How to Buy a National List of Vacation Rental Owners

What a national file of US vacation rental owners can hold, what to ask a list seller, how to filter 283,611 permit records, and how to roll out by state.

Published Oct 29, 2026 · 32 min read · by Lead Mining Company

A company that sells to vacation rental owners in every part of the country usually asks for one file: every owner, every state, each with a phone and an email. That file does not exist in the form most buyers picture. What exists is a patchwork of public permit registers, kept by the cities, counties and states that require short-term rentals to register, plus whatever a seller adds on top. A national list is only as good as the registers behind it and the work done to join them.

This guide is for companies that want national coverage: software vendors, manufacturers, franchise systems, insurers and other suppliers who sell to owners in many states at once. It covers what a national file can and cannot hold, the questions to put to any seller, how to read and filter a national file, worked examples that cut a large file down to a target list, how to plan a rollout state by state, the outreach rules that apply, and what each way of building national coverage costs in time and money.

The numbers come from our own national file, PermitPulse, as of October 2026: 283,611 short-term rental records in 28 states, of which 127,924 carry a phone number or an email. That is 45%. We use our file as the example because we can show every count behind it. The questions and the methods work on any seller's file, and you should hold ours to the same standard.

What a national owner list is made of

Three different products get sold as a national list of vacation rental owners. Permit records are filings an owner made with a government agency, under their own name, at a specific address. Listing data is collected from booking sites and describes the rental, not the person who owns it. Consumer marketing files are general databases of households matched to some sign of rental activity. The comparison of Airbnb lead sources covers the differences in detail. This guide is about the first kind, because it is the only one where the owner identified themselves to a public body.

A national permit file is a merge of many local files. Each register has its own fields, its own status codes, its own permit types and its own update schedule. One register publishes the owner's phone and email. The next publishes an address and a permit number. A third keeps every application since 2017, including the ones that were denied. When a seller joins these into one table, the columns line up, but the meaning behind them does not. A national file is really 28 state files with different shapes that happen to share column headers.

That has one practical consequence that runs through the rest of this guide: a national average is close to useless for planning. Our file is 45% contactable overall, but the share by state runs from 0% to 100%. Every decision about channel, budget and timing has to be made per state, and sometimes per register.

Where permit registers exist and where they do not

There is no national short-term rental license. Permits are issued by the places that choose to require them, and a national file can only contain the places that both require a permit and publish the list. That gives four kinds of coverage.

Statewide license files

Florida licenses vacation rentals at the state level. Section 509.241 of the Florida Statutes says each public lodging establishment “shall obtain a license from the division,” and that licenses are renewed annually. Because the license is statewide, the Florida file reaches every town in one register: 50,110 records from the Department of Business and Professional Regulation's vacation rental licenses as of October 2026. Wisconsin is the other clear case. Its agriculture and consumer protection department (DATCP) says that lodging rented to a tourist or transient requires a permit, and its tourist rooming house file holds 12,919 records. The Florida license guide and the Wisconsin guide explain each file.

Statewide tax rolls

Texas has no statewide short-term rental license, but the Texas Comptroller says state hotel occupancy tax must be collected and remitted for all short-term rentals in Texas, and that the tax covers hotels, motels and bed and breakfasts as well as condominiums, apartments and houses rented for less than 30 days. So the hotel tax permit roll lists rental owners next to hotels, across the whole state. Our file holds 43,130 records from that roll. It is the biggest address-level file in the country, and it needs filtering before it is a rental list, as shown below.

City and county registers

Everywhere else, the register belongs to a city or a county. Nashville, New Orleans, San Diego, Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Asheville, Louisville and dozens more keep their own. Our file draws on 64 public registers in all; the register directory lists each one with its record count. Coverage in these states is a set of dots on the map, not the whole state. California, for example, has no state program, so a California file is San Diego, San Bernardino County, Sonoma County, Marin County, Sacramento and other local registers added together.

Places with no register to read

Some states block local permit programs. Idaho Code 67-6539 says “No county or city shall require a license, fee, permit, certification, or registration to operate a short-term rental.” Iowa Code 414.1 bars a city from adopting or enforcing any regulation relating to short-term rental properties, including a conditional use permit requirement, outside a short list of purposes, and says a city shall not require a license or permit fee. With no permits, there is no register, so no permit-based national file can contain Idaho or Iowa owners. The Idaho and Iowa guide covers what is left in those states.

