How DSCR Lenders Find Short-Term Rental Owners in Permit Records

How DSCR and investor lenders use public STR permit records to find rental owners to refinance or finance, with segments, ad rules and sample copy.

Published Oct 29, 2026 · 31 min read · by Lead Mining Company

Lenders who finance short-term rentals need two lists: owners who may refinance a rental they already run, and investors who may buy another one. Both groups show up by name in public government records. Cities, counties and some states make short-term rental hosts register or get a permit, and many of those registers are published. As of October 2026, the PermitPulse dataset holds 283,611 short-term rental permit records from 64 public registers in 28 states, and 127,924 of them (45%) carry a phone number or an email address.

This guide is for loan officers, mortgage brokers and marketing leads at DSCR and investor lenders. It covers what a permit record tells a lender and what it leaves out, which states publish names, mailing addresses and contact fields, why the owner's mailing address matters more than the rental's address, how to split a register into segments a lending program can use, and which outreach and lending rules apply before you send anything. It ends with a sample letter, a sample email, the cost arithmetic and a checklist.

It does not tell you how to underwrite. A permit record carries no loan, lien, income or credit information. It tells you that a named person or company told the government it runs a short-term rental at a given address. For a lender who wants rental owners, that is a better starting point than a list of all homeowners, because the activity you finance is already on the record.

What a permit record tells a lender

A short-term rental register is a list the government keeps of properties allowed to take paying guests for short stays, usually under 30 days. Each register publishes its own set of fields, and no two match exactly. Across the registers in the dataset, these are the fields that matter to a lending team.

Field	What it tells a lender	How often it is there
Property address	The rental, which is also the collateral you would lend against. It fixes the market, the state and the city's rules.	Almost every record
Name on the permit	The owner, licensee or applicant. Lets you tell a company from a person and group one owner's properties together.	Most registers; Honolulu publishes none, and North Carolina names 24 of 1,734 records
Mailing address	Where the holder gets mail. Shows owners who live somewhere else, and is the address to write to.	Florida, Tennessee, Texas, Colorado, Minnesota and Nevada registers, in part or in full
Phone and email	A direct channel, subject to the calling and email rules below.	Strong in Louisiana, Florida, California, Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona; none in nine states
Permit type	Owner-occupied or not, whole home or rooms, house or condo, commercial owner or residential owner. Decides which loan program, if any, fits.	Most registers, with local labels
Status and dates	Pending, active, expired, denied. Pending and recent filings point to new operators.	Varies; Florida's and Wisconsin's license files carry almost no dates

Read the permit type and status before anything else. A pending application in New Orleans, an active non-owner-occupied permit in Nashville and an expired license in San Diego are three different conversations, and some of them are not conversations a business-purpose lender should start at all. The segmentation section below sorts this out.

What the record does not tell you

No financing details. Nothing about the current lender, balance, rate, maturity or lien position.
No income. The permit does not report bookings, nightly rates or revenue.
No credit information. It says nothing about the holder's credit, and it must not be used as if it did. The FCRA section below explains why.
Not always the owner. In Florida a management company can hold the license for a home it manages, so a large licensee name can be a manager, not an owner. The multi-property owner guide covers this limit.

Status in the national file, as of October 2026: 94,466 records are active, 56,041 have ended (expired, closed or revoked), 8,747 were refused or denied, 4,575 are pending, and 91,443 come from registers that publish no status at all. Those last records are still useful. They tell you a property was registered; they do not tell you whether it still is.

States and markets with names, mailing addresses and contacts

The first question for a lender is not how many records a state has. It is whether the records carry the fields you need to reach an owner. The table below shows, for the larger states in the dataset, how many records there are, how many carry a phone or email, how many carry an owner mailing address and how many carry a name, as of October 2026.

State	Records	With phone or email	With mailing address	With a name
Texas	57,734	9,017	37,744	52,954
Florida	53,152	39,708	51,116	51,332
Louisiana	34,063	29,350	0	33,966
Washington	29,622	879	127	757
California	24,522	19,420	0	23,222
Tennessee	19,532	0	17,538	18,961
Wisconsin	13,374	13,064	458	13,189
Colorado	10,105	304	6,350	9,905
Oregon	6,943	0	0	1,248
Arizona	5,503	4,790	0	3,911
Illinois	4,231	0	0	4,231
Kentucky	4,029	2,531	0	2,559
Georgia	3,675	3,043	1	1,671

Three patterns stand out for a lending program.

