Week-one San Antonio foundation permits: a drainage crew's route

Hector runs a two-truck gutter and French-drain crew out of the South Side of San Antonio. His best jobs are houses that just had foundation work, because the repair crew almost always tells the homeowner the same thing on the way out: get the water away from the slab, or the clay will move again.

He used to find those homes by luck, from a neighbor or a yard sign left behind by the pier crew. A City of San Antonio Foundation Repair Permit is the earlier signal: the city publishes it with the property address, the contractor on the permit, the council district, and the issue date.

What changed

He bought the SatxLead permits pack for $19. After Stripe checkout, the CSVs were emailed directly from Armorlight: 7-day and 30-day files of building permits the city issued. Hector only needed one filter, permit_type, set to Foundation Repair Permit.

That week

• Mon: opened the 7-day file: 1,467 permits issued Oct 19 to Oct 23. He skipped the plumbing, mechanical, electrical and tree permits and filtered down to 79 Foundation Repair Permits, pulled by 29 different contractors.
• Tue: sorted those 79 by council_district. District 3 had 13, Districts 1 and 10 had 12 each, District 7 had 11 and District 2 had 10, so more than two-thirds of the week sat in five districts. He grouped the addresses into two loops for the trucks.
• Wed: left a door hanger at each house on the first loop: a free downspout and grading check, a photo of a finished French drain, and a note that drainage work protects the foundation repair they just paid for. A homeowner who signed a pier contract that week is already thinking about water.
• Thu: opened the 30-day file for the bigger picture: 259 Foundation Repair Permits issued Sep 28 to Oct 23 by 72 contractors. District 10 led with 52, Districts 1 and 3 had 35 each and District 2 had 31, so he put District 10 on a standing every-other-week door-hanger loop.

The file became his Monday planning sheet: every new foundation repair permit is a house where the owner has just learned their soil moves, and the drainage crew that shows up that week gets the call.

Illustrative scenario: Hector is a composite operator, not a named customer. The permit counts, permit types, council districts, contractor counts and dates come from real SatxLead 7-day and 30-day permit files from the latest weekly refresh (generated Oct 26, 2026).

Armorlight Enterprises, LLC is not affiliated with the City of San Antonio.