What we built, and why.
PullFirst collects Minnesota building permits from city and county portals across the state, normalizes them into a single format, and ships monthly CSV editions plus an API. Buy one city-month as a CSV, or query the dataset through the API.
Minnesota permit data is split across dozens of city and county systems.
Every Minnesota city runs its own permit portal. Each one picked its own software, each exports records differently, and each updates on its own cadence. None of them share a format, and none of them talk to each other.
To get a clean list of last week’s permits statewide you visit every portal, handle every export quirk, merge the results, and do it again next week. State licensing, state and AG enforcement, and federal OSHA inspections live in their own separate systems on top of that.
One format. Buy a city, or query the API.
PullFirst crawls every Minnesota jurisdiction it covers and normalizes the records into a single format. Every permit carries the same fields: permit number, address, contractor, work type, value, issue date, parcel ID, and fees.
Downloads are for one-off city editions. Pick a city, preview a free sample, pay once, and the month’s CSV is emailed to you — fresh while the month is still open, frozen once it closes. The API is for recurring programmatic access and cross-city queries, with a free self-serve sandbox key for evaluation.
Minnesota contractor licenses, state and Attorney General enforcement actions, and federal OSHA inspections ride along the same pipeline and share the same output shape.
Questions? Email contact@pullfirst.com.