How every row is produced, and from where.

The home page says "same query, same result, any day you want to re-run it against the county's open data." That sentence is only worth anything if the query is published. This is the query.

1. Where the data comes from

Two public sources, both free and open, both queried directly with no intermediary:

The county fields we read, and what we call them:

Miami-Dade County (miamidade-county)
  PermitNumber            -> permit_id
  PermitType              -> (classifier input)
  DetailDescriptionComments -> (classifier input)
  ProposedUseDescription  -> (classifier input)
  PropertyAddress         -> address
  City                    -> city
  EstimatedValue          -> valuation
  ContractorName          -> permit_applicant
  ContractorPhone         -> applicant_phone
  ContractorNumber        -> applicant_license      (added 2026-07-30)
                             applicant_license_class (decoded from the prefix)
  OwnerName               -> owner_or_builder
  LastInspectionDate      -> last_inspection
  CoCcDate                -> co_date
  ResidentialCommercial   -> (occupancy input)

City of Miami (miami-city)
  PermitNumber            -> permit_id
  ScopeofWork             -> (classifier input)
  WorkItems               -> (classifier input)
  DeliveryAddress         -> address
  TotalCost               -> valuation
  CompanyName             -> permit_applicant
  CompanyAddress          -> applicant_mail_address  (added 2026-07-30)
  CompanyCity             -> applicant_mail_city     (added 2026-07-30)
  CompanyZip              -> applicant_mail_zip      (added 2026-07-30)
  PropertyType            -> (occupancy input — see §3, this is a BUILDING class)
  Certificatedate         -> co_date

1b. What re-running this yourself actually costs

Everything above is free. A page that publishes the endpoints, the field mapping and the literal regexes has argued most of the way to "so why am I paying you", and until 2026-07-30 this page did not spend one word on the other half of that. So, only frictions I have actually exercised — each one is a command you can run and get the same answer:

1. There is no spreadsheet download. The layer advertises supportedQueryFormats: JSON, geoJSON, PBF, and asking for a CSV is rejected: …/query?where=1%3D1&f=csv returns HTTP 400 (checked 2026-07-30 on both the county and City of Miami layers). Whatever you do with this data, you are parsing JSON, not opening a file.
2. Pagination is mandatory, not optional. The layer's own metadata reports maxRecordCount: 1000. A single request for the current 7-day window came back with exactly 1,000 features and exceededTransferLimit: true — against 1,234 permits scanned in the window of the run behind today's numbers. One request does not see the week.
3. Filtering server-side works — that is not the argument. A WHERE clause of UPPER(DetailDescriptionComments) LIKE '%REMODEL%' is accepted and returns {"count":4965}. I am not going to tell you the county's API is crippled; it is not.
4. What comes back is permits, not leads. This is the actual gap, and it is all downstream of the pull: the first-match-wins classifier in §3 (nine literal patterns for remodel-interior, and the MEP-prefix rules that must run before it or a "MECH KITCHEN HOOD" permit is sold to you as a kitchen remodel), the phone gate, the $2,500 flooring-specific valuation floor, the corrupt-valuation and government-owner exclusions, project de-duplication (14 rows at 14 distinct addresses in the current run), the flooring-firm applicant exclusion (1 dropped this run), the DBPR licence decode in §5, and the second City of Miami source that supplies the only rows where the authority itself names floor coverings.
5. And it has to happen every week, on a week where nothing broke. Every count on this site is dated and regenerated; the value of a permit lead decays in days.

2. The date window

Each run pulls permits whose issue date falls in a trailing window — currently 7 days — and every published file is named with the date it was generated. The window start and end of the run behind the current numbers are printed on the home page and in claims.json. Files are never edited after generation; a new run writes a new dated file beside the old one.

