority at a time.

Two of them publish anonymously, in bulk, in a machine-readable form, and those are the two on this feed.

Two boundary facts worth more than the table, because they are the two that make people misread their own results.

Miami-Dade is the county issuer. The layer carries permits the county issues, and the 34 municipalities inside it, Miami, Hialeah, Coral Gables and the rest, issue their own on their own systems. The city name on the row is the property's city. Read the feed as county-issued work in that city, and it is exactly right.

Orlando publishes permit applications, and the trade permits sit in the same dataset as the building permits. The feed filters to building permits on purpose. Pull the raw dataset yourself and count the electrical, plumbing and mechanical permits alongside the building permit for the same job and you will count one job three or four times, then build a pipeline forecast out of the double count.

Broward runs its permitting behind a login. Orange County runs an in-house portal. Tampa's feed refuses anonymous requests and Jacksonville has no public row API at all. Naming Miami-Dade and Orlando is not a hedge, it is the accurate name for the coverage you get, and those two metros are where the remodel and build money in Florida concentrates anyway.

<!-- CAPTURE (later, when a Florida tenant exists): the work feed filtered to Florida / Miami-Dade County, showing four permit cards with address, work type, estimated value and issued date visible. -->

Read six fields and decide in ten seconds

A permit line is not a lead until you have read it like an estimator.

Work type and application type. New construction, alteration, addition, roof, shell, interior. Type sets the sequence, and the sequence tells you which month the job is yours.

The description. The field everybody skims. "Interior alteration, second floor" and "re-roof, tile, 3,100 sf" are scope statements with square footage and material in them. This is where you decide whether it is your work.

Estimated value. The number the applicant declared. Treat it as construction value, not contract value, and read the next section before you trust it.

Issued date, or processed date in Orlando. Your clock. A permit issues after plan review clears, so the drawings were finished months before the date on the row.

Contractor name. A company you can look up, on a job you can name. That is the whole call.

Address. Drive past it. A lot with a dumpster and a fence is a different conversation from a lot with nothing on it.

Set your value floor low, because the median Florida permit is small

The default minimum value on a new profile is $50,000, and it is the single setting most likely to hide your own market from you.

The median valued permit in Miami-Dade County is $22,888. Set a $50,000 floor and more than half the county disappears from your feed, including nearly all of the residential remodel work. A roofer, a remodeler or a service electrician should drop that floor to $2,000 and let the trade filter do the narrowing instead.

Three habits keep the value column honest.

A blank is unknown, not zero. Only 2.1 percent of Miami-Dade rows come in under $500, which means the field is diligently populated there and a sub-$500 figure is genuinely odd rather than routine. That is unusual: on the California feeds the same placeholder rate runs 10 to 14 percent. A job with no published value can still be the biggest one on your list.

Never add sibling permits together. In Miami-Dade, 39,663 of 139,740 rows hang off a master permit and repeat the master's estimated value on every trade sub-permit. Sum the column and one $4M job becomes $16M of imaginary pipeline. The master permit number is the key that collapses them back to one job, and it is carried on every row for exactly that reason.

Expect a dirty top end. Above $10M is 1.24 percent of Miami-Dade permits, six to ten times the rate on the comparable West Coast feeds, and 27 rows out of 65,459 sit above $1B, all of them impossible use and value combinations. A single family residence at $40M is a typo, not a mansion. Flag the top of the range and look at it yourself rather than letting it set your expectations.

Turn a permit line into a named buyer

The record gets you to a name. What you do next is tradecraft, and it is the part that separates people who use permit data from people who bounce off it.

1. Check who the contractor of record actually is. Search the name on DBPR's public licensee search at myfloridalicense.com before you dial. Thirty seconds tells you whether they are certified and working statewide or registered and working one county, and which of them will need a sub holding your qualification. That last part is a reason for them to take your call.
2. Match the permit to your month. On a $2M interior alteration, electrical and mechanical were bought out before the permit printed. Framing goes within weeks. Drywall, ceilings, flooring and paint are bought out one to four months after issue. Call at the point your scope is being priced, not the day the permit appears.
3. Name the permit when you call. "Do you need a roofer" is a cold call. "You pulled permit B-2026-0114 on NW 87th Avenue, the tile re-roof at 3,100 square feet, I do that size in Miami-Dade and I can be there Thursday, who buys that scope for you" is a conversation with somebody who now knows you read their job.
4. Work the applicant as well as the winner. The permit names one contractor. The owner, the architect on the plan review and the neighbors on either side of a job that has visibly started are three more conversations off the same address.
5. Log the ones that do not answer. A contractor who pulls eight permits a quarter in your radius is a repeat buyer worth six calls, not one.

Serve the paperwork the day the job is yours

A permit call that lands becomes a job, and a Florida job has its own clock the moment you set foot on it. If you are a sub or a supplier and you are not in privity with the owner, s.713.06(2)(a) gives you 45 days from your first furnishing to serve the Notice to Owner, and missing it does not shrink your claim, it removes your lien entirely. The whole receivable, gone on a date nobody sends you a reminder about.

Get the sequence right at the front and the rest of the job runs on rails: the Florida Notice to Owner for the 45 day service, the Notice of Commencement for the s.713.13 recording that sets the whole payment chain up, pricing a Florida job so the number you quote off a permit description is one you can build to, and invoicing and getting paid in Florida so the money follows the work. If the permit search turned up work you are not yet qualified to sign for, getting your Florida contractor license is the step in front of all of it.

What it costs

There is no monthly subscription. The platform fee is 2.5% of each invoice processed through AEC Stack, collected on payment due dates.

The permit records themselves are free. Miami-Dade County and the City of Orlando both publish theirs as open data with no key and no account. What the market charges for the same information assembled for you:

Those are the alternatives to reading two portals yourself, and they are worth knowing so you can tell a government fee, a data subscription and a platform fee apart when somebody quotes you all three in the same breath.

Let Sunday do the reading

The two feeds are read every Sunday against a nine day window, so a skipped week leaves no hole in your list. Every row that comes back is scored against your profile, enriched, classified to a trade and stamped in US dollars, which is why a $22,888 permit reads as $22,888 rather than as a number in the wrong currency.

That lane currently holds 2,148 live open Florida opportunities: 1,768 from Miami-Dade County and 380 from Orlando, published between 2 and August 15, 2026. Roughly 1,074 a week across the two. Filter to one trade and one value band and you are looking at 30 to 50 real candidates. Call ten, reach three, quote one. That is a booked job out of half an hour on a Monday.

Open the work feed and set your criteria there: pick your trade, set Target Regions to Florida, tick Miami-Dade County and Orlando under Target Cities, and drop the minimum value to something your smallest real job would clear. Then read the first ten permits that come back and pick the one closest to your yard.