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City of Sacramento building permits: export the permit records

Permit records from the city’s Accela portal, in a spreadsheet you can refresh.

City of Sacramento building permits are published through the city’s Accela Citizen Access portal, one record per filing. If you need those public records for research, you can use the Accela Building Permit Scraper on Apify to export permits from that agency’s portal. This page covers the city’s building permits only.

What you can export

Building permits

The Accela Building Permit Scraper reads the public portal for a date range or a rolling lastDays window and returns one row per permit. A row contains permitNumber, permitType, status, appliedDate, addressFull, detailUrl, and valuation where the portal publishes it. Turn on includeDetails to include contractor details. You can use permitTypeContains to filter by words in the permit type; the published Sacramento example uses this filter to select roofing and solar work.

Ready-to-run example: Sacramento roofing and solar permits, last 14 days

What the data does not tell you

  • An application is not an issued permit. Keep that distinction in mind when reading the application date and status in an exported row.
  • The agency decides what its portal publishes. Permit type names differ between agencies, so use the names published by the agency when choosing words for a type filter.
  • A portal can block automated access or be down for maintenance. Either is a source failure; it does not establish that no records exist for your search.
  • Code enforcement is not available through automated access in Sacramento today. In testing, the Sacramento portal blocked automated access to its code enforcement search. The building permit search works and is the basis of the published example above.

How to export it

  1. Open the Accela Building Permit Scraper on Apify. You need a free Apify account to use it. Check current pricing on the actor page before running the tool.
  2. Set the agency to the City of Sacramento using its agency code and portal URL. Choose a date range or a rolling lastDays window. For the roofing and solar search, you can start with the published example.
  3. Set permitTypeContains if you want to filter by permit type, and turn on includeDetails if you need contractor details. Run the tool, then check the run log for limits or source failures when reviewing the results.
  4. Export the results as CSV or Excel. Remember that valuation appears only where published, and contractor details require includeDetails to be on.
  5. Import the exported file into a spreadsheet for your research. Use the permit status alongside the application date when reviewing the rows, and retain the source links as references.

The same tool reads other Accela agencies when you supply their agency code and portal URL.

Keep it current

Schedule a repeat run with the agency and permit filters you need. A rolling lastDays window lets you use a relative date window for repeat runs. Enable sinceLastRun if you want only permits the tool has not seen before. The portal publishes on the agency’s own schedule, so treat each export as a starting point for research.