How fresh is the permit data?

The free 2026 download contains every 2025 Massachusetts permit record. Paid alerts refresh daily, so recency — the single biggest scoring factor — stays accurate.

Will the homeowner know I got their information from a public record?

Building permits are public record in Massachusetts. Referencing the filed permit in your outreach reads as local awareness, not as an intrusion.

Do I need software to score leads?

No. A scoring model can live in a spreadsheet. The point is to rank leads by a few weighted factors so your best hours go to the best permits first.

What is the most important scoring factor?

Recency, for most trades. A permit filed this week sits inside the optimal window; one filed months ago has often already been worked. Trigger strength and project value come next.

Permit Lead Scoring: How to Rank MA Permits Before You Call

By the permits.llc team · Last reviewed March 30, 2026 · Optimal window: Ongoing

TL;DR

Permit lead scoring Massachusetts ranks permits so your outreach time goes where it converts.
Score on recency, trigger strength, project value, geography fit, and contactability.
Recency and trigger strength usually carry the most weight; the model can live in a spreadsheet.
Highest-value move: work the top of your scored list during your best hours, every day.

Most contractors work a permit list top to bottom, or worse, in whatever order it downloaded. Every permit gets the same effort, which means the best leads get no more attention than the weakest. That is how a strong lead filed this week ends up worked after a stale one from two months ago — and lost to a competitor in the meantime.

A permit is a signal about the homeowner, not the contractor who pulled it, but not every signal is equally strong. A bedroom-addition permit filed three days ago in your core town is a different prospect than a small repair permit filed two months ago at the edge of your range. Treating them the same wastes your most valuable resource: the hours you have for outreach.

Lead scoring fixes that. It is a simple way to rank permits by a few weighted factors so your best hours go to the permits most likely to convert. No software required — a spreadsheet does it.

Why scoring beats working a list in order

Scoring beats sequential work because outreach time is finite and permits are not equal. You can only make so many calls or send so many mailers in a day, so the order you work them in directly determines your return. Ranking by likelihood-to-convert puts your effort where it pays.

Consider the cost of getting it wrong. The optimal window for most trades is measured in weeks. A high-value permit filed three days ago is squarely inside that window; if it sits at the bottom of an unsorted list and you reach it in two weeks, you have burned a third of its window for no reason. Meanwhile a low-value, aged permit at the top of the list got your first and best effort. Scoring inverts that — freshest, strongest, highest-value first.

This compounds with cadence. The follow-up cadence guide shows that multiple touches win jobs; scoring decides which leads earn the full cadence and which get a single touch. And it sharpens ROI: as the measuring permit-lead ROI breakdown shows, concentrating effort on high-scoring leads lowers your cost per booked job without buying more data.

The goal is not to ignore weaker leads. It is to reach the strong ones first, while they are still worth reaching.

The factors that should drive your score

Build your score from four or five factors that predict conversion for your trade. These are the ones that matter most across nearly every business.

Factor	What it measures	Why it matters
Recency	Days since the permit was filed	Fresh permits sit inside the optimal window; old ones are often already worked
Trigger strength	How directly the permit predicts your job	A code-driven trigger (septic, egress) beats a loose one
Project value	Size or valuation of the project	Bigger projects justify more follow-up effort
Geography fit	Distance from your core service area	In-territory jobs cost less to win and serve
Contactability	Whether you have a way to reach the owner	A permit you can act on outranks one you cannot

Recency usually carries the most weight, because it maps directly to the optimal window. Trigger strength is close behind — a permit that legally requires your service, like a Title 5 septic trigger, converts far better than a permit where your work is optional. Project value justifies effort: a full kitchen warrants the full cadence; a minor permit may get one touch. Geography fit and contactability are the practical filters that keep you from chasing jobs you cannot economically win.

How to build a simple scoring model

Start with a spreadsheet and the five factors above. Give each a score from one to five, assign a weight that reflects your trade, multiply, and sum. The total ranks every permit on the list.

A practical default weighting for a fast-window trade like an HVAC contractor: recency at 35 percent, trigger strength at 25 percent, project value at 20 percent, geography fit at 15 percent, contactability at 5 percent. A slower, relationship-driven trade like an insurance broker or a real estate investor might lower recency and raise project value or trigger strength, because their windows are longer and their best deals are worth a patient pursuit.

The exact numbers matter less than the discipline. Score every permit the day it arrives, sort highest-first, and work the top of the list during your prime outreach hours. A permit scoring near the top gets the full multi-touch cadence; one near the bottom gets a single mailer or none at all. The model turns a flat list into a priority queue.

Working your scored list

Run the list daily, because recency decays daily. A permit that scored high on Monday scores lower by Friday simply because it aged, so a fresh sort each morning keeps your priorities honest. Pull the new filings, score them, merge them into the ranked list, and start at the top.

Match your effort to the score. The top tier — fresh, strong-trigger, high-value, in-territory — earns immediate outreach and the full cadence. The middle tier gets a touch or two. The bottom tier gets a single low-cost mailer or waits until you have spare capacity. This is how a one-person shop and a large operation both make the most of the same data: the small shop works only the top tier, the large one works deeper down the list.

Keep outreach compliant as you go. Phone and text fall under TCPA and email under CAN-SPAM, covered in the compliance guide — scoring tells you who to contact, not permission to skip the rules.

Common mistakes that break a scoring model

A scoring model fails in predictable ways, and avoiding them is most of the work. The first mistake is over-weighting a single factor — usually project value. Chasing only the biggest permits feels smart, but a fresh, code-driven mid-size job often converts faster and cheaper than a large project the homeowner is still years from finishing. Balance the factors rather than letting one dominate.

The second mistake is treating the score as fixed. A permit's score is mostly a function of recency, so it must be recalculated as the permit ages. A model scored once and never refreshed quietly drifts out of date, and stale high-scores send you chasing leads competitors already closed.

The third mistake is scoring leads you have no realistic path to win — out of territory, wrong project type, or no way to make contact. A high score on an unreachable lead is a distraction. Filter those out before scoring, not after, so the ranked list contains only permits you can actually act on.

The last mistake is never revisiting the weights. The point of a model is to improve. Track which scored leads became jobs, and adjust the weights toward the factors that predicted your real wins. A scoring model that never changes is a guess that never gets tested.

How exclusivity makes scoring pay off

County exclusivity is what makes a scoring model worth building. permits.llc assigns leads on a non-compete county basis — one business per niche per county, held until cancel — so the high-scoring permits you identify are yours alone to work, on your own schedule.

Without exclusivity, scoring loses its edge. If three competitors download the same list and the same top-scoring permit, ranking it first does not help — they ranked it first too, and the lead becomes a race. Exclusivity removes that race. The strongest permits in your county come only to you, so working them in priority order actually wins the jobs rather than just reaching the same crowded homeowner faster.

That is the quiet logic behind scoring: it only pays to invest in identifying your best leads if those leads are yours to convert. For more on the model that makes it work, see how county exclusivity works.

How permits.llc fits in

permits.llc aggregates 167,000+ Massachusetts permit records across 92 cities and 11 counties, refreshed daily from official municipal portals. Every record carries the inputs a score needs — property address, permit type, and filed date, with valuation on many — so you can build your model directly against real filings. Daily refresh keeps recency accurate, which is the factor that decays fastest and matters most.

Start with the free 2026 dataset: download every 2025 Massachusetts permit for your trade and build your scoring model against it at the free MA permit download. When you want fresh, exclusive permits to score each morning, set up daily alerts for your county and work your ranked list from the top down.