Florida has everything. The state's vacation rental license file names the licensee, gives a mailing address on 96% of records (51,116 of 53,152) and a phone on about three in four (39,690). Our system checks it every four hours. For a lender, it is the most complete statewide file in the dataset.
Tennessee and Texas are mail states. Tennessee's registers publish no phone or email, but 17,538 of 19,532 records (90%) carry a mailing address. The Texas file is mostly the state hotel-tax permit roll, which covers hotels and motels as well as short-term rentals, so it has to be filtered first. The Texas hotel-tax guide shows how.
Louisiana and California are phone and email states. They publish contacts on most records but no separate mailing address. You write to the property address or use the published email.

Nine states show no phone or email at all: Tennessee, Oregon, Illinois, South Carolina, North Carolina, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Wyoming. Their registers publish an address and usually a name, nothing more. A lender can still mail those owners where a name exists. Honolulu's register publishes no names, so it is not a lead source in that sense.

Mailing address versus property address

The property address tells you where the collateral is. The mailing address tells you where the owner is. For a lender those are two different facts, and the second one is usually the one you need.

Why the property address is the wrong place to write

A short-term rental is occupied by guests, cleaners and maintenance crews for much of the year. A letter addressed to the owner at the rental may be opened by a guest, left on a counter by a cleaner or forwarded weeks late, if at all. A letter to the mailing address on the permit goes where the owner told the government to send official mail. In Florida that address exists on 96% of licenses. In Tennessee it exists on 90%. In Colorado 6,350 of 10,105 records (63%) carry one, and in Texas 37,744 of 57,734 (65%).

What an out-of-state mailing address tells you

When the mailing address is in a different state from the rental, the owner bought in a market where they do not live. For a DSCR or investor lender that is a useful signal for three reasons:

The property is very likely an investment. An owner who lives in another state is not using the rental as a primary residence. That matters for the loan purpose question covered in the compliance section below, although the owner's own use of the home during the year still matters.
The owner may not have a local lender relationship. They may have financed the purchase through a lender in their home state, paid cash, or used a national program. You do not know which, and the permit will not tell you, but the question is worth asking.
They have bought across state lines once. An owner in Illinois who holds a rental in Florida has already done the work of buying remotely. That is the investor most likely to do it again.

We do not publish a count of out-of-state owners per market. You can build one in a spreadsheet from any export that has a mailing address: compare the mailing state to the property state and flag the rows where they differ. Then group by owner name (next section) so an owner with three Florida rentals and a home in Ohio counts once.

When the mailing address is not the owner's home

Not every mailing address is a house. Some are a property manager's office, a company's registered agent, an attorney or an accountant. Signs to look for: the same mailing address on dozens of records under different owner names, a suite number in an office building, or a P.O. box shared by many licensees. Those addresses still reach someone who can pass on a letter, but they are not where the owner lives, and the out-of-state flag does not mean much on them. Mark them and decide whether to mail them separately or not at all.

Segmenting the list for a lending program

A raw register is a mix of people a lender wants and people a lender should leave alone. Four splits do most of the work: owners with several properties, companies versus individuals, owner-occupied versus investor permits, and permit status.

Owners with several properties

An owner on two or more permits is an investor building a portfolio. That owner may refinance one property to buy the next, may want a blanket or portfolio loan, and has shown they will buy again. The method is in the multi-property owner guide: group records by the name on the permit within one state, count distinct property addresses rather than records, and set thresholds.

Counts, as of October 2026, for names that appear on two or more property addresses in their state:

State	Names on 2+ addresses	Records under those names	Most addresses under one name
Florida	1,996	5,837	86
Wisconsin	659	1,697	48
California	647	2,633	62
Arizona	267	918	97
Michigan	217	881	47

Some towns have a much higher share of records under multi-property names than their state does. A few examples from the city files:

Town	Records	Under names with 2+ properties	Under names with 10+ properties
Lake Havasu City, AZ	842	282 (33%)	70
Wisconsin Dells, WI	328	119 (36%)	57
Atlanta, GA	1,546	452 (29%)	0
Sacramento, CA	539	155 (29%)	38
Destin, FL	902	169 (19%)	60
Davenport, FL	2,409	384 (16%)	108
Kissimmee, FL	2,788	413 (15%)	23

For a lender, the band from two to nine properties is usually the one to work first. Names on ten or more are mostly management companies and larger investors, and in Florida some of them are managers holding licenses for other people's homes. Atlanta is an example of a market where many owners hold a few properties and none in the file hold ten or more under one name.

Two cautions. Registers that keep every historical application, like Nashville's and New Orleans', list the same home once for each permit it has held, so group by distinct address and look at current status before you count anyone as a portfolio owner. And names are grouped as printed, so "Smith Rentals LLC" and "Smith Rentals, LLC" count as two until you merge them. Treat every count as a floor.