Other places run a permit program but do not publish the list online. The records are still public, but getting them means a records request to that agency. And a state can require registration without that registration reaching any national file. Hawaii's Department of Taxation requires a Transient Accommodations Tax certificate from anyone who rents a transient accommodation for less than 180 consecutive days. The Hawaii records in our file come from the City and County of Honolulu's short-term rental register, not from the state tax list, and Honolulu says short-term rentals are only permitted in resort-zoned areas and a couple of specific apartment-zoned areas.

Two more gaps apply everywhere. Owners who rent without a permit are not on any register. And a permit record says nothing about how a property performs. When a seller says “national,” the accurate meaning is every register the seller has found and can read, in the states where registers exist.

What our national file contains, state by state

The table shows all 28 states in our file as of October 2026, with the number of records and how many carry a phone or an email. It counts short-term rental records only. Five of the 64 registers we read are hotel and lodging license files (Florida and Wisconsin licensed lodging, Missouri's licensed lodging establishments, Denver's standalone lodging licenses and the New Orleans hotel list). Those 9,382 records are kept out of the short-term rental file and are not sold as short-term rental data.

State	Records	With phone or email	Share
Texas	57,734	9,017	16%
Florida	53,152	39,708	75%
Louisiana	34,063	29,350	86%
Tennessee	19,532	0	0%
Washington	29,622	879	3%
California	24,522	19,420	79%
Wisconsin	13,374	13,064	98%
Colorado	10,105	304	3%
Oregon	6,943	0	0%
Arizona	5,503	4,790	87%
Illinois	4,231	0	0%
Kentucky	4,029	2,531	63%
Georgia	3,675	3,043	83%
South Carolina	2,896	0	0%
New Mexico	2,183	1,275	58%
Ohio	1,952	1,910	98%
North Carolina	1,734	0	0%
Minnesota	1,580	936	59%
Michigan	1,530	1,147	75%
Hawaii	1,490	0	0%
Pennsylvania	1,326	0	0%
Nevada	765	278	36%
Utah	728	60	8%
Massachusetts	500	0	0%
Wyoming	213	0	0%
Virginia	163	146	90%
Maine	47	47	100%
Missouri	19	19	100%
All 28 states	283,611	127,924	45%

Four patterns matter more than the total.

Contact details are concentrated. Fourteen states have a phone or email on at least half their records. Together they hold 145,792 records and 117,386 of the contactable ones, which is 92% of every contactable record in the file. Florida, Louisiana, California and Wisconsin alone hold 101,542, or 79%.
Some big states are thin on contacts. Texas, Washington, Colorado, Nevada and Utah hold 98,954 records between them, but only 10,538 carry a phone or email. They are address files first.
Nine states have none. Tennessee, Oregon, Illinois, South Carolina, North Carolina, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Wyoming hold 38,865 records, 14% of the file, and not one has a phone or email. The next section explains why.
Record counts are not owner counts. Several registers keep renewals, expired permits and denied applications. A state's record count is the size of its registers, not the number of operating rentals or owners in it.

The nine states with no phone or email

A state shows 0 contactable records because its registers publish no phone number or email. They publish an address, and usually the owner's name. That is a decision by the agency that keeps the register, not a gap in collection. Here is what each one publishes, as of October 2026.

Tennessee, 19,532 records. Mostly Metro Nashville's residential short-term rental permits (17,712 records), plus a published residential short-term rental permit dataset (1,262) and Chattanooga's active short-term vacation rentals (558). Nashville names the permit holder and carries an owner mailing address on 17,538 of its 17,712 records. Nashville's permit types also split owner-occupied from not owner-occupied homes.
Oregon, 6,943 records. Portland's accessory short-term rental permits (4,462) and Bend's register (1,249). Bend publishes names; Portland does not. Portland says a Type A permit is for renting one or two bedrooms for up to five overnight guests, so most Portland records describe rooms in an occupied home.
Illinois, 4,231 records. Chicago's active shared housing registrations. Every record has a name. Chicago says all shared housing units need an approved registration number to operate short-term rentals of 31 days or fewer.
South Carolina, 2,896 records. Charleston's operational permits (907), Beaufort's register (273) and a 2024 license dataset (1,716 records, all named).
North Carolina, 1,734 records. Nearly all from Asheville's homestay permits (1,712), which publish no names. Asheville says a homestay is permitted only if the host lives in the house or apartment full time and rents one or two bedrooms, so the property address is the host's home.
Hawaii, 1,490 records. Honolulu's register. It publishes addresses without names.
Pennsylvania, 1,326 records. Philadelphia's limited lodging operator licenses. Every record is named, and the license is for renting your primary residence or a room in it for 30 consecutive days or less, so the property address is again the owner's home.
Massachusetts, 500 records. Cambridge's short-term rental register, named on all 500.
Wyoming, 213 records. Cody's short-term rental permits, named on 209.

