A permit gets pulled in March. Drywall goes up in August. Which makes April the month to call.

Word of mouth has no calendar. It works right up until the week it does not, and by then the truck is loaded for a job that finishes Friday with nothing booked behind it.

Meanwhile Austin, Dallas and San Antonio publish every construction permit they issue, free, daily, carrying the address, the scope, the declared valuation and the contractor of record. TxDOT publishes who bid what on every highway letting, refreshed the same day. Those records exist weeks or months before anyone sends a bid invitation, and a long way before the job ever becomes an ad.

That gap is the whole opportunity. This page is how to read one of those records the way an estimator reads it: what the permit tells you about scope and money, which trade it is early news for and which trade it is already late news for, and what to say when you call.

What Texas puts in public, and how fast

Two things about that table are worth more than the table.

Houston is the largest construction market in Texas and the most awkward one to watch, which means the fewest competitors are watching it. Awkward is not the same as closed. The city publishes monthly totals, and the per-permit detail sits in the Permitting Center's Sold Permits search behind a challenge page that a person clicks through in seconds. Five minutes and a job address gets you what the automated tools cannot reach, and that asymmetry belongs to whoever bothers.

The second thing is that every feed on that list is a city feed, so coverage stops at the city limit. Blank space on a permit map outside those boundaries is not missing data, it is a different market with a different door. Work out there moves on relationships and on the award registers, which means a name inside the general contractor's office does the job the permit record does inside the city, and the awards feed further down this page is how you get that name.

Read the permit like an estimator, not like a list

Six fields carry the whole signal.

Permit type. A building permit for new construction, an alteration, a shell, a finish-out. Type sets the sequence, and the sequence is what tells you your month.

The work description. This is the line people skim and estimators read twice. "Interior finish-out, 18,400 sf, second floor, office" is a scope statement. It tells you stud and hang footage, ceiling area, device counts, and whether there is any structural work ahead of your trade.

Declared valuation. The number the applicant put on the form. It is construction value rather than contract value, and the section below turns it into a figure you can price against.

Issue date. Your clock. The permit issues when plan review clears, which means the drawings were finished some months before that date.

Contractor of record and applicant. A name, and often a company you can look up. That is your call, and it is a call about a specific job rather than a cold introduction.

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

What a $2.4M commercial alteration means for your trade

Same permit. Two subs read it completely differently, and both are right.

For the electrician, a $2.4M interior alteration that issued yesterday is late news. Electrical drawings had to be in the permit set for plan review to clear, which means the general contractor was talking to electrical contractors months ago, and on a job that size the buyout is usually settled by the time the permit prints. Texas runs electrical work through a licensed electrical contractor under Occupations Code Ch.1305, so that name gets committed early and stays committed. What is early for an electrician is the plan review queue, the award feed, and the general contractor's next job rather than this one.

For the drywall sub, the same permit is close to perfect timing. Hang and finish gets bought out well after the permit issues, and the work itself lands months later.

Here is the shape of a $2.4M commercial finish-out, counted from the day the permit issues. Your own last four jobs will sharpen every row of it:

Now put money on it. Do not guess at your share, measure it. Pull the last four jobs of this type off your own board and work out what your scope ran as a percentage of the construction value. A drywall sub whose scope has come in around nine percent on those four looks at $2.4M and sees a package worth roughly $216,000, which tells them immediately whether this is a job to chase or a job to pass.

One more signal that costs nothing to watch. Trade permits are separate records carrying separate names, so an electrical permit appearing on the same address three weeks after the building permit does two things at once: it confirms the job is real and moving rather than parked, and it names the electrician who won it. That person is now on the same site you want to be on, and a call to them lands warmer than a call to the general contractor's front desk.

How to tell a real $2.4M job from a $2.4M column

Declared valuation is the field that separates people who use permit data from people who get burned by it. Three habits fix it.

Ignore the placeholders. In Austin, roughly three quarters of building permits carry any valuation at all, and around nine in ten of those carry a token figure under $500. A $1 valuation does not mean a small job, it means the field was left as filler. Filter to figures above $1,000 and you are down to about eight percent of the permits, with a median around $191,000. Those are the jobs.

One job wears many permit numbers. Austin repeats the total job value on every sibling permit of one development. The largest figure in the set, $830 million, appears on dozens of sequential permit numbers, each with its own project id. Identical valuations across an adjacent run of permit numbers are one job, not a run of them. Add them up and you will talk yourself into a pipeline that does not exist.

Read the field as text, because it is text. San Antonio publishes declared valuation as a string holding values like "3500000.0", frequently blank. A blank is a blank rather than a zero, and a job with no published value can still be the biggest one on your list.

The awards feed names the winner and the losers

Permits tell you a job is happening. Awards tell you who is holding the money, and the losing bidders are half the value.

TxDOT bid tabulations carry every bidder on every letting for the previous 24 months. The winner is a prime you can call about subcontract packages. The firms that bid and lost are primes who wanted that class of work, priced it, and now have crews with a hole in the schedule. That is a list worth working.

Two details in that feed are worth money once you know them. The engineer's estimate arrives as a pseudo-bidder named Txdot Engineer's Estimate, so it is not a competitor and TxDOT did not win its own job. And contracts show up with the estimate published and no bid results yet: in one 30-day window, 11 of 94 contracts sat in exactly that state, all of them within four days of the letting. That is the closest thing this feed has to a forward look. The money is named, the prime is not chosen, and a sub who is already on three of those bidders' lists gets carried into the bid.

The feed also tells you when a job comes back around. Contract 0081-01-053 was let in December 2024 and let again in August 2026, with a different low bidder each time. A letting you watched go to somebody else is not automatically a job you lost, so keep the ones you wanted on a short list and check whether they return.

Make the call about the job, not about yourself

The difference between a call that works and a call that gets a voicemail is whether you name the job.

"Do you need a drywall sub" is a cold call. Read the permit number and the address off the record and open with those instead: "You pulled the building permit on Burnet Road last Tuesday, the $2.4M second floor finish-out, I hang and finish commercial at that size and I am eight minutes away, who buys that scope for you." That is a conversation with an estimator who now knows you read his job.

Have the boring part ready before you dial. Four of the five biggest Texas cities want you on their contractor register before you can pull a permit or call an inspection, and the numbers are small enough that not being on one is just lost time: Austin is free, Dallas is $120 a year, Fort Worth is $168.75 a year, San Antonio runs $150 to $170 for a two year term and only bites if you touch residential, and Houston does not register general contractors at all. That matrix is in city contractor registration in Texas, and the documents an estimator asks for on the second call are in the Texas bid ready checklist.

Have it read for you

Watching six portals by hand works for about three weeks. AEC Stack reads the permit feeds and the award registers, matches them to your trade and your radius, and puts each one on a card with the scope, the valuation, the issue date and the contractor of record already on it, so what reaches you is jobs rather than data. Track one and it lands on your pipeline board with the value and scope filled in.

There is no monthly subscription. The platform fee is 2.5% of each invoice processed through AEC Stack.

Open the work feed and set it to your trade and your city. Then work the two lanes that pair with it: finding Texas bids and tenders for the jobs that do get advertised, and getting on a Texas general contractor's bid list so the next permit they pull arrives as an invitation instead of a cold call.