Guides / Data
STR Permit Records, Explained: What They Are and What's Inside
When someone registers a short-term rental with their city, that filing becomes a public record. Here is exactly what those records contain, where they come from, and how businesses use them.
Most people selling into the short-term-rental market have never looked at a permit register. It is the least glamorous dataset in the industry and by some distance the most useful, because it is the one place an operator has to identify themselves by name.
This guide explains what these records are, how they get created, what is actually inside one, and — the part that matters commercially — why two states with similar populations can produce wildly different data.
What a short-term-rental permit is
In most of the United States, renting a home to guests for short stays is a regulated activity. The regulation is almost always local: a city, a county, or occasionally a state decides that anyone operating a short-term rental must register, pay a fee, and meet some conditions.
The conditions vary enormously. Some places want proof of insurance and a local contact who can be reached within an hour. Some cap the number of permits in a neighbourhood. Some require the operator to live in the home. Some just want the lodging tax collected properly.
What matters for our purposes is the paperwork. To get a permit, someone fills in a form. That form asks who they are, where the property is, and how to reach them. Once the agency processes it, that filing becomes a government record — and in the United States, government records are presumptively public.
Why the records are public
Every state has a public-records law, and the federal government has the Freedom of Information Act. The details differ, but the principle is consistent: records created by a government agency in the course of its work belong to the public unless a specific exemption applies.
Permit registers are a plain case. They are not personnel files or law-enforcement records. They are licensing records, in the same family as contractor licences, restaurant inspections and liquor permits — the kind of thing many agencies publish on an open-data portal without anyone having to ask.
That publishing decision is where the variation comes from. Two cities can run near-identical permit programs and make completely different choices about what appears on the public-facing register. One posts a searchable map with the operator's phone number. The other posts a PDF with addresses and permit numbers. A third posts nothing and makes you file a records request.
None of them are doing anything wrong. They are exercising discretion about how much of a public record gets pushed onto the open internet versus released on request. But it means the quality of short-term-rental data in a market has almost nothing to do with the size of the market and almost everything to do with an administrative decision made by a records officer.
What is inside a record
A typical permit filing, normalized into database fields, gives you:
- Property address — the actual street address of the rental, not a fuzzy map circle. Present on essentially every record.
- Owner or host name — the person or entity that applied. Frequently an individual; often an LLC.
- Permit ID — the licence or registration number, which lets you verify the record against the source register.
- Permit type — many programs distinguish whole-home from owner-occupied or partial-home rentals, which tells you something real about the operator.
- Status — active, pending, expired, revoked. Pending is commercially interesting; more on that below.
- City and county — for territory assignment and routing.
- Filing date — when the application was made. The single most under-used field in the entire dataset.
- Phone and email — where the register publishes them. This is the field that varies most.
Of the 302,337 records currently in PermitPulse, 104,962 carry a phone or email — 103,243 with a phone, 46,749 with an email. That is roughly a third of the database, and the distribution is nothing like even.
The contactability problem, explained properly
This is the thing to understand before you buy permit data from anyone.
Louisiana and Texas are both large states with large short-term-rental markets. New Orleans publishes its short-term-rental registers with the applicant's phone number and email address attached — so Louisiana contributes 28,247 contactable records out of 32,756.
Texas surfaces short-term rentals mainly through hotel-occupancy-tax permits filed with the state Comptroller. That file is statewide, current, and covers every beach town and hill-country market in the state — 46,154 records. It publishes almost no phone numbers at all.
Neither file is better. They are different products. The Louisiana data feeds a dialer. The Texas data feeds a direct-mail campaign or a skip-trace, and because it frustrates every phone-first competitor, it is considerably less worked.
The question to ask any vendor: "For the specific states I care about, how many records include a published phone number — and does that number come from the government register or from an append vendor?" A file that was 12% contactable at the source and is now advertised at 95% has been appended, and appends in this category are frequently wrong. A wrong number is worse than no number: it costs you a call, and occasionally it costs you a complaint.
Where the records live
There are roughly four tiers, and they determine everything about whether a market is available.
Open-data portals. The best case. A city publishes its register as a structured, machine-readable dataset that updates on a schedule. New Orleans, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, Nashville and Louisville are all in this category. Data quality is high and freshness is genuinely good.
Mapping services. Many counties publish permits as a geographic layer intended for a map viewer rather than as a data download. The information is all there and it is entirely public — it just was not designed to be read in bulk. A lot of county-level short-term-rental data lives here.
State licensing files. A handful of states license at the state level rather than leaving it to cities. Florida is the clearest example: the Department of Business and Professional Regulation licenses vacation rentals statewide under Florida Statute 509.241, which is why Florida coverage is statewide rather than city-by-city, and why most Florida records carry the licensee's phone number straight from the licence file. Wisconsin runs a comparable statewide program for tourist rooming houses, and its file is the best-contact-quality dataset in the country.
Records requests only. Plenty of jurisdictions run real permit programs and publish nothing online. The records still exist and are still public; getting them means filing a formal request under the state public-records act, waiting, and often paying a copying fee. Sevier County, Tennessee — Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, thousands of permitted cabins — is a well-known example of a large market that publishes nothing.
The fields people ignore
Two fields carry more commercial signal than the contact details everyone fixates on.
Filing date
A permit filed last month and a permit filed in 2021 are not the same prospect. The recent one belongs to someone in the middle of setting up: they are buying furniture, choosing a lock, shopping for insurance, deciding whether to self-manage, and looking for a cleaner. The 2021 one has settled every one of those questions and has an incumbent supplier for each.
21,002 records in the database were filed within the last twelve months. If you sell anything a new operator needs, that subset is worth more than the rest of the file combined. This argument gets its own guide.
Status
Pending applications are the earliest possible signal — someone who has decided to operate but has not yet been approved. There are 3,296 of them in the database right now. They are also the most perishable: pending becomes granted, and the window closes.
What permit data is not
Three honest limitations.
It does not cover unpermitted operators. Some people run short-term rentals without registering. They are, by definition, absent from a permit register. In markets with strict caps and long waiting lists, that population can be significant.
It tells you nothing about performance. A permit record does not know whether the property books out every weekend or sat empty all year. If you need occupancy or revenue estimates, that is a different product built from listing and booking data.
It is uneven, and honest vendors say so. Coverage follows administrative decisions, not market size. Some enormous markets are thin because the county publishes nothing; some small resort towns are beautifully documented. Anyone claiming uniform national coverage of this data is describing something that does not exist.
And two states with nothing
Idaho and Iowa have both preempted local short-term-rental permitting at the state level. Idaho's House Bill 583, signed in March 2026 and effective 1 July 2026, bars cities and counties from requiring a permit, licence, registration or fee to operate a short-term rental. Iowa did the same in 2020 through House File 2641.
The consequence is straightforward: if local governments cannot require permits, no permit registers get created, and there is nothing to publish. We exclude both states from everything we sell. The longer version is here.
Using it
Permit data answers one question extremely well — who is legally operating a short-term rental, where, and since when — and it answers it with a government record rather than an inference.
Everything else is your job: deciding which markets are worth working, choosing an outreach channel that matches what the register actually publishes, and staying inside the rules when you make contact. Public record status makes the data legal to hold. It does not make every method of using it legal, and the compliance side is worth ten minutes of your time before you dial anything.