One Year, Four Metros: What 221,175 Building Permits Reveal About Construction Demand
A trailing year of building permits across Austin, San Antonio, Colorado Springs and Sacramento — 221,175 records. What the data shows about HVAC, roofing, solar and EV demand, and why some metros can answer questions others can't.
One Year, Four Metros: What 221,175 Building Permits Reveal About Construction Demand
The numbers. Over a trailing 12-month window (mid-2025 → mid-2026) we compiled 221,175 building-permit records across four US metros — Austin–Round Rock, San Antonio–New Braunfels, Colorado Springs, and Sacramento–Roseville. The counts below are what each metro’s own permit classifications report, stated as counts.
- HVAC is the quiet giant of residential permitting: 10,810 HVAC/mechanical permits in Austin, 12,158 in San Antonio–NB, 7,469 in Sacramento — the only vertical strong enough to report in three of the four metros.
- San Antonio–NB recorded 5,981 roofing permits in twelve months — a dated, official-record measure of roofing demand no survey can match. Sacramento adds 4,537.
- Sacramento is the only studied metro where solar and EV-charger activity are directly readable: 1,986 solar permits and 660 EV-charger permits in one year.
- Our files capture 80–89% of officially reported new-residential activity where a like-for-like comparison is computable: San Antonio 80.7%, Colorado Springs 89.2%, Sacramento ≥80.9% — validated month-by-month against the US Census Building Permits Survey.
There is no national permit feed
US building-permit data lives in hundreds of separate city and county systems, and at scale it is close to unusable as-is. Anyone who wants to answer a simple question — how many roofs were replaced in this metro last year? — has to go jurisdiction by jurisdiction and reconcile four different ways of describing the same work. We did that once, so the answer is a query instead of a project.
Four metros, four ways of describing a building
| Metro | Records (12 mo) | What its data can tell you |
|---|---|---|
| Austin–Round Rock, TX | 60,450 | Trade-level detail (Electrical 15,827; Plumbing 14,609; Mechanical 10,631) with clean work classes — but no roofing or solar vocabulary |
| San Antonio–New Braunfels, TX | 87,829 line items (~75,100 distinct permits) | The most granular permit-type vocabulary studied |
| Colorado Springs, CO | 20,994 | Numeric construction-type codes rather than words. Near-100% valuation reporting ($3.27B declared, median $15,000) |
| Sacramento–Roseville, CA | 51,902 | The most descriptive work classifications — vertical signals readable directly |
The finding that matters: the same question is answerable in one metro and invisible in another. “How many re-roofs?” is a one-line query in San Antonio and Sacramento, and unanswerable from Austin’s trade-permit vocabulary alone. A national number assembled by naive keyword-matching would quietly undercount some metros and overcount others.
The vertical signals
Twelve-month permit counts, shown only where the metro’s own permit classifications name the vertical directly:
| Vertical | Austin | San Antonio–NB | Colorado Springs | Sacramento |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HVAC / mechanical | 10,810 | 12,158 | n/r¹ | 7,469 |
| Roofing / re-roof | n/r¹ | 5,981 | n/r¹ | 4,537 |
| Solar / PV | n/r¹ | ~871² | n/r¹ | 1,986 |
| Pool / spa | n/r¹ | ~427² | n/r¹ | 738 |
| EV charger | n/r¹ | n/r¹ | n/r¹ | 660 |
¹ Not reportable from that metro’s permit classifications — publishing it would mean publishing a false zero or an unverifiable guess. ² Detected, but with attribution caveats — treat as indicative rather than exact.
And one we refuse to publish anywhere: kitchen & bath remodels. Every studied jurisdiction bundles them into generic alteration/remodel classes. In Sacramento, counting the bundle would overstate the true kitchen-and-bath number roughly 34-fold. Vendors selling “kitchen remodel leads from permit data” are, in these four metros at least, selling the bundle.
How complete is it? We checked against the Census
Where a like-for-like comparison is computable — new single-family permits against the US Census Building Permits Survey’s 1-unit authorizations, month by month over 11 published months — our files capture:
- San Antonio–NB: 80.7% of officially reported new-residential volume
- Colorado Springs: 89.2%
- Sacramento: ≥80.9% (a floor)
- Austin: not computable as like-for-like — reported as N/A rather than estimated
The Census survey counts only new housing units. Our files carry 3.5×–15.5× more records than those aggregates — trade permits, remodels, re-roofs, equipment change-outs — which is exactly where the vertical signals above live.
What this means if you buy permit data
- Official records beat surveys for demand measurement. A re-roof permit is a household that actually spent money, dated and geolocated — not a stated intention.
- What a metro can tell you varies enormously. Sacramento is a vertical-intelligence source; Colorado Springs is a valuation and new-construction source.
- Valuation reporting is wildly uneven — near-100% in Colorado Springs and 94% in Sacramento, against 8% in Austin and 2% in San Antonio. Cross-metro dollar comparisons drawn from raw permit data are not honest without saying so.
- Ask any vendor what their numbers exclude. If they can’t tell you which verticals their data genuinely supports and which it doesn’t, the number is a guess.
About
PermitExport sells historical building-permit record files for US metros, compiled fresh on order. Independent compilation — not an official record.