Permit Signal · Electrical & fire alarm

The City publishes the permit. We tell you whether your trade is already on that address.

For electrical and fire-alarm contractors. Permits lead across trades, not inside one — so we send you the renovation and new-construction records your trade follows, and check the address for a permit in your trade before the record reaches you. Every row carries the City’s own record, so you can check us before you act. Based anywhere you can drive from: what matters is whether you bid the work, not where you park the trucks.

Send me 3 real permits — free See the numbers first

Three real permits, free — nothing to sign, no card, no call.

The permits we read are City of Chicago's today. If you bid work there, the feed is for you — whatever state your yard is in.

Last read 2026-08-07 22:26 CT ·

Renovation → electrical · 180 days

16.1%

FORENSIC_AUDIT_REPORT §2 · n = 11,584 · measured 2026-08-01

Roofing → more roofing · same address

0.5%

measure_followon.py · n = 2,130 · measured 2026-08-07

Electrical-scope permits · week of 2026-07-22

160

measure_counts.py · ydr8-5enu · measured 2026-08-07

Chicago records go public

Next morning

City of Chicago ydr8-5enu · measured 2026-07-29

Illustration: the Chicago skyline in near-darkness before sunrise, seen from the south along the lakefront, with scattered amber lights showing through heavy haze. — Illustration, not a photograph. Chicago before sunrise from the south lakefront — the hour the morning read runs.

What a city portal cannot do

Before a record reaches you, we ask the City one more question.

A permit tells you money is committed at an address. It does not tell you whether your part of that job is still open. So on every cross-trade record we re-query the City file for permits in your trade at that same address, and print the answer on the row with the date we checked it:

no electrical permit on file at this address since approval — checked 2026-08-04

And when we could not check, the row says that instead, rather than implying a clean address:

not re-checked against the City file for this issue

An absent permit is not proof the work is unassigned — it is proof nobody has pulled the permit yet. That is the honest version, and it is the one we print.

The engine

Source. Connect. Deliver. Every morning.

01 SOURCE

Every morning the engine reads four public government datasets — Chicago building permits, FMCSA registration orders, Chicago business licences, and the city's business-owner register. Published by the agencies themselves: no login, no scraping, no vendor in the middle.

ydr8-5enu · wb4f-neki · r5kz-chrr · ezma-pppn

02 CONNECT

Raw registers are noisy, and the noise has a name. Of 2,712 permits the City filed as new construction in one measured cohort, 774 were tents, mobile stages and marquees. They are not buildings and they wreck the numbers: those temporary records showed a 36.8% electrical follow-on rate against 3.4% for the 1,938 genuinely structural ones. We separate them before anything is sent, because mixing them is how a mobile stage gets mailed to an electrician as a construction job. We found that defect in our own outgoing batch.

2,712 → 1,938 structural · 774 temporary removed · FORENSIC_AUDIT_REPORT §2 · 2026-08-01

03 DELIVER

No dashboard to learn — it's an email. It lands cut to your trade, with the City's own record link on every row, the open-trade check on every cross-trade record, and the measured odds for that pairing printed next to it. Odds are measured history, not a guarantee.

Email · City record on every row · no login

Next morning read

--:--:--

07:00 America/Chicago, daily — the sources refresh whether anyone is watching or not

Illustration: ordinary Chicago building stock under overcast dawn light — brick three-flats, a low-rise commercial strip, exterior fire escapes and rooftop conduit. — Illustration, not a photograph of any address. Chicago's ordinary building stock — the kind of property most of these records are written against.

The territory

Thirty days of building permits, dot by dot.

Each amber dot is one building permit from the last 30 days, placed at the coordinates the city publishes with the record. The dense cluster on the lakefront is the Loop.

One dot= 1 permit · 2,892 plotted · 30 days to 2026-08-08

City of Chicago ydr8-5enu · 2,892 permit locations · pulled 2026-08-08

Permits issued per week

WK OF 2026-05-112026-07-27

12 complete weeks · 7,720 permits

City of Chicago ydr8-5enu · issued per week · pulled 2026-08-08

Nothing here is our estimate.