These 38,865 records are still usable. Every one has a property address, so every one can be mailed. In Asheville, Philadelphia and much of Portland the rental sits in the host's own home, so a letter to the property reaches the owner directly. In Nashville the owner mailing address solves the absentee-owner problem. What these states cannot support is a phone or email campaign built from the register alone.

This is also where buyers get misled. If a seller shows you phone numbers for Nashville or Chicago owners, those numbers did not come from the register. They came from an append: a third party matched the name or address to a phone in some other database. Appended numbers can be right. They can also belong to a previous owner, a relative or a stranger. Ask which records carry appended data, and test them before you dial. The guide to STR permit data covers why contactability varies so much from one register to the next.

Fields in a national permit file

A national file should give you the same columns for every record, even when a register leaves some blank. Our export has 15 columns. Here is what each one means and where it trips people up.

permit_id. The license or registration number from the register. It lets you check a record against the source. Keep it in your CRM so you can match updates later.
owner_name and business_name. The person or company on the permit. Many permits are in a company's name. In the Florida license file, 22,242 of 50,110 records name a company; in Nashville, 6,975 of 17,712 do. A company name is not a dead end, but it changes who you write to and how.
property_address. The rental itself. It is present on nearly every record and is the field you can always mail.
mailing_address. The owner's own address, where the register publishes one. Florida, Texas, Tennessee and Colorado carry most of these. It is the field that reaches owners who do not live at the rental.
city, state, zip, county. The location of the property. State here means the property's state, not the owner's.
phone and email. Exactly as the register published them. Blank where the register publishes none.
permit_type. The register's own words. Florida uses DWEL for houses and CNDO for condos. Texas uses industry codes. Nashville splits owner-occupied from not owner-occupied. New Orleans splits commercial owner, residential owner and non-commercial permits. Wisconsin bands tourist rooming houses by the number of units: 11,909 records are single-unit licenses, 696 cover two to four units, 189 cover five to nine and 74 cover ten to nineteen.
status. Also the register's own words: active, issued, renewed, in compliance, pending, expired, revoked, denied. The vocabulary changes from register to register, so map it to your own short list before you filter.
filed_date. The date the register gives for the filing. Not every register publishes one. Florida's license file does not, so only 927 of 53,152 Florida records have a filing date.
first_seen_at. The date the record first appeared in our dataset. It tells you a record is new to the dataset. It does not tell you the permit was issued that day, unless the register's own date says so.

The fields a buyer most often asks for and cannot get from a register are revenue, occupancy and the owner's personal phone where the register does not publish one. If those matter to you, they come from other products, and the comparison guide above explains which.

Questions to ask any list seller

Put these questions to every seller, including us. A seller who cannot answer them in writing is asking you to buy on trust. For each one, here is what a useful answer looks like, with our own figures as the example.

Where does each record come from?

The answer should name a register or an agency for every record: the Florida license file, the Nashville permit register, the Texas hotel tax roll. A list of sources at the bottom of a sales page is not enough. Ask whether each row in the export says which register it came from, and whether you can check a sample of rows against the public register yourself.

Is it a permit record or a scraped listing?

A permit record names the owner. A listing describes the property and shows a host's first name and an approximate location. Some files mix the two, matching listings to parcels and parcels to owners. Ask what share of the file is permit records and what share is matched. Matching adds error at every step.

How are duplicates handled?

Registers repeat themselves. New Orleans publishes an applications register that goes back to March 2017 (28,104 records) and a separate register of current issued licenses (4,314). One property can appear in both, and several times in the first. In our Louisiana file, 6,201 records carry an active status, 23,948 an inactive one and 3,618 a pending one. Nashville keeps renewals and expired permits, so one home can appear once for each permit it has held. Ask the seller whether their count is records, properties or owners, and how they collapse repeats. If they quote one number for all three, the number is records.

How often is each source refreshed?

Refresh cadence differs by source. In our file, the Florida license file is checked every four hours and the other registers daily, and 219,910 records were re-checked against their source in the 24 hours to October 23, 2026. Over the 15 finished weeks from July 6 to October 18, 2026, 10,505 records were new to the dataset, an average of 700 a week, ranging from 454 to 1,476; 6,426 of them carried a phone or email. The weekly batches show where they appeared. Also ask whether any part of the file is a one-time import. Ours includes some published city datasets that are snapshots, such as a 2022 Savannah short-term vacation rental dataset of 1,493 records, which sits beside Atlanta's live register in our Georgia file. A snapshot is useful, but it ages.

