Pending vs. Granted: Why New Permit Applications Are the Best Leads
A pending STR application is a homeowner days away from needing everything — furniture, cleaning, insurance, management. How to time outreach to the permit lifecycle.
On this page
There is a field in every short-term-rental permit record that most buyers never filter on, and it is worth more than the phone number.
The filing date tells you where an operator is in their lifecycle. Someone who filed three weeks ago has not chosen a cleaner, has not bought furniture, has not decided whether to self-manage, and has not sorted out insurance. Someone who filed in 2021 settled every one of those questions years ago and has an incumbent supplier for each of them.
Same dataset. Completely different sales conversation. Most people work it as though every record were identical.
The permit lifecycle
Strip out the local variation and a short-term rental goes through roughly five stages:
1. Decision. Someone decides to rent the property short-term. Invisible in the data — nothing has been filed yet.
2. Application. They file for a permit. This is the earliest point at which they become visible to you, and in registers that publish pending applications, you can see them here.
3. Approval. The permit is granted. Depending on the jurisdiction this takes days or months.
4. Setup. Furniture, photography, listing creation, locks, insurance, a cleaning arrangement, pricing. Most purchasing decisions in the entire lifecycle happen here.
5. Operation. The property is live. Suppliers are chosen. Switching now requires dissatisfaction with an incumbent.
Nearly all the commercial value sits between stages 2 and 4, and that window is usually a matter of weeks.
Pending applications
Some registers publish applications before approval. New Orleans, for instance, maintains a public register of short-term-rental permit applications distinct from its register of active licences.
A pending application is the strongest buying signal available in this dataset. The person has committed — they have filled in the form, paid the fee, and in many places had to satisfy conditions before applying. They are weeks from needing everything, and no supplier has reached them yet.
There are 4,147 pending applications in the database right now. It is a small fraction of the total, and that is the point: it is the fraction where a first-mover advantage still exists.
Two things to keep in mind. First, pending is perishable — it becomes granted, or occasionally denied, and either way the status changes. If you are going to work this segment, work it on a short cycle, not quarterly. Second, not every register publishes pending status, so this is a market-by-market opportunity rather than a national one.
Which registers publish pending applications
As of October 23, 2026, 15 registers carry ten or more records marked pending, 4,751 records between them. New Orleans STR Permit Applications (all applications, historical + current) holds the most, 3,618 of its 28,104 records. A register that is missing from this table either decides applications before it publishes anything or does not print a status at all, so its records enter the file already granted.
| Register | State | Pending | Share of register |
|---|---|---|---|
| New Orleans STR permit applications | Louisiana | 3,618 | 13% |
| El Dorado County vacation home rental permits | California | 373 | 19% |
| Metro Nashville residential STR permits | Tennessee | 140 | 1% |
| Boulder County short-term and vacation rental licenses | Colorado | 136 | 26% |
| City of Arlington TX Short Term Rental Permits | Texas | 86 | 11% |
| Imported: Short Term Rental Permit | Texas | 68 | 10% |
| City of Boulder Short-Term Rental Licenses (open data, CC0) + Boulder County Assessor owners | Colorado | 64 | 6% |
| City of Charleston SC Short Term Rental Operational Permits | South Carolina | 63 | 7% |
| City of Sacramento Active Short Term Rental Permits | California | 41 | 8% |
| Imported: Short Term Vacation Rentals | Colorado | 39 | 27% |
| Portland accessory short-term rental permits | Oregon | 33 | 1% |
| Sonoma County Vacation Rental Licenses (grandfathered / exempt list) | California | 31 | 6% |
| Asheville homestay permits | North Carolina | 24 | 1% |
| City of Waco TX Short Term Rentals | Texas | 20 | 5% |
| City of Beaufort SC Short Term Rentals | South Carolina | 15 | 5% |
The share column matters as much as the count. Where pending applications are a large slice of a register, the program is either young or slow to decide, and a supplier who reaches applicants before approval is early by weeks. Where the share is small, pending records are a short list worth calling by hand rather than mailing in bulk.
Recently granted
The bigger and more reliably available segment is permits granted in the last few months. The urgency is slightly lower than pending, but the volume is far higher and the buying is still ahead of them.
26,549 records in the database carry a filing date within the last twelve months. The registers below carry the most of them. A date column means different things in different places (an application date in one register, an issue or renewal date in another), so read the newest date as "the latest event the register recorded", and check a register's own page for what its date field holds.
| Register | State | Filed, last 90 days | Filed, last 12 months | Newest filing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texas hotel occupancy tax permits (statewide) | Texas | 378 | 3,576 | October 23, 2026 |
| Chicago shared housing registrations | Illinois | 338 | 3,367 | October 21, 2026 |
| New Orleans active STR licenses | Louisiana | 224 | 3,138 | October 13, 2026 |
| New Orleans STR permit applications | Louisiana | 582 | 1,753 | October 21, 2026 |
| City of Corpus Christi TX Short Term Rental Properties | Texas | 0 | 1,503 | May 19, 2026 |
| Lexington-Fayette STR public view | Kentucky | 742 | 1,467 | October 21, 2026 |
| New Orleans non-commercial STR licenses | Louisiana | 89 | 1,231 | September 22, 2026 |
| Louisville Metro STR registrations | Kentucky | 255 | 1,219 | October 22, 2026 |
| San Bernardino County STR permits | California | 181 | 1,043 | October 12, 2026 |
| Metro Nashville residential STR permits | Tennessee | 177 | 872 | October 19, 2026 |
| City of Charleston SC Short Term Rental Operational Permits | South Carolina | 135 | 769 | October 1, 2026 |
| City of Aspen STR permits | Colorado | 0 | 747 | May 26, 2026 |
Some registers publish no usable date at all: Florida DBPR vacation rental licenses (statewide) (50,109), Imported: Short Term Rental License (18,969), Wisconsin DATCP tourist rooming house licenses (statewide) (12,919), Seattle short-term rental licenses (9,769), San Diego STRO licenses (8,850) and City of Austin short-term rental locations (3,819). For those, the only freshness signal is when a record first appeared in our copy of the register, which the export carries as the first-seen date.
