Playbook · Material suppliers & distributors
The supplier playbook
You sell materials to contractors. A building permit is the earliest public proof a job is real and funded — pulled weeks before the slab and months before dry-in. This is the working guide to turning that into a daily list of accounts worth a call: the exact searches, the signals, and the advanced moves.
Set up in a few minutes; your first digest lands the next morning at 7 AM.
The daily loop
- 1
Set your territory
On sign-up, pick “Material supplier,” enter your service-area ZIP codes, and start from a trade preset (lumber, roofing, plumbing/PVF, HVAC, concrete, solar…). That builds your first saved search and turns on a 7 AM daily digest — so day one already knows where and what you sell.
Tip Add every ZIP you cover, even thin ones — a permit in an edge ZIP is still an order you’d have missed.
- 2
Read your Today feed
Every morning, Today is a ranked call list — not a database. Each play tells you who to call, why now (numbers first), the phone number, and Open for the full record. Work top-down: the list is ranked by opportunity, so the first five calls are usually the day’s best five.
- 3
Open the record, then dial
Each play opens to the full picture — the permit (type, work class, value or labeled estimate, lifecycle stage), the property (owner, parcel, water signal), and the contractor of record with license status, disciplinary history, and recent volume, each on a match-confidence badge. Tap the number to call, or Route for directions. Mark the outcome so the ranking learns and your Report fills.
- 4
Build your Book
Add the contractors you sell to — and the ones you want — to My Book. It becomes your account radar: who’s ramping, who’s gone quiet, and whose license is about to lapse, before your competitor’s rep knows.
Tip Put your top 20 accounts in first. The “going quiet” alert alone often covers the seat.
Aim it right
Point your search at the work that buys your product
Not every supplier sells into the same permit. Point your saved search at the work that actually consumes your product — here’s the mapping, with a search you can paste straight into the bar.
| If you sell… | Target the… |
|---|---|
| Lumber & building materials | New homes, additions, ADUs — the framing stage“new single family homes over $300k in Mesa” |
| Roofing distribution | Tear-offs, reroofs, new-construction roofing“reroofs over $15k in North Phoenix in the last 30 days” |
| Plumbing / PVF | Repipes, water-heater swaps, new-construction rough-in“water heater and repipe permits in Scottsdale this month” |
| Electrical distribution | Service upgrades, panel changes, solar interconnect“electrical service upgrade permits over $10k” |
| HVAC distribution | AC changeouts and new-construction mechanical“AC replacement permits in my zips” |
| Concrete & masonry | Foundations, slabs, block and retaining walls, pavers“concrete and masonry permits over $25k” |
Searches you can paste straight in
Type it in plain English — the search bar parses the trade, the ZIPs, the dollar floor, and the date window for you.
“reroofs over $15k in North Phoenix in the last 30 days”
Roofing tear-offs above a material-worthy threshold, in a specific slice of the metro, from the last month. (The roofing lens excludes roof-mounted solar and rooftop AC — you get shingle and tile jobs, not PV arrays.)
“new single family homes over $300k in Mesa”
New-construction SFR big enough to carry a full material package, in one city.
“new construction over $1M anywhere”
The largest projects across the whole metro — the accounts worth a personal visit.
“water heater and repipe permits in Scottsdale this month”
Fixture-and-pipe replacement work, matched to the plumber where the city names one.
What to look for
The signals that separate a call from a waste of a call
- Lifecycle stage
- An “applied” permit is the earliest signal — before the contractor has ordered material. “Issued” means it’s imminent. The earlier you catch it, the more of the order is still up for grabs.
- Valuation band
- A bigger declared value is a bigger material order. Sort by highest-$ to put the largest jobs first — just treat clearly-labeled ~EST figures as a rough band, not a quote.
- New vs. remodel
- New construction is a full material package; a remodel or alteration is a partial one. The work class tells you which, so you can size the opportunity before you call.
- The contractor’s trend
- A contractor whose permit count is climbing is a growing account. One that’s gone quiet is an account to defend — or a competitor’s you can win while they’re slipping.
- Owner & property (Pro)
- A recently-sold property or a cash buyer is a fast-moving, well-capitalized owner more likely to spend. Filter for it when you want the highest-intent slice.
Power moves
Once you’re past the basics
Run a separate saved search — and separate morning digest — for each line you carry. Roofing leads land in one rep’s inbox, plumbing in another’s, already filtered to their territory.
The account radar flags a customer whose permit pace has dropped before they churn. That “going quiet” email is often the difference between a save and a lost account.
Territory shows which trades are heating up in your ZIPs this quarter. Use it to get ahead of demand and route reps where the work is actually moving, not where it was last year.
The contractor leaderboards rank the most active builders in your area. The ones you don’t sell yet are your best new-account targets — you already know they’re busy.
Applied permits surface before they’re issued — which is before your competitor’s rep has heard about the job. It’s the earliest legal moment to make the call.
Any search exports to CSV, so you can bulk-load a call list into your CRM or hand a rep a route for the week.
What you’ll see on every lead
Type, work class, lifecycle stage (applied → issued → in progress → finaled), and declared value — or a clearly-labeled estimate when the city doesn’t report one.
Address matched to the county parcel, owner of record, and Arizona-specific signals like the assured-water determination.
Where the permit names one: the AZ ROC license, status, classification, disciplinary flags, and recent permit volume — with a match-confidence badge on every link.
How recent the activity is, refreshed daily from each city’s feed — so “hot” really means this week.
Straight about the data
What we won’t oversell
- Some cities publish permits without a contractor field — Gilbert, Goodyear, Chandler, and Queen Creek name no contractor, so there you’ll see the job and the property but not always who pulled it.
- Across everything, a contractor is resolved on 42% of all permits and about 68% of the permits that actually name one — every link shows its confidence, so you see how sure we are rather than an inflated number.
- Where a city doesn’t report a value, we show a labeled estimate — treat ~EST figures as a rough band, especially on solar and specialty work where estimates are noisier.
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