Ask for the count of records with a phone and with an email in each state you care about, not a national rate. Then ask whether those details came from the register or from an append. A national file that claims a phone on 90% of records is either drawing on different sources from the registers or appending. Our national rate is 45%, and nine states are at zero, because that is what the registers publish.

Are hotels and other lodging mixed in?

Lodging licenses look a lot like rental permits in a spreadsheet. We keep five lodging registers (9,382 hotel, motel, bed and breakfast and similar records) out of the short-term rental file. But the Texas hotel tax roll is a mixed file by nature: in our Texas records, 11,025 are filed under industry code 721110 (hotels and motels) and 28,547 under 531110 (lessors of residential buildings). Ask the seller how they separate the two. If you sell to rental owners and receive hotels, you pay to mail the wrong people. The Texas hotel tax guide lists the codes to keep and drop.

Which state does the state column mean?

In a permit file, state is the property's state. The owner may live elsewhere. Ask whether the file carries an owner mailing address, and in which states. This matters for territory assignment and for calling hours, covered below.

What is missing?

A seller who knows their file has a ready answer. Ours: nothing from Idaho and Iowa, nothing from places that publish no register, nothing on unpermitted operators, no revenue or occupancy, no phone or email in nine states, and names missing on some city registers such as Honolulu, Asheville and Portland.

Can I see a sample from my states?

A sample from the seller's best state tells you little. Ask for rows from the states you plan to work first, and check ten of them against the public register by permit number.

What can I do with the file?

Read the license terms. Check whether you can load the file into your CRM, share it with resellers or franchisees, and keep using it after a subscription ends.

How to filter a national file

Filtering happens in two places: in the seller's tool before you export, and in your spreadsheet or CRM after. In our account workspace you can filter the national file by state, by what contact details a record has, by city, by permit type and by filing date, then export a CSV. Everything else, including status cleanup, duplicate removal and owner grouping, happens on the export.

The contact filter

The Has filter offers five choices: any record, phone and email, phone or email, phone, or email. The last two keep records that have that field, whether or not they also have the other. Nationally, as of October 2026, the counts are:

Has filter	Records
Any record	283,611
Phone or email	127,924
Phone	125,065
Email	64,233
Phone and email	61,374

Some arithmetic from those counts. Records with a phone but no email: 125,065 minus 61,374, or 63,691. Records with an email but no phone: 64,233 minus 61,374, or 2,859. So almost every contactable record has a phone, and about half also have an email. The two channels are not spread the same way. Louisiana and Wisconsin hold 42,135 of the 64,233 emails, or 66%. Florida and California are phone files: Florida has 39,690 phones and 959 emails, California 19,413 phones and 101 emails. An email-first campaign is mostly a Louisiana and Wisconsin campaign unless you add other channels.

State, city and permit type

State is the first cut for any national plan, because channel and rules change at the state line. City contains is a text match on the property city, useful for territory lists. Permit type contains is a text match on the register's own permit type, so you need the register's words: DWEL or CNDO in Florida, 531110 in Texas, Owner Occupied in Nashville, Commercial Owner in New Orleans.

Filing date

Filed since keeps records whose register date is on or after the date you pick. Leave it blank for registers that publish no filing date, or you will drop them all. Florida and Wisconsin are the large examples.

Status and duplicates

Do these on the export. Map each register's status words to three buckets: current (active, issued, renewed, in compliance), pending, and ended (expired, revoked, denied, withdrawn). Then collapse repeats by permit ID within a register, and by property address across registers in the same city. Keep the most recent status for each address.

Owners with several permits

There is no single filter for multi-permit owners, because the grouping depends on how names are written. Group by owner or business name within one state, then count distinct property addresses per name. Counting records instead of addresses overstates the result in registers that keep renewals. The guide to finding multi-property owners walks through the method and its traps. Our state counts of records held under names with two or more, and ten or more, distinct addresses are used in the examples below.

Worked examples from 283,611 records

Each example starts from the whole national file and cuts it down to a list a team can work. Counts are as of October 2026.

Example 1: a software vendor that wants to call and email owners

A vendor of guest messaging or scheduling software wants owners it can reach by phone and email, because its sales process runs on a short email sequence and a call.