Companies versus individuals

Investor loans can close in the name of an LLC or other entity. The name on the permit tells you whether the holder is a company, a trust or a person. Counts from the larger registers, as of October 2026:

Register	Records	In a company's name	In a trust's name
Florida DBPR vacation rental licenses (statewide)	50,110	22,242 (44%)	531
New Orleans STR permit applications	28,104	4,947 (18%)	37
Nashville residential STR permits	17,712	6,975 (39%)	357
Wisconsin DATCP tourist rooming houses	12,919	5,575 (43%)	224
Corpus Christi STR properties	8,738	952 (11%)	43
San Bernardino County STR	5,328	684 (13%)	30
Summit County, CO STR	2,301	575 (25%)	325
Traverse City vacation home rentals	1,530	418 (27%)	2
Louisville Metro STR registration	1,566	390 (25%)	49

Some registers record a person even where a company owns the home. San Diego's register lists 2 company names among 8,850 licenses, and the city's own page says a host may hold only one license. Read those files as lists of hosts, not as lists of titleholders.

Why the split matters to a lender is mostly about rules, covered in the compliance section. Credit extended to a company is outside Regulation Z. Credit to an individual can be inside it, depending on how the property is used. The company records are the cleanest place for a business-purpose program to start. For more on who holds permits by type, see the research page on permit holders.

Owner-occupied and investor permit types

Many cities issue different permits to owners who live on the property and owners who do not. That label is the most useful single field for a DSCR lender, because it separates investors from people renting part of their own home.

Register	Investor-type permits	Owner-occupied-type permits
Nashville	"Not Owner Occupied" 9,603 (4,663 active) and "Non-Owner Occupied" 1,793 (336 active)	"Owner Occupied" 6,316 (2,003 active)
New Orleans applications	"Commercial Owner" 4,194, of which 2,392 (57%) are in a company's name	"Residential Owner" 4,059, of which 72 are in a company's name
Florida DBPR	Not split by occupancy; split by building type: 35,119 dwellings and 14,990 condos	None
Wisconsin DATCP	License type shows how many rooming houses it covers: 696 for 2 to 4, 189 for 5 to 9, 74 for 10 to 19, and 46 for 20 or more	Not split

Some permit programs only exist for people who live in the home. New Orleans' residential owner permit requires the rental to be on the same lot as the owner's primary residence with a homestead exemption. Philadelphia's Limited Lodging Operator License is for renting your primary residence or a room in it, and only an owner or tenant living there is eligible; the dataset holds 1,326 of these. Asheville's homestay permit requires the applicant to live in the house full-time and rent one or two bedrooms. Those holders are homeowners renting rooms, not investors. A loan on that property is likely to be a consumer mortgage, which is a different product under different rules. Leave them out of a business-purpose campaign.

Status and filing dates

Status tells you where the owner is in the permit cycle. Each stage suggests a different conversation:

Pending. Someone has just applied. They may have just bought, or be about to, and may be the investor who will buy again within a year. As of October 2026, Louisiana has 3,618 pending applications, Texas 168, Tennessee 121, Colorado 90, South Carolina 77 and California 43. The pending versus granted guide explains why new filings matter.
Recently filed. Where registers publish a date, 26,549 records were dated in the last 12 months. Louisiana leads with 6,191, then Texas 5,488, Illinois 3,367, Kentucky 2,686, California 1,806, Colorado 1,574, Ohio 1,540 and Tennessee 1,232. Florida and Wisconsin rank low only because their files carry almost no dates.
Active. An operating rental with a track record. This is the refinance pool.
Expired, denied or revoked. The owner may have stopped renting short-term, switched to long-term tenants or sold. New Orleans' applications include 14,640 expired and 6,944 denied records. Some of those owners now hold a long-term rental, which some investor programs also finance, but you cannot tell from the permit which ones. Check the current status at the city before you build a pitch on it.

Rules that change the collateral

A lender financing short-term rental income needs to know whether the permit survives a sale. In San Diego the city's page says licenses are "not transferrable between ownership or location/dwelling unit," expire two years from issuance, and that a host may hold only one license. Whole-home licenses there are capped at 1% of the city's housing units, and Mission Beach at 30% of its planning area. A buyer of a San Diego rental cannot count on the seller's license. A refinance of a licensed home is a different question from a purchase loan on it. Rules like these sit on city pages, not in the permit record, so read the city page for every market you lend in.