Every figure below is a count against a public dataset, measured on the date shown, with the dataset ID printed next to it so you can run the same query. No login, no scraping, no vendor in the middle.

Measured figures behind Permit Signal
Figure	What it is	Source
3,074	Building permits issued in Chicago in the last 30 days	measure_counts.py · 2026-08-07
5,475	Distinct contractors on those permits across 90 days — 2,226 pulled one this month	measure_counts.py · 2026-08-07
160	Electrical-scope express permits issued 2026-07-22 through 2026-07-29	measure_counts.py · 2026-08-07
16.1%	Renovation permits followed by an electrical permit at the same address within 180 days (n = 11,584)	FORENSIC_AUDIT_REPORT §2 · 2026-08-01
0.5%	Roofing permits followed by more roofing work at the same address (n = 2,130) — which is why we route across trades, not inside one	measure_followon.py · 2026-08-07
6.3x	Buildings with a CDPH demolition or asbestos notice pulled a permit within a year at 54.3%, against 8.6% for 2,733 comparable same-area buildings (n = 911)	measure_cdph_control.py · 2026-08-04
774	Of 2,712 permits the City filed as new construction, 774 were tents, stages and marquees — we exclude them before anything is sent	FORENSIC_AUDIT_REPORT §2 · 2026-08-01

Measured between 2026-07-29 and 2026-08-04 against City of Chicago datasets ydr8-5enu and qhb4-qx8k. Every measurement script is in the repo and re-runnable.

The objection

This is public data. Why would you pay us for it?

The records are free. The reading is what you buy. We do not sell access to anything — the dataset is open and unauthenticated, and its ID is printed all over this site precisely so you can go around us.

Here is what going around us looks like. In July 2026 the City retired the permit type PERMIT - ELECTRIC WIRING. It returns no deprecation flag and no partial result — it returns zero records, for all time, as though electrical permits had never existed. Electrical work now files under PERMIT – EXPRESS PERMIT PROGRAM, spelled with an en-dash, not a hyphen. Type the obvious hyphen and you match zero rows, and the query looks perfectly reasonable in the editor. A man running a saved query would have shipped himself an empty electrical feed for the whole of July and never known, because an empty feed and a slow week look identical.

We found it on 2026-07-29 while building sample packets by hand. That week carried 165 electrical-scope express permits a filter on the retired type would have silently dropped.

The full worked example, with the query log

Kova Signals also runs three feeds for other trades and industries — truck insurance, Cook County vendors, and one-off builds. See all four

Proof before payment. Three steps.

Ask for three real permits.

Tell us your trade and we send three real permits selected for it — free, nothing to sign, each with the City's own record link attached. Check them before you read another line.

Judge a real week.

If the three are the kind of record you’d want every morning, reply “send this week’s” and the full current week arrives — still free — so you judge the feed on a real week, not a sample.

Subscribe.

The feed arrives every cycle after that. If it ever stops being worth it, cancelling should be the obvious thing to do — we would rather you did that than keep paying for a login.

9-for-12 prepay · Permit Signal

Pay 9 months up front — $2,241 — and you get 12. No countdown timers, no invented scarcity.

Prepay$249 × 9: $2,241
Months 10–12: $0
Delivered: 12 months

Ask about the prepay

Methodology

Public records only

Every dataset we read is published by the City of Chicago or the US DOT / FMCSA, in the open, under the IDs printed in the footer. Run the same queries; you will get the same numbers.

Every row cites its source

Each figure on this site carries its dataset ID and the date it was measured, inline. Each record in a feed carries the government's own link to itself.

What we won’t show you

A close rate. We have not measured one, so we do not have one. Where a figure is missing on this site, it is missing because it was never measured. And two trades we stopped selling, because when we measured them, targeting them came out worse than random — roofing at −0.06 points of lift and masonry at −1.03. The measurement is on the about page.