Start with 283,611 records.
Set Has to Phone and email. That leaves 61,374 records.
Look at where they sit: Louisiana 29,090, Wisconsin 11,151, Texas 8,312, Georgia 3,036, Kentucky 2,472, Arizona 1,721, New Mexico 1,251, Ohio 1,083, Florida 941, Washington 850, Minnesota 790, Colorado 300, Nevada 275, California 94 and Maine 8.
Check Louisiana before anything else. It is nearly half the list, and the New Orleans applications register keeps history back to 2017. Statewide, 23,948 of the 34,063 Louisiana records carry an inactive status. Filter the Louisiana export to current and pending statuses, then collapse repeat addresses. Expect the Louisiana share to shrink sharply.
Check Texas. Its phone-and-email records come mostly from city registers that publish contacts, not from the tax roll, which publishes none. Read the permit type column to confirm each record is a rental registration.
Decide what to do with the phone-only records. Florida alone has 39,690 phones and fewer than a thousand emails. If Florida matters to your sales plan, switch Florida to Has: Phone and plan a call-first or mail-first approach there.

The result is not one list but two: an email-and-call list built mostly from Louisiana, Wisconsin, Georgia, Kentucky and Arizona, and a phone list built from Florida and California. The subscription's 50,000-row monthly limit also shapes the order. The 61,374 phone-and-email rows will not all export in one month, so pull Louisiana and Wisconsin first and the rest the next month, or buy the one-time file.

Example 2: a furniture maker mailing whole-home owners in Texas and Florida

A furniture or linen manufacturer wants to mail a catalog to owners of whole houses used as rentals in its two largest states. It does not need phones.

Start with 283,611 records. Filter State to Florida: 53,152.
Set Permit type contains to DWEL. That keeps 35,119 houses and drops the 14,990 condos (CNDO). Condo owners buy furniture too, but their rules and unit sizes differ, so they get their own mailing.
Use the mailing address column. Florida's license file carries an owner mailing address on nearly every record: 51,116 of the 53,152 Florida records statewide. Mail the owner's address, not the rental, so the catalog does not land in a guest's hands.
Switch State to Texas: 57,734. Of these, 43,130 come from the hotel tax roll. Keep industry code 531110 (28,547 records) and consider 531311, residential property managers (1,232). Drop 721110, hotels and motels (11,025), 721000 (1,059) and 721199, other traveler accommodation (312). That removes 12,396 lodging records before you print anything.
Add the Texas city registers, such as Austin, Corpus Christi, Arlington, Waco and Irving, which are rental registrations by definition. Collapse addresses that appear both on the tax roll and on a city register.
On the tax roll, 32,933 of the 43,130 records carry a mailing address. Use it where present, and the property address where not.

The two states give the manufacturer a mail list in the tens of thousands without a single phone number, which is exactly what a catalog needs.

Example 3: an insurer looking for operators with ten or more properties

A commercial insurer wants operators large enough for a schedule of locations, not single-home owners.

Start with 283,611 records and export the states you are licensed to write.
Group by owner or business name within each state and count distinct property addresses.
Keep names with ten or more addresses. In our state counts, records held under such names number 999 in Florida, 969 in California, 256 in Arizona, 161 in Kentucky, 131 in Wisconsin, 110 in New Mexico, 69 in Colorado, 17 in Georgia and 16 in Nevada. That is 2,728 records across those nine states.
Treat Texas separately. Records under names with ten or more addresses come to 16,411 in Texas, and the largest single name holds 3,472 addresses. That pattern fits the tax roll, where hotel groups, apartment operators and management companies file permits for many locations. Filter out the hotel codes first, then look again.
Look up the largest names one by one. Many will be management companies rather than owners, which is a different sale.

The broader cut, names with two or more addresses, produces far more records: 5,858 in Florida, 2,636 in California, 1,718 in Wisconsin, 918 in Arizona, 851 in Kentucky, 504 in Georgia, 501 in Colorado and 329 in New Mexico. The largest single names hold 97 addresses in Arizona, 86 in Florida and 62 in California. A list this size can be worked by a small team in a quarter.

Example 4: a cleaning franchise choosing where to sell territories

A franchise system needs to know where rental owners cluster, and whether franchisees will be able to reach them. Market counts from our October 23 breakdown show the spread:

Market	Records	With phone or email
New Orleans	33,649	29,231
San Diego	8,850	8,850
Orlando and Kissimmee	6,392	5,019
Big Bear and Joshua Tree	5,328	5,327
Panama City Beach	3,920	3,277
Fort Lauderdale	3,870	2,810
Miami Beach	3,619	2,736
Destin and 30A	3,359	2,667
Scottsdale	3,069	3,069
Louisville	2,562	2,531
Sonoma County	2,424	2,274

Two cautions before drawing territory lines. First, New Orleans looks like the biggest market by far, but its count includes years of applications; 6,122 of its records are dated in the last 12 months. Size a territory on current records, not on register size. Second, a territory with no contact details, such as Austin or Seattle, can still be worked, but the franchisee will be prospecting by mail, which takes longer and costs more per contact. Tell franchisees which kind of territory they are buying. The city index lists every market with its counts.