Worked examples from five markets

Each example uses the counts in the dataset as of October 2026. They show how the same method plays out where the registers publish different fields.

Florida statewide

Florida's license file is the strongest place to start a business-purpose program. Of 53,152 records, 51,116 carry a mailing address and 39,690 a phone. The license type splits dwellings (35,119) from condos (14,990), which tells you the collateral type before you pull a property report. 1,996 names hold two or more Florida addresses. The largest single name holds 86. Towns with the most records are Panama City Beach (3,903), Kissimmee (2,788) and Davenport (2,409). Davenport also has the most records under names holding ten or more properties (108).

A first campaign: filter to names with two to nine addresses, drop names whose mailing address repeats across many unrelated licensees, flag mailing addresses outside Florida, and write to each owner once, listing the addresses they hold. The Florida page shows counts by town.

New Orleans

The New Orleans market file has 33,649 records, 29,231 with a phone or email, 3,618 pending applications and 6,122 records dated in the last 12 months. It is the most active market in the dataset by recent filings. The register publishes no separate mailing address, so the channels are email and mail to the property address.

The useful split is the permit type. Commercial owner applications (4,194) are mostly in a company's name (57%). Residential owner applications (4,059) are almost all in a person's name, and by definition sit on the owner's homestead lot. A business-purpose lender works the first group and leaves the second alone.

Nashville

The Nashville file has 18,943 records and no phone or email, so it is a mail market. 17,538 records in Tennessee carry a mailing address. The permit type does the investor screening for you: non-owner-occupied permits outnumber owner-occupied ones, 11,396 to 6,316, and 4,999 non-owner-occupied permits are active. The register keeps expired and cancelled permits alongside current ones, so filter to issued permits and group by distinct address before you mail.

Big Bear Lake and Joshua Tree

San Bernardino County's register, which covers Big Bear, Joshua Tree and Lake Arrowhead, has 5,328 records, all marked active, and 5,327 with a phone. No email and no mailing address. 1,043 records are dated in the last 12 months, and 118 in the last 30 days. 316 names hold two or more properties, covering 1,557 records, and the largest holds 62. 684 records (13%) are in a company's name. This is a market where the phone is the main channel, which means the calling rules below matter more than anywhere else on this list.

Wisconsin

Wisconsin's statewide tourist rooming house file has 12,919 records, and the state has 12,944 records with an email address. The license type does something no other register does: it shows how many rooming houses the license covers, in bands. 11,909 licenses cover one, 696 cover two to four, 189 cover five to nine, and 120 cover ten or more. A lender looking for small portfolios can filter on the band directly. 5,575 records (43%) are in a company's name. See the Wisconsin register page for the fields.

Calling, texting and email rules for lender outreach

Owners on permit registers are often individuals, and many permit phone numbers are personal mobiles. Treat every number as a consumer number unless you know otherwise. This section and the next summarize federal rules we have read on official pages. It is not legal advice; have your compliance team or counsel review any campaign before it runs. State rules can be stricter than the federal ones described here.

Calls and texts

Do Not Call. The FCC's rule protects residential subscribers who have registered on the National Do Not Call Registry. The FTC says sellers and telemarketers who must use the registry have to sync their lists with it at least every 31 days. Scrub every number before you dial.
Calling hours. The FCC's rule bars telephone solicitations to a residential subscriber before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m., the called party's local time. Out-of-state owners live in a different time zone from the rental; use the owner's time, not the property's. Some states set narrower hours, and our terms ask buyers to call only between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.
No autodialers, prerecorded or AI voices. Telemarketing calls to wireless numbers with an autodialer or an artificial or prerecorded voice need the called party's prior express written consent. In February 2024 the FCC confirmed that the TCPA's restrictions on artificial or prerecorded voices cover AI technologies that generate human voices. Dial by hand, with a live person.
No texts without consent. Do not send marketing texts unless you hold the recipient's prior express written consent. Permit data never supplies consent.
Business calls are not a blanket pass. The FTC notes that most calls to a business to sell to that business are exempt from parts of its rule, but a number on a permit is often a person's mobile, not a business line, so treat it under the consumer rules.

The guide to calling STR owners under the TCPA and DNC rules covers scrubbing, records and opt-outs in more detail.

Email

CAN-SPAM applies to commercial email, and the FTC's guide says the law "makes no exception for business-to-business email." Each message needs accurate header information, a subject line that matches the content, a clear statement that it is an advertisement, your valid physical postal address, and a clear way to opt out. Opt-outs must be honored within 10 business days. Our post on cold email to vacation rental owners covers sending volumes and list hygiene.