How fast a new filing reaches the dataset
Each register is copied in full once, and every record that appears after that first copy is tagged as new. For new records that also carry a filing date, the gap between the two dates shows how quickly a filing becomes visible. Most of the gap is the register's own publishing delay: the pullers are scheduled to check each register at least once a day.
| Register | New dated records | Within 7 days of filing | Within 30 days | Over a year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texas hotel occupancy tax permits (statewide) | 924 | 7% | 30% | 1% |
| New Orleans STR permit applications | 870 | 76% | 95% | 0% |
| Marin County CA Registered Active Short Term Rentals | 803 | 0% | 2% | 94% |
| Lexington-Fayette STR public view | 742 | 100% | 100% | 0% |
| New Orleans active STR licenses | 419 | 18% | 76% | 1% |
| Chicago shared housing registrations | 419 | 100% | 100% | 0% |
| San Bernardino County STR permits | 369 | 14% | 60% | 12% |
| New Orleans non-commercial STR licenses | 355 | 3% | 45% | 0% |
| Metro Nashville residential STR permits | 339 | 30% | 47% | 24% |
| Louisville Metro STR registrations | 333 | 98% | 98% | 0% |
| Portland accessory short-term rental permits | 202 | 67% | 97% | 2% |
| Boulder County short-term and vacation rental licenses | 89 | 7% | 58% | 0% |
| Chattanooga active short-term vacation rentals | 68 | 3% | 13% | 1% |
| Traverse City vacation home rentals | 67 | 99% | 99% | 0% |
| Denver STR licenses | 63 | 11% | 11% | 3% |
| Philadelphia limited lodging operator licenses | 63 | 98% | 100% | 0% |
| Sonoma County vacation rental permits | 55 | 0% | 22% | 2% |
| Minneapolis STR licenses and registrations | 30 | 67% | 93% | 7% |
A register where most new records arrive within a week of their filing date is a near-live feed; working it weekly keeps you ahead of anyone working it monthly. A register where most arrive months after filing is publishing in batches, so its "new" records are older than they look and the pitch should not assume a brand-new operator.
Who should care, and how much
Recency is not equally valuable to everyone. Roughly:
| If you sell | Best segment | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Furniture, staging, setup | Pending & <60 days | The purchase happens once, right at the start. After setup you have missed it entirely. |
| STR insurance | Pending & <90 days | Coverage is a setup purchase, and the policy renewal gives you a second window a year later. |
| Photography, listing setup | <60 days | Needed before the first booking. Worthless after the listing is live and performing. |
| Cleaning & turnover | <90 days, then anytime | Best at the start, but cleaner churn is high enough that established operators are worth calling too. |
| Property management, co-hosting | 6–24 months | Counterintuitive: brand-new owners want to self-manage. They reconsider after a season of it. More here. |
| PMS & software | Any, skewed 3–18 months | Nobody buys software before they have felt the problem. Once they own two properties, they will. |
| Tax & accounting | Any, seasonal | Driven by the calendar, not the permit — first tax season after the first rental year is the moment. |
| Lending | 12+ months | Expansion capital is a second-property conversation, and that comes after a year of returns. |
The pattern: services needed to start operating want the freshest possible records. Services needed to keep operating better want operators with a season or two behind them.
Multi-property owners
One more segmentation worth doing. Someone holding several permits in the same market is running a small business, not a side project. They buy differently — more likely to want software, professional management and financing, less likely to be shopping on price alone, and worth substantially more over their lifetime.
You can identify them by grouping records on owner name, allowing for the fact that a lot of them file through LLCs and the entity names will not match neatly.
Working it in practice
A workable approach for a small team looks like this:
Set a cadence that matches the perishability. If you sell to new operators, pull the newly filed records every week or two, not once a quarter. The segment refreshes constantly and goes stale just as fast.
Write to the stage, not to the industry. A note that opens with the permit itself ("your short-term rental permit was filed in March; if you are still lining up turnover cleaning before the first booking, here is what we do") lands very differently from a generic services pitch. You know something specific and true about their situation, because the government record told you.
Track filing date in your CRM. It is the field that tells you when to follow up and what to say. A prospect who was too early for your offer in March may be exactly right in September.
Do not confuse fresh with contactable. The freshest markets are not always the ones with published phone numbers — Texas and Chicago both file heavily and publish almost no contact details. Match the segment to the channel you can actually run.
The filtering workspace supports both filters: filed-since date and contactability, per state. That combination is where most of the value in this dataset actually lives.