Planning a rollout by state

A national launch on day one usually means a national mess on day thirty. A staged rollout lets you learn in the states where the data is richest, then carry what works into the harder states.

Wave 1: the contact-rich states

Fourteen states have a phone or email on at least half their records: Florida, Louisiana, California, Wisconsin, Arizona, Kentucky, Georgia, New Mexico, Ohio, Minnesota, Michigan, Virginia, Maine and Missouri. They hold 117,386 contactable records. Start here, measure reply rates by state and by channel, and fix your scripts and offers.

Wave 2: the large address states

Texas, Tennessee, Washington, Colorado, Oregon and Illinois hold 128,167 records between them and very few contact details. They are mail states. Plan a letter or postcard program, with a response path (a short web address or a phone number of your own) so owners can raise their hands. Texas needs the hotel codes filtered out first. Tennessee's Nashville records carry owner mailing addresses, which makes them one of the better mail files in the country.

Wave 3: the small registers

South Carolina, North Carolina, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Utah, Massachusetts and Wyoming add 9,652 records. They are small enough to work by hand, and in Asheville and Philadelphia the rental is the host's own home, which makes mail simple.

Fitting the plan to a row budget

Our national subscription allows 50,000 exported rows a month. All 127,924 contactable records would take three months of exports (127,924 divided by 50,000 is 2.56). One workable order: month one, Florida's 39,708 contactable records plus Arizona's 4,790 and Georgia's 3,043, for 47,541 rows; month two, Louisiana's 29,350, Wisconsin's 13,064 and Ohio, Michigan, New Mexico and Minnesota's 5,268, for 47,682 rows; month three, California, Kentucky, Texas and the rest. After that, new-to-the-dataset records ran at about 700 a week this summer and fall. As an estimate, that is roughly 3,000 a month (700 times 52, divided by 12, is 3,033), which fits easily inside the monthly limit.

Rules change at the state line

Before each wave, check what the state and its main cities require of owners, because your message has to fit their world. A pitch about permit renewals in Florida's annual license cycle is wrong in Idaho, where no city may require a permit. The permit requirements by state guide is a starting point.

Owner state and property state

A national file sorted by property state is not the same as a territory file sorted by where owners live. A Florida condo may belong to someone in Ohio. A Texas beach house may belong to a family in Dallas. This changes three things.

Territories. A franchise or field sales team sells where the property is. An inside sales team or a software vendor may care more about where the owner is, for time zones and events. Decide which state you mean before you assign leads.
Calling hours. The FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule bars calls outside 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. local time at the location called. That is the owner's location, not the rental's. Where the file has a mailing address, use it to set the time zone.
Mail. A letter to the rental of an absentee owner reaches a guest or a manager. Use the owner mailing address where the register publishes one.

The mailing address column is the tool for all three. In our file it is populated on 51,116 of 53,152 Florida records, on 32,933 of the 43,130 Texas tax roll records, on 6,350 of 10,105 Colorado records, and on nearly every Nashville record. Where a register has no mailing address but the permit is tied to the host's home, as in Asheville homestays, Philadelphia limited lodging licenses and Nashville's owner-occupied permits (6,316 of 17,712 records), the property address is the owner's address.

Ways to build national coverage compared

There are five ways to get a national file. The table compares them on what you get, cost, time and limits. Costs for our own product are our published prices. Costs for building in-house are our estimates, with the arithmetic below. We do not quote other vendors' prices; get them in writing.

Approach	What you get	Cost	Time to a first list	Main limits
Buy a permit file	Owner name, property address, permit status and type; phone, email and mailing address where registers publish them	Ours: $499 one-time national file, or $299 a month for up to 50,000 rows; free 25-row sample	Same day	Covers only places with public registers; contact details uneven by state
Scrape listing sites	Listing details, a host first name, approximate location	Developer time; not priced here	Weeks, then ongoing	No owner identity; Airbnb's terms prohibit bots, crawlers and scrapers
Buy from a data aggregator	Varies: often consumer records matched to rental signals, with appended phones	Quoted by each vendor	Days	Source and match method often undisclosed; appended contacts need testing
Build your own register pipeline	Whatever the registers publish, on your schedule	Our estimate: about $16,700 to $33,500 to build for 64 registers, plus about $2,600 a quarter in upkeep	Our estimate: 6 to 13 weeks for one developer	Sources change without notice; someone must own it
File public records requests	Registers that are not published online	Copy fees set by each agency	Depends on each agency's response time	One agency at a time; formats vary

How the in-house estimate is built

The estimate uses three inputs. Change any of them to match your own team.