Mail

Mail is the lowest-risk channel for permit-based outreach. There is no federal Do Not Call list for mail to scrub, and no federal consent rule for a letter. The content rules in the next section still apply to what the letter says, and so do the rules in our terms on not making a letter look like a government notice. The direct mail guide covers formats and timing.

Lending advertising rules that apply to permit-based campaigns

Outreach rules govern how you reach owners. Lending rules govern what you are allowed to say once you do, and in one case what you are allowed to do with the data at all. Four sets matter here.

Business purpose or consumer purpose

The two federal mortgage advertising rules covered here, Regulation Z and Regulation N, apply to consumer credit. Regulation Z, which implements the Truth in Lending Act, exempts "an extension of credit primarily for a business, commercial or agricultural purpose" and "an extension of credit to other than a natural person." So a loan to an LLC is outside it.

For loans to individuals, the CFPB's official interpretation of Regulation Z draws the line on rental property:

Credit to acquire, improve or maintain rental property that is not owner-occupied is deemed to be for business purposes, regardless of the number of units.
That special rule does not apply if the owner expects to occupy the property for more than 14 days during the coming year. A second home the owner uses for a few weeks each summer and rents the rest of the year falls outside it.
For rental property that is or will be owner-occupied, credit to acquire it is deemed business purpose only if it has more than 2 housing units, and credit to improve or maintain it only if it has more than 4.

Map that onto the register. A Nashville "Not Owner Occupied" permit or a New Orleans commercial owner permit held by an LLC sits on the business side. A Philadelphia limited lodging license, an Asheville homestay or a New Orleans residential owner permit sits with an owner who lives in the home, and a loan there is likely consumer credit. An individual who holds a whole-home permit on a vacation property may land on either side depending on how many days they stay there. The permit cannot tell you the answer for a given borrower; your application process has to.

This matters for the data as well as for the ad. Our terms do not allow using the data to target individuals with regulated consumer offers. Use permit records for business-purpose investment property programs, and leave owner-occupied permit types out of the file.

Regulation Z advertising rules

If any part of your program is consumer credit, Regulation Z section 1026.24 governs the ad. Three points matter most for a letter or email:

If the ad states a rate of finance charge, it must state it as an "annual percentage rate," using that term.
Certain terms trigger more disclosure. If the ad states the amount or percentage of a down payment, the number of payments or period of repayment, the amount of any payment, or the amount of any finance charge, it must also state the down payment, the terms of repayment over the full term including any balloon payment, and the APR, with the fact that it may increase if it can.
For dwelling-secured credit, the rule lists prohibited practices, including misleading advertising of "fixed" rates and payments, misleading comparisons, misrepresenting government endorsement, misleading use of the current lender's name, misleading claims of debt elimination, misleading use of the term "counselor" and misleading foreign-language ads.

The simplest way to stay clear in a business-purpose campaign is to leave rates, payments and loan amounts out of the first touch entirely. The samples below do that.

The Mortgage Acts and Practices advertising rule

Regulation N, the Mortgage Acts and Practices advertising rule at 12 CFR part 1014, bars material misrepresentations in any commercial communication about a "mortgage credit product." It applies to persons under the FTC's jurisdiction, which generally means non-bank lenders and brokers. Its definition of a mortgage credit product covers credit "offered or extended to a consumer primarily for personal, family, or household purposes," so it reaches the consumer side of the line drawn above.

The list of misrepresentations it prohibits reads like a checklist for any lending ad, consumer or not. It includes the interest rate, the APR or any other rate; fees and costs; whether the rate or payment can change, including use of the word "fixed"; comparisons between short-term and full-term rates or payments; the type of product; the amount of cash or credit available; prepayment penalties; associations with government programs; the source of the communication; and the consumer's ability to obtain a product, a term, a refinancing or a modification, which covers claims of preapproval. Covered persons must keep the evidence the rule requires for 24 months from the last date a communication was made or sent.

Two items on that list bear directly on permit-based mail. "The source of any commercial communication" means a letter cannot look like it comes from the city, the permit office or the owner's current lender. And "ability to obtain a refinancing" means no "you qualify" or "you are pre-approved" language when all you know is that someone holds a permit.

Fair lending in advertising

Regulation B, which implements the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, covers business credit as well as consumer credit; it defines business credit in its own text. Section 1002.4(b) bars any oral or written statement, "in advertising or otherwise," that would cause a reasonable person to believe the creditor would deny or offer worse terms because of a prohibited basis, such as race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status or age. Statements include words and visual images such as photographs. The CFPB's commentary adds that a creditor may affirmatively solicit members of traditionally disadvantaged groups. Have compliance review the creative and the way markets and ZIP codes are chosen for a mailing.