3. What makes a permit "interior remodel"

A first-match-wins classifier runs over the permit type and description, lowercased. The rule that produces this feed is remodel-interior, and these are its literal patterns:

/remodel/       /renovat/        /kitchen/
/bathroom/      /\bbath\b/       /interior build.?out/
/tenant improvement/             /interior alter/
/\baddition\b/

Order matters, and trade-specific rules run first — so a permit reading "MECH A/C CHANGEOUT" is classified hvac and never reaches this feed even if the description also mentions a bathroom. Each shipped row carries an evidence column stating the exact pattern that matched and the exact county text it matched in, for example:

matched /remodel/ in "MBLD INT REMODEL — CONDO/APT INDIVIDUAL UNIT"

Declared floor scope

Separately, a row is flagged county_declared_floor_scope = yes when the county's own text matches:

/wood\/laminate\/tile\/vinyl|floor.?covering|\bcarpet\b|\bflooring\b|\btile work\b|\bvinyl plank\b/i

These are the strongest rows we have, because the permitting authority itself states the job involves floor coverings. In practice they come from miami-city, which publishes no phone numbers, so they ship in their own file with contact = name-only.

Occupancy

Occupancy is derived from the same text. "SINGLE FAM RES-CLUST-ZERO LOT-TOWN HOUSE" and "CONDO/APT INDIVIDUAL UNIT" are residential; "MULTI-FAMILY", "UNITS OR MORE", "APARTMENT" are multifamily; retail, office, hotel, restaurant, warehouse and similar are commercial. Anything unmatched is unknown and is counted with commercial, never with residential.

That rule describes only one of the two sources, and this page used to imply it described both. Miami-Dade marks occupancy at the unit level — its description literally says "CONDO/APT INDIVIDUAL UNIT". The City of Miami has no equivalent field; what it publishes is PropertyType, which is a building class. So a floor replacement in one condo unit inside a commercial-classed tower is labelled commercial, and one inside a tower whose WorkItems text reads "MULTI-FAMILY (CONDO)" is labelled multifamily — even though the job is a single dwelling and exactly the work a two-truck residential crew does.

4. What is filtered out, and why

1. The phone gate. A row only enters the flooring phone feed if applicant_phone contains at least 7 digits. Name-only rows are not silently dropped — they go to the declared-scope file with contact = name-only so you know what you are holding.
2. Valuation floor: $2,500. Below that a permit is a trivial ticket. This floor is deliberately far lower than the rest of the platform uses, because for a flooring crew the small ticket is the product. A permit with declared floor scope bypasses the floor entirely — positive evidence beats a dollar proxy.
3. Corrupt valuations. Rows with implausible valuations are excluded from lead output. They stay in the raw denominator (the "permits scanned" count) but never reach a customer row.
4. Government owners. Permits whose owner of record is a government body are excluded.
5. Flooring firms — a company-name heuristic, and nothing stronger. If the permit applicant's own name matches /\bfloor(s|ing)?\b|\bhardwood\b|\bterrazzo\b|\bcarpet\b/i the row is dropped: we do not sell a flooring contractor a job another flooring contractor already has. Be clear about what that is and is not. It is a regex over a name, it fired on 1 applicant in the current run, and it cannot be upgraded to a licence check — Florida does not license floor covering as a trade (see §5), so no licence class can confirm or deny that a filer is a flooring firm. A flooring company trading under a name with no floor word in it will get through this filter — as EMPIRE TODAY LLC, a national flooring retailer, did: it reached the downloadable declared-scope file on five consecutive nights, because “Empire Today” contains no floor word and the regex only looked for one. The regex now names the national chains whose brand carries none (Empire Today, Lumber Liquidators) and the exclusion was moved into the publish step, which runs before any file is written; the fourteen dated files already in the spool were rewritten through it, so no downloadable file contains that row any more, and a publish-time assertion re-reads every servable file and refuses to publish at all if a flooring-trade applicant is in one. Deferring this to “the next build”, which is what this paragraph used to say, was the error; chains whose names do contain a floor word (Floor & Decor, LL Flooring, 50 Floor) were already caught by the rule above. A chain on neither list can still slip through, which is why the declared-scope file ships as name-only rows you are expected to read, not as vetted leads. The count excluded is published in the stats file and on the home page.
6. Project de-duplication. Permits are collapsed by project before counting, so one building with several permits is not sold to you as several jobs.