Labor rate. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median annual wage for software developers at $135,980 in May 2025. Divided by 2,080 working hours, that is about $65 an hour, before benefits and overhead.
Setup hours. We assume 4 to 8 hours per register to find it, read its fields, map statuses and permit types to a common format, and test the pull. That is an assumption, not a measured figure. For 64 registers it comes to 256 to 512 hours, or about $16,700 to $33,500 at $65.38 an hour. At 40 hours a week, 256 to 512 hours is 6.4 to 12.8 weeks of one developer's time.
Upkeep. Between July and October 2026 our own pipeline needed five source fixes with no change to the product: a city register moved to a new map layer, a county began blocking requests from cloud servers, a city put its register behind a sign-in token, map services delivered phone numbers as decimals, and several layers that looked like permit registers turned out to be zoning or parcel maps. Each took a day or less. At up to 8 hours each, that is up to 40 hours a quarter, about $2,600 at the same rate, or about $10,500 a year.

Infrastructure is the small number. Cloudflare's Workers Paid plan has a minimum charge of $5 a month per account, and its D1 database includes the first 5 GB of storage. The estimate leaves out duplicate handling across registers, owner grouping, a search interface and the compliance review of your outreach, each of which adds hours. The build versus buy guide covers when a build makes sense, and the guide to what custom lead software costs breaks down the drivers. On scraping, the guide to web scraping and the law explains the risks.

Which approach fits which buyer

Testing whether rental owners buy from you at all: buy a one-time file or a sample and run one state.
Selling nationally every month: a subscription, or a build if the data is central to your business and you have someone to own it.
Needing a specific market with no published register: a records request to that agency, alongside a bought file for everywhere else.
Needing revenue or occupancy: listing analytics, used together with permit records rather than instead of them.

Compliance for national outreach

This section is a summary, not legal advice. Have counsel review a national program before launch, because state rules add to the federal ones and a national campaign touches all of them.

Start from one fact: owners on permit registers are often individuals, and the phone on a permit is often a personal mobile. Owning a rental does not make a person's cell phone a business line.

Calls and texts

The TCPA applies. Do not call these numbers with an autodialer, a prerecorded voice or an artificial voice without the owner's prior express consent. In February 2024 the FCC confirmed that AI-generated voices count as artificial voices under the TCPA. Do not send texts without consent.
Scrub the National Do Not Call Registry. The FTC's Telemarketing Sales Rule requires sellers and telemarketers to synchronize their call lists with the Registry every 31 days. The FTC says the Registry's prohibition does not apply to business-to-business calls, but do not assume a permit holder's personal number is a business number.
Call within hours. 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. local time at the location called, which is where the owner is, not where the rental is.
Keep an internal do-not-call list and carry it across every refresh of the file, so a person who opted out in March is not called again in June.

The guide to calling STR owners under the TCPA and DNC rules covers these points in more detail, including state rules.

Email

The CAN-SPAM Act does not require consent before a commercial email, but it sets rules for every message: accurate header and sender information, a subject line that matches the content, identification as an advertisement, a valid physical postal address, and a clear way to opt out. The FTC says you must honor an opt-out within 10 business days, that “The law makes no exception for business-to-business email,” and that each separate email in violation can bring penalties of up to $53,088.

Mail

Postal mail is the lowest-risk channel. It sits outside the TCPA and CAN-SPAM, and it is the only channel that works in the nine states whose registers publish no phone or email. What a letter says is still subject to advertising law. The direct mail guide covers addressing and segmenting.

Franchisees and resellers

If you hand a national file to franchisees, dealers or agents, your compliance program has to travel with it. Give them the scrubbed list, the internal do-not-call list and written rules for each channel. A franchisee who texts a list you supplied can create a problem with your name on it.

Mistakes to avoid with a national file

Planning on the national average. 45% contactable nationally means 98% in Wisconsin and 0% in Tennessee. Budget each state on its own number.
Counting records as owners. Registers keep renewals, expired permits and denied applications. Collapse to properties, then group to owners, before you size a market or a sales team.
Mailing hotels. The Texas tax roll includes 11,025 records under the hotels and motels code. Filter by code before printing.
Mailing the rental instead of the owner. For absentee owners, a letter to the property reaches a guest. Use the mailing address column where it exists.
Treating appended phones as register phones. If a seller shows phones in a state whose registers publish none, the phones were added later. Test before you dial.
Filtering on a field a register does not publish. A filing-date filter drops every Florida record, because Florida's file has no filing date.
Calling on the rental's time zone. Calling hours follow the owner's location.
Launching everywhere at once. Start with the contact-rich states, learn, then carry what works into the mail states.
Buying a snapshot and treating it as current. Ask which parts of the file are refreshed and how often, and check the age of any imported dataset.

