Are purchased leads ever the better choice?

Yes. If you need work this week, have no sales process, and can answer the phone within minutes, buying leads is faster to stand up and requires no patience. Public-record prospecting rewards consistency over weeks and months, and it is a poor fit for a business that cannot work a pipeline.

Are building permits public records?

Yes. Building permits, planning entitlements, and environmental filings are public records published by the agency that issues them. The difficulty is not access, it is that every jurisdiction publishes differently, on its own schedule, in its own format, which is the work a monitoring platform does for you.

Reviewed August 22, 2026

Permit leads and purchased leads solve different problems.

Q: What is the difference between a purchased lead and a permit lead?

A purchased lead is a form submission from someone who has already decided to look for a contractor, normally sold to several contractors at once. A permit lead is a public record filed with a government agency before the buying decision is made. The purchased lead has better intent; the permit lead has better timing, exclusivity in practice, and a verifiable record behind it.

These are not two versions of the same thing, and the honest answer to which is better is that it depends on whether your problem is this week or this year. Here is the actual difference, including where buying leads still wins.

The short answer

In one paragraph.

A purchased lead is somebody who has already decided to hire a contractor, sold to you and usually to several of your competitors at the same moment. A permit lead is a public record filed with a government agency before that decision gets made, which nobody has sold to anyone. Purchased leads buy you intent. Public records buy you time. If you can only have one and you need revenue this month, buy leads. If you are trying to stop renting your pipeline, the records are already public and already free to read.

Side by side

Six dimensions that actually differ.

DimensionPurchased leadsPublic-record prospecting

Who else gets itCommonly sold to several contractors at once. The homeowner is contacted by everyone who bought it, usually within minutes.A public record is available to anyone who looks, but almost nobody looks. In practice you are competing with whoever else is monitoring, which today is very few businesses in most markets.

TimingThe prospect raised their hand just now. Intent is immediate and real, which is the single biggest advantage of buying leads.The record surfaces before the buying decision, sometimes long before. Deal Radar times each alert to when that trade is normally bought rather than when the record was filed.

Cost structurePer lead. Cost scales with volume and rises when competitors bid up your category. You pay again for the same address next year.Subscription. Cost is flat regardless of how many signals surface, so the economics improve as your market gets busier rather than worse.

Effort requiredLow. Answer the phone fast. This is a real advantage if you do not have a sales motion and do not want to build one.Higher. Someone has to review drafted outreach and actually send it. The platform stages the work; it does not remove it.

What you know going inA form submission. Contact details and a stated need, with variable accuracy and no independent record behind it.A filed public record: address, scope, valuation where declared, and the licensed contractor named on it, resolved through the CSLB registry.

Consumer contactYou call the homeowner directly. They submitted a form, so the call is expected.Deal Radar never contacts consumers. Where the audience is a property owner, the resolved contact is a mailing address and the drafted artifact is a letter or postcard you send.

Against our own interest

When you should not buy Deal Radar.

You need work in the next ten days. Public records are an earlier signal, which also means a slower one. Buy leads, run ads, call past customers. Come back when the emergency is over.
Nobody will do the outreach. The platform drafts and stages; a person still has to review and send. If there is no one to do that, the subscription buys you a very well-organised list you never work.
Your market is not covered yet. Coverage is honest on this site and there are markets where we have ingested nothing. A market page that shows no numbers is telling you the truth, and paying for a market we cannot yet see into would be a bad trade.
Your trade is not permit-driven. Some work simply does not leave a public record before it is bought. If your jobs do not touch permits, sales, entitlements, or code enforcement, this is the wrong tool.

The mechanism

Why the timing gap exists at all.

A homeowner does not fill in a form the day they decide to redo the yard. The sequence runs the other way: a pool permit is pulled, a shell goes in over about six weeks, and only then does anyone start thinking about the dirt around it. The permit was public on day one. By the time that same job becomes a purchased lead, the record has been sitting in a public database for a month and a half.

That gap is the whole product. Deal Radar keys each record to aCSLB classificationand fires the alert at the point that trade is normally bought, which is a different day for the pool builder, the landscaper, and the fencing contractor reading the same permit.

See it against your market

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Greater Sacramento is the market open for subscription today. It covers Sacramento County and Yolo County records, including the cities inside them. Request another county rather than paying for a market we cannot see into.