5. The trade guess: what the licence decides, and what it cannot

applicant_trade_guess exists to warn you that the filer may be a trade sub rather than the general contractor. Until 2026-07-30 it was a name heuristic only — nine regexes over the company name (flooring, hvac, electrical, plumbing, roofing, fire-protection, pool, glass-windows, solar) — and this section said the licence number was absent from the record "by design". It was not absent. It was on the record and being discarded (see the correction in §1).

The licence number is now read from Miami-Dade's ContractorNumber and ships in two columns: applicant_license (e.g. CGC1524060) and applicant_license_class, decoded from the prefix. Because the raw number ships, you can verify any row against DBPR's own public licensee search without taking our word for the decode.

What a licence class cannot do: confirm anyone is a flooring contractor

This page previously called a "DBPR licence-class lookup" the real fix for both the trade guess and for turning the name-only declared-scope rows into callable ones. Both halves were wrong, and the reason is in the statute, not in our code:

• Florida licenses no floor-covering trade. DBPR's own published CILB licensee extracts contain exactly 25 categories — 13 certified (CAC Cert Air, CBC Cert Building, CCC Cert Roofing, CFC Cert Plumbing, CGC Cert General, CMC Cert Mechanical, CPC Cert Pool, CRC Cert Residental [DBPR's spelling], CSC Cert Metal, CUC Cert Under, CVC Cert Solar, PCC Cert Pollutant, SCC Cert Specialty) and 12 registered equivalents (RA RB RC RF RG RM RP RQ RR RS RU RX). Not one is floor covering. Specialty licensees appear only as the undifferentiated "Cert Specialty" / "Reg Specialty" with no trade sub-type in the published data. Read for yourself: www2.myfloridalicense.com/sto/file_download/extracts/cilb_certified.csv and …/cilb_registered.csv — I streamed both on 2026-07-30 and took the distinct (prefix, class) pairs. So licence class can rule a filer out as a regulated MEP trade; it can never rule one in as a flooring contractor. Positive flooring evidence therefore stays tied to the county's own declared-scope text and to nothing else.
• A DBPR lookup does not return a phone number. Those same extracts are twelve columns: licence prefix, class label, licence number, licensee name, two address lines, city/state/ZIP, expiry date, then continuing-education course fields. There is no telephone column in the file. The home page and the sample page both used to instruct you to "run a Florida DBPR licence lookup to get a number"; that instruction could not work and has been corrected on both. What a lookup gives you is the licence, its class, its status, its expiry and a mailing address. The paths that can actually produce a phone are a Sunbiz corporate-officer record keyed off the company name, or the Miami-Dade county feed when the same firm also filed a county permit — that feed does publish ContractorPhone.

For the declared-scope rows specifically, the useful fix was never DBPR at all: the City of Miami record already carried the applicant's mailing address, city and ZIP, and the pipeline was dropping all three. They now ship as applicant_mail_address / _city / _zip — populated on 8 of the 8 declared-scope rows in the current run. Those rows are mail-or-door rows with a real address, not names with nothing.

6. What we do not measure

• Job stage. Floors go in near the end of a job; a permit issue date is the start of one. Inspection history would answer it, and Miami-Dade publishes the field — but it is populated on almost none of our qualifying rows, so we do not sort by stage. The count of rows carrying an inspection date is published on the home page.
• Whether the job actually needs new floors. Outside the declared-scope file, this is an inference from the work type, not a statement by the county. The page says so in the first paragraph.
• Anything outside Miami-Dade and the City of Miami. Orlando is configured and produces nothing. No other metro is claimed.

7. Checking us

Every shipped row carries its permit_id, its source and the evidence text. Take any permit ID from the sample page, query the endpoint above for that permit number, and compare the address, valuation, applicant and description against what we shipped. If a row does not match its source, that is a defect and I want to hear about it.