Checklist for buying a national file

Write down the states you sell in and the channels you will use in each.
Ask the seller for record counts and phone, email and mailing address counts for each of those states.
Ask which register each record comes from, and check ten rows per state against the public register by permit number.
Ask whether any contact details are appended, and in which states.
Ask how often each source is refreshed, and which parts of the file are one-time imports.
Ask how lodging licenses and hotel tax records are separated from rentals.
Ask whether counts are records, properties or owners, and how repeats are collapsed.
Ask what the state column means, and whether an owner mailing address is included.
Ask what the file does not cover, and get the answer in writing.
Get a sample from your first-wave states, not the seller's best state.
Read the license terms on CRM use, sharing with franchisees or resellers, and use after cancellation.
Set up Do Not Call scrubbing, an internal do-not-call list and CAN-SPAM opt-out handling before the first export.
Map status words to current, pending and ended, and collapse duplicates on the export.
Plan waves by state, and fit the exports to your row budget.
Measure replies by state and channel in wave one before you buy more.

The PermitPulse national file and sample

PermitPulse is our national file of short-term rental permit records, drawn from 64 public registers, with the Florida license file checked every four hours and the rest daily. The national subscription is $299 a month and covers every state in the database, with up to 50,000 exported rows a month. The one-time national download is $499, a file you keep. Single-state access is $99 a month or $149 one-time. After a free sign-up you can take a free 25-row sample of any register, which is enough to see the fields, the status words and the contact coverage for a state before you plan around it. Pricing has the details, how PermitPulse works explains the dataset, and the page for STR software companies shows how vendors use it.

To check one address rather than a whole country, the free STR permit lookup shows whether an address appears on a public short-term rental register. If you need the records delivered into your own CRM, matched to your accounts or split by franchise territory, custom lead-generation software builds start at $1,500.

Questions and answers

Is there a complete national list of Airbnb and vacation rental owners in the US?

No. There is no national short-term rental license. Permits are issued by the cities, counties and states that require them, and a national permit file can only include places that require a permit and publish the list. Idaho and Iowa law block local permit programs, some places publish nothing online, and owners who rent without a permit are on no register. A national file means every register a seller has found and can read.

How many US vacation rental owner records have a phone or email?

In our national file, as of October 2026, 127,924 of 283,611 short-term rental records carry a phone number or an email, which is 45%. The share depends on the state: Wisconsin and Ohio are at 98%, Louisiana 86%, Florida 75%, Texas 16%, and nine states are at 0% because their registers publish no phone or email. 61,374 records have both a phone and an email.

Why do some states show no phone numbers at all?

Because the registers in those states publish none. Tennessee, Oregon, Illinois, South Carolina, North Carolina, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Wyoming publish a property address and usually the owner's name, but no phone or email. That is a publishing decision by each agency. Those records can still be mailed. A seller who shows phones in those states got them from an append, so ask and test before dialing.

Should I buy the one-time national download or the monthly subscription?

The one-time national download is $499 and is a file you keep. The subscription is $299 a month, with up to 50,000 exported rows a month, and suits a team that wants to pull new records as they appear. Pulling all 127,924 contactable records through the subscription would take three months of exports. If you are testing whether rental owners buy from you, start with the one-time file or the free 25-row sample of a register.

Is it legal to call or text vacation rental owners from a permit list?

It can be, within the rules. Permit phones are often personal mobiles, so the TCPA applies: no autodialers, prerecorded or artificial voices (including AI voices) without prior express consent, and no texts without consent. Scrub the National Do Not Call Registry at least every 31 days and call only between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. at the owner's location. Email follows CAN-SPAM. Mail is the lowest-risk channel. This is not legal advice.

Does a national permit file include hotels?

It should not, but check. We keep five lodging registers, 9,382 hotel, motel and bed and breakfast records, out of the short-term rental file. The Texas hotel tax roll is mixed by nature: it lists rentals next to hotels, with 11,025 Texas records under the hotels and motels industry code. Filter by industry code before you mail, and ask any seller how they separate lodging from rentals.

How do I find owners with several rentals in a national file?

Export the states you want, group by owner or business name within each state, and count distinct property addresses per name. Counting records instead of addresses overstates the result in registers that keep renewals. In our file, records held under names with ten or more addresses come to 999 in Florida, 969 in California and 256 in Arizona, among others.