FCRA: permit data is not a consumer report

The Fair Credit Reporting Act defines a consumer report as information from a consumer reporting agency bearing on a consumer's creditworthiness, character or mode of living that is used or expected to be used as a factor in establishing eligibility for consumer credit, insurance, employment or another purpose the Act allows. Permit records are public government records about a property and its permit holder. We sell them as a marketing list, not as a consumer report, and our terms do not allow using them to decide anyone's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment or housing, or for any other purpose covered by the FCRA.

In practice that means three things for a lending team:

Use the list to decide whom to contact, not whom to approve. Do not use permit status, the number of permits or any other field from the file to approve, decline, price or set terms on a loan. Underwriting runs on your own application and your own verified sources.
Verify the collateral's permit at the source. If your program requires a valid permit on the property, check it with the issuing city or county as part of underwriting, under your own policy, not from a marketing export.
Prescreened offers are a different process. If you want to send a firm offer of credit selected on credit criteria, the selection comes from a consumer reporting agency under the FCRA's prescreening provisions. Each written solicitation made that way must carry a clear and conspicuous statement that the consumer's report was used, that the consumer was selected because they met the criteria, that the offer may be withdrawn if they no longer meet them, and that they can opt out of prescreened offers. That is a bureau process with its own rules, and it is separate from a permit-based mailing.

Sample mail piece for a DSCR lender

The letter below is written for a business-purpose program aimed at owners with more than one non-owner-occupied rental. It names the properties so the owner knows why they got it, says where the address came from, makes no rate, payment or approval claim, and does not look like a government notice. Replace everything in brackets. Have compliance approve the final copy, including any licensing or identification lines your state requires.

[Company legal name] | [Street address, city, state ZIP] | [Phone] | [NMLS or license number, if required]

[Owner name]
[Mailing address]

Dear [Owner name or company name],

I work with owners of short-term rentals in [market]. Your name appears on public short-term rental records for [property address 1] and [property address 2], so I am writing about financing for rental property you own or plan to buy.

We make business-purpose loans on investment property, including short-term rentals, [one line on how your program underwrites]. We can help with three things: refinancing a rental you own outright or on a short-term loan, taking equity out of one rental to buy another, or financing your next purchase.

If any of those is on your list for the next year, I would be glad to talk through what we would need to see. If not, no reply is needed.

[Name], [Title]
[Direct phone] | [Email]

This letter is about business-purpose financing of investment property. It is not an offer of credit or a statement that you qualify for a loan. We got your name and address from public short-term rental permit records. To stop receiving mail from us, call [number] or email [address].

What the letter leaves out on purpose:

No rate, payment, loan amount or down payment. Any of those in a consumer ad triggers Regulation Z disclosures, and all of them are on the Regulation N list of things that cannot be misrepresented.
No "pre-approved," "you qualify" or "your property is eligible." You do not know that from a permit.
No permit number, city seal or the word "official." A letter that uses those can read as a government notice, which our terms prohibit and which goes to the source of the communication.
No reference to the owner's current lender. The permit does not tell you who it is, and naming a lender you have guessed is a misleading-use problem.

A second touch four to six weeks later can be a postcard with the same three reasons and a short line about the market, for example a fact from the city's own permit page that changes how rentals are held or transferred. Keep the source line and the opt-out on every piece.

Sample email for a DSCR lender

Use email where the register publishes an address, such as Louisiana, Wisconsin and Kentucky. Send it from a real person at the lender, to one owner at a time, at low volume.

Subject: Financing for your rentals at [street name] and [street name]

Hi [first name or company name],

I am [name], a loan officer at [company]. I am writing because your name is on public short-term rental permit records for [property address 1] and [property address 2] in [city].

We make business-purpose loans on investment property, including short-term rentals. We can help if you want to refinance a rental, take equity out of one to buy another, or finance the next purchase.

If that is on your plans, reply with a good time and I will call. If not, reply "no" and I will not write again.

[Name], [Title], [Company legal name]
[Phone] | [Physical postal address] | [NMLS or license number, if required]

This is an advertisement for business-purpose financing. It is not an offer of credit. To stop receiving these emails, reply "no" or use this link: [opt-out link].

Checks before you send: the From name is a person who works there, the subject line matches the body, the physical postal address is present, the message says it is an advertisement, the opt-out works and is honored within 10 business days, and the list has been through your suppression file. If you use a reply classifier, test it against your own footer text so a reply quoting your opt-out line is not filed as a refusal.

