Week-one Seattle roofing permits: a North Seattle crew's route

Jordan runs a three-person residential roofing crew out of Maple Leaf / North Seattle, tearing off composition roofs and building small additions on bungalows and craftsman houses from Wedgwood to Crown Hill. His best weeks start with addresses where Seattle just issued a roof permit or an addition/alteration, because those owners already decided to spend money on the house and are still talking to contractors.

Referral loops and Nextdoor posts brought work, but slowly, and by the time a neighbor mentioned a tear-off the job was often already awarded. A brand-new city permit is the earlier signal he wanted: Seattle publishes issued building, roof and demolition permits with work address, ZIP, permit type and a short description.

What changed

He bought SeaLead for $19. After Stripe checkout, the CSVs were emailed directly from Armorlight: 7-day and 30-day files from the City of Seattle's public building-permits feed, with permit class, type, description, street address, ZIP, status and issued date. The public file also carries a contractor column, but Jordan uses SeaLead to spot work addresses early, not as a contact list.

That week

• Mon: opened the 7-day file: 89 Issued permits from Oct 5 to Oct 9. Seventy were Single Family/Duplex, 11 Commercial and 8 Multifamily. He filtered permit_type_mapped to Roof and got 6 pure roof jobs, then kept Addition/Alteration (49 of the 89) because those descriptions often mean dormers, decks and roof changes on the same house.
• Tue: sorted by ZIP. 98115 (Maple Leaf / Wedgwood) led the week with 11 permits, then 98199 and 98122 with 8 each, and 98177 and 98103 with 7 — right in the North Seattle belt he already drives. He skipped the denser downtown and Capitol Hill commercial rows and booked a door-hanger loop for the single-family addresses in 98115, 98117 and 98177.
• Wed: pulled the six Roof-type rows and the Addition/Alteration descriptions that mentioned roof work. One Maple Leaf flat-roof TPO job and a Magnolia composition tear-off sat inside his radius; he left a short estimate card offering a same-week scope before the owner locked a national chain.
• Thu: opened the 30-day file for the bigger picture: 437 permits issued Sep 12 to Oct 9, including 34 Roof-type, 269 Addition/Alteration and 38 Demolition. Top ZIPs were 98115 (44), 98117 (29), 98112 (22), 98122 (21) and 98105 (21). He mapped the North Seattle roof and addition addresses by ZIP and planned next week's route block by block instead of cold-calling whole streets.

The file became his weekly planning sheet: every new roof or addition/alteration permit in North Seattle is a reason to be on that block this week, without buying a list or naming strangers from the contractor column.

Illustrative scenario: Jordan is a composite operator, not a named customer. The permit counts, types, ZIPs and dates come from real SeaLead 7-day and 30-day files generated Oct 12, 2026 for the weekly refresh.

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