The generated counts themselves live in claims.json, written by the same run that writes the CSVs. The home page reads its numbers from that file, so the page cannot state a count the data does not contain.

Questions people actually ask before buying

Each answer below restates a section above it, in the words a buyer uses rather than the words a pipeline uses. Nothing here is new information; if an answer and a section disagree, the section is the one that is generated and the answer is the one that is wrong.

Where does EarlyFloor's Miami permit data come from?

Two public endpoints, both free and both published in section 1 of this page: Miami-Dade County's ArcGIS permit layer (miamidade_permit_data), which carries a contractor phone number, and the City of Miami's own layer (Building_Permits_Since_2014), which carries the trade scope in its permit text but publishes no phone number on any of its 41 fields. Nothing is scraped from a paywalled source and nothing is bought from a broker.

Can I search Miami-Dade building permits myself for free?

Yes, and we publish the query. Miami-Dade's permit layer is an open ArcGIS FeatureServer with no key and no licence fee; you can paste a query into a browser and get the same records this product is built from. The step-by-step version, with field meanings, is at /miami-dade-permit-search.html. What EarlyFloor sells is the daily run, the filtering and the published counts, not access to something secret.

Which permits count as an “interior remodel”?

A first-match-wins classifier over the permit type and description. The literal patterns are /remodel/, /renovat/, /kitchen/, /bathroom/, /\bbath\b/, /interior build.?out/, /tenant improvement/, /interior alter/ and /\baddition\b/. Trade-specific rules run first, so an A/C changeout is classified hvac and never reaches this feed. Every shipped row carries an evidence column naming the exact pattern that matched and the exact county text it matched in.

Do Miami permit records include the contractor's phone number?

The Miami-Dade County layer does, on many records, and that is the only reason this product exists. The City of Miami layer does not — 41 fields, none of them a telephone number — so its rows ship in a separate name-only file with the filer's company mailing address instead. The City of Orlando dataset does publish a phone column - our field map simply never asked for it until 2026-08-19 - and with it read Orlando produced 2 rows in the 2026-08-19 run - one commercial and one whose occupancy that source does not resolve, neither residential - which is why no Orlando feed is sold. An earlier figure of 4 counted two fire-alarm sub-permits that the gate now removes.

Does the permit actually say the job involves flooring?

Usually not. On most rows you are calling a remodel and asking whether floors are in it. The exception is the declared-floor-scope file: rows whose county text itself matches wood/laminate/tile/vinyl, floor covering, carpet, flooring, tile work or vinyl plank. Those are the strongest rows in the product and they come from the City of Miami, one municipality out of the county's 34 — so a crew working Hialeah or Doral will essentially never get one. The coverage matrix at /coverage.html states this up front.

What gets filtered out before a row reaches a customer?

Six gates, all listed in section 4: rows with fewer than 7 digits of phone go to the name-only file rather than the phone feed; permits valued under $2,500 are dropped unless they carry declared floor scope; implausible valuations are excluded; government-owned properties are excluded; applicants whose own company name contains a floor word are dropped, because we will not sell a flooring contractor a job another flooring contractor already has; and permits are collapsed by project so one building is not sold as several jobs.

What does EarlyFloor not know?

Whether the flooring is already subcontracted — nothing in the public record says this, and it is the biggest unknown in permit-based prospecting. Whether a county permit is still open, because the Miami-Dade layer publishes no status field at all. Which trade the work is, since there is no trade code. And what your close rate would be, because EarlyFloor has never had a paying subscriber, so there is no close rate to quote.

How do I check that a row is real?

Every row carries its county permit ID and the exact county text that classified it. Take any permit ID from /sample.html, query the endpoint published in section 1, and compare digit by digit. That is the intended use of the sample page: verification before payment, not a teaser.

Related: run the Miami-Dade permit query yourself · permit leads vs marketplace leads · what is covered and what is not · a real week of rows.