A short phone opener, where calling is allowed

Only for numbers that passed your Do Not Call scrub, dialed by hand, within calling hours in the owner's time zone:

"Hi, this is [name] with [company legal name]. I am calling owners of short-term rentals in [city]. Your name is on the public permit list for [street]. We do business-purpose loans on rental property. Is financing something you are looking at this year? If not, I will make a note and we will not call again."

If the person says not to call, record it and suppress the number across every campaign the same day.

What a permit-based campaign costs

The figures below use our published prices and the USPS retail postage prices effective October 4, 2026. Printing, envelopes, labor and any mail house fees are not included, because they depend on your vendors; get quotes and add them. Every total here is an estimate built from the arithmetic shown.

Data

Option	Price	Per record
Florida, one-time state download	$149	$149 / 53,152 = about 0.28 cents per record; $149 / 39,708 contactable = about 0.38 cents
California, one-time state download	$149	$149 / 24,522 = about 0.61 cents per record
National, one-time download	$499	$499 / 283,611 = about 0.18 cents per record
State subscription	$99 a month	Up to 10,000 rows a month, with updates
National subscription	$299 a month	Up to 50,000 rows a month, with updates

One trade-off to work out before you buy: Florida has 53,152 records, and a state subscription exports up to 10,000 rows a month. Pulling the whole state that way takes six monthly cycles (53,152 / 10,000 = 5.3, rounded up), or $594 at $99 a month. The one-time download gets the whole file for $149. The subscription earns its cost when you want new filings every month in the markets you lend in, not when you want one full pull.

Postage

USPS retail prices effective October 4, 2026: $0.82 for a stamped 1-ounce First-Class letter and $0.65 for a stamped postcard. Presorted commercial rates on the same price list are lower; your mail house can quote them.

Campaign (estimate)	Pieces	Postage	Data	Total before printing
Florida owners on 2+ addresses, one letter each	1,996	1,996 x $0.82 = $1,636.72	$149	$1,785.72
Same list, one postcard each	1,996	1,996 x $0.65 = $1,297.40	$149	$1,446.40
Same list, letter then postcard	3,992	$1,636.72 + $1,297.40 = $2,934.12	$149	$3,083.12
Big Bear and Joshua Tree owners on 2+ properties, one letter each	316	316 x $0.82 = $259.12	$149 (California file)	$408.12

The Florida count is names on two or more Florida addresses, mailed once per name. After you drop shared manager and agent addresses the piece count will be lower, and so will the cost.

Break-even

We do not publish response rates, and we cannot tell you what yours will be. What you can do is work out the break-even before you mail. The formula is: funded loans needed = total campaign cost / your net revenue per funded loan. With the Florida letter campaign above, if your net revenue per funded loan is R dollars, the campaign pays for its data and postage with one funded loan whenever R is above $1,785.72 plus your printing cost. Put your own R into the formula and decide whether one, two or ten funded loans is a reasonable bar for a list of owners who already run rentals.

Time

An estimate, not a measured figure: if your team spends about two minutes per owner name checking the grouping, the mailing address and the permit type, the 1,996 Florida names take about 67 hours (1,996 x 2 = 3,992 minutes). Most of that time goes on the names with many records. Sorting by record count and reviewing the top of the list by hand, while accepting the single-property and two-property names as grouped, cuts it sharply.

Mistakes to avoid

Mailing owner-occupied permits. Homestays, primary-residence licenses and residential owner permits belong to people renting part of their own home. They are not a business-purpose audience, and our terms do not allow using the data for consumer offers to individuals.
Using the data to make credit decisions. The file is for choosing whom to contact. It is not a consumer report and must not be used to approve, decline or price a loan.
Writing to the rental instead of the owner. Where a mailing address exists, use it.
Counting renewals as properties. Registers that keep history list one home many times. Group by distinct address and current status.
Treating every big name as an owner. In Florida a manager can hold the license. Check the mailing address and the name before you call someone a portfolio investor.
Putting a rate in the first touch. It adds disclosure duties for consumer credit and misrepresentation risk for everything. Save terms for the conversation.
Making the letter look official. No permit numbers, seals or "official notice" language, and no suggestion that the letter comes from the city or the owner's current lender.
Calling on the property's clock. Calling hours follow the owner's local time. Out-of-state owners live elsewhere.
Dialing without a scrub. Permit phone numbers are often personal mobiles, and permit data never supplies consent.
Ignoring the city's rules on the collateral. A license that cannot transfer, expires on a fixed date or sits under a cap changes what a buyer is getting.

Checklist for a permit-based lending campaign

Pick markets you can lend in and confirm with compliance that you can advertise there.
Pull the registers for those markets. Check which fields each publishes: name, mailing address, phone, email, permit type, status.
Filter to active and pending permits. Set aside expired, denied and revoked records for a separate decision.
Remove owner-occupied permit types: homestays, primary-residence licenses, residential owner permits, owner-occupied permits.
Group by name within each state, counting distinct property addresses. Merge spelling variants by hand.
Tag each name as company, trust or individual.
Flag mailing addresses outside the property's state. Flag mailing addresses shared by many unrelated names as likely managers or agents.
Choose segments: for example, companies on two to nine addresses, then individuals with out-of-state mailing addresses on non-owner-occupied permits.
Read the city's permit page for each market and note any rule that affects the collateral: caps, transfer limits, expiry dates.
Write the first touch with no rate, payment, amount or approval language, a source line, and an opt-out. Get compliance sign-off.
Mail first. For email, apply CAN-SPAM. For phone, scrub against the National Do Not Call Registry within 31 days, dial by hand, call within hours in the owner's time zone.
Log every opt-out and suppress it across all channels. Keep copies of every piece and its send date for at least 24 months.
Work out the break-even before you mail and compare funded loans against it afterward.
Pull new filings monthly in your markets and send each new pending applicant one letter.

Getting the records

PermitPulse collects the public registers described here into one file, with the name, addresses, contact fields, permit type and status each register publishes. The lender page shows the fields and live counts that matter for financing. You can start with a free 25-row sample of any register after a free sign-up. Paid options are $149 for a one-time state download, $499 for the national file, or $99 a month for one state and $299 a month for the national file with updates; see pricing. To check a single property before a call, the free STR permit lookup tells you whether an address appears on a public short-term rental register. For a lending team that wants the grouping, flags and suppression built into its own system, custom lead-generation software builds start at $1,500.

Questions and answers

Can a DSCR lender use short-term rental permit records to find borrowers?

Yes, for marketing. Permit registers name the holder of each short-term rental permit and give the property address, and many add a mailing address, phone or email. Lenders use them to find owners who may refinance or buy again, starting with non-owner-occupied permits, company holders and names on two or more properties. The records carry no loan, lien, income or credit information, so they decide whom you contact, not whom you approve.

Which states publish owner mailing addresses or contact details?

As of October 2026, Florida's license file has a mailing address on 51,116 of 53,152 records and a phone on 39,690. Tennessee has mailing addresses on 17,538 of 19,532 records but no phone or email. Louisiana, California, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia publish phones or emails on most records. Tennessee, Oregon, Illinois, South Carolina, North Carolina, Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Wyoming publish no phone or email.

Is short-term rental permit data a consumer report under the FCRA?

We sell it as a marketing list built from public permit records, not as a consumer report, and our terms do not allow using it to decide anyone's eligibility for credit, insurance, employment or housing, or for any other FCRA purpose. Do not use permit fields to approve, decline or price a loan. A prescreened firm offer of credit is a separate process run through a consumer reporting agency, with its own notice rules.

Do Regulation Z advertising rules apply to DSCR loan marketing?

Regulation Z exempts credit primarily for a business purpose and credit to anyone other than a natural person, so a loan to an LLC is outside it. The CFPB's official interpretation deems credit for non-owner-occupied rental property to be business purpose, unless the owner expects to occupy it more than 14 days in the coming year. Owner-occupied rentals can be consumer credit, where section 1026.24 and the Regulation N MAP rule apply. Ask your compliance team. This is not legal advice.

Can I call or text the phone numbers on permit records?

Treat them as consumer numbers, because many are personal mobiles. Scrub against the National Do Not Call Registry at least every 31 days, dial by hand, call between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the owner's local time (some states and our terms set narrower hours), and do not use autodialers, prerecorded or AI-generated voices, or marketing texts without prior express written consent. Permit data never supplies consent.

How do I find investors with several short-term rentals?

Group permit records by the name on the permit within one state and count distinct property addresses, not records. As of October 2026, 1,996 names hold two or more Florida addresses, covering 5,837 records. Lenders usually start with names on two to nine properties, because names on ten or more are often management companies. Merge spelling variants by hand and treat the counts as a floor.

How much does a permit-based mail campaign cost?

Data is $149 for a one-time state download, $499 national, or $99 a month per state with updates. At the USPS retail letter price of $0.82 effective October 4, 2026, one letter to each of the 1,996 Florida names on two or more addresses costs $1,636.72 in postage, or $1,785.72 with the Florida file, before printing. Presort rates are lower. These are estimates; add your own printing and labor.