What current LADBS permit volume says about where the work is this quarter

Everything below is counted from public open data, not from a market report. Two sources: the City of Los Angeles dataset Building Permits Issued from 2020 to Present, published on data.lacity.org; and the EPIC-LA case history published as an open feature service through the LA County open data portal, which covers unincorporated LA County only. Our pull covers permits issued from 8 May to 1 August 2026: 14,693 in the city, 13,098 in unincorporated county areas.

May is a partial month in this window, so treat it as a floor rather than a monthly total.

The city is flat, and that is the story

June and July are within one percent of each other. There is no summer surge and no collapse. If you were waiting for the market to tell you something, it is telling you that the volume you are seeing now is the volume you should plan crews around.

Most permits are not jobs worth cleaning

The median permit valuation across all 14,693 is $7,200. Total valuation is $1.85 billion, but it is concentrated in very few permits:

Three percent of permits are jobs of a size that reliably carries a real post-construction clean. That is roughly 150 a month across the whole City of Los Angeles. Anyone selling you a lead list of "14,000 active projects" is selling you 13,000 water heater swaps.

By work type, the same skew shows up:

• Alteration and repair: 9,763
• Additions: 1,151
• New buildings: 1,056
• Grading: 840
• Pools and spas: 617
• Demolition: 350

And by property class: 11,037 one-or-two-family dwelling, 1,831 apartment, 1,502 commercial. Residential is the volume. Commercial and multifamily are the money: of the 163 permits at $1 million or more, 59 are commercial and 36 are apartment, against 68 single or two family.

One ZIP code is running a third of the big work

ZIP 90272 is Pacific Palisades. In this window it pulled:

• 1,153 permits, 7.8% of every building permit the city issued
• 59 of the 163 permits at $1 million or more, which is 36%
• 410 new single-family dwelling permits, out of 1,269 in the entire city

Monthly, 90272 went 276 in May, 458 in June, 418 in July. Council District 11, which contains the Palisades, is the busiest district in the city by a wide margin at 2,620 permits, 17.8% of the total. The next four are CD4 (1,684), CD5 (1,394), CD12 (1,319) and CD3 (1,197).

After the Palisades, the busiest ZIPs are 90049 Brentwood (389), 91367 Woodland Hills (287), 90066 Mar Vista (280), and 91344 Granada Hills and 91335 Reseda (273 each). West side and south Valley, which is where the money and the older housing stock overlap.

Unincorporated county: 13,098 permits, and a rebuild inside them

Over the same window the county issued 13,098 permits in unincorporated areas: 3,316 in May from the 7th, 4,631 in June, 4,708 in July. Total valuation $1.69 billion, with 1,272 permits at $500,000 or more and 274 at $1 million or more, a noticeably heavier mix than the city's.

Supervisorial District 5 accounts for 6,883 of them, more than the next two districts combined. SD-1 has 2,553 and SD-2 has 1,902.

900 of those permits carry a disaster flag: 864 Eaton Fire and 36 Palisades Fire. 861 of them are at Altadena addresses. 365 are flagged as rebuild in construction, meaning the structure is actually being built rather than sitting at issued. That is covered in more depth in the rebuild roundup.

Across all unincorporated permits, 1,738 add dwelling units, totalling 2,466 new units.

Four caveats worth knowing before you use any of this

The permit datasets no longer name the contractor. The current LADBS series carries the address, APN, type, valuation and work description, but not the contractor or the licence number. The legacy dataset that carried them is no longer available. So permit data tells you where the work is; it does not tell you who is doing it. Attaching a GC to a specific active permit still means looking the address up on the LADBS permit and inspection report, one at a time. The one current LADBS dataset that does still carry a contractor name and licence is the Certificate of Occupancy file, and a certificate of occupancy means the job is already finished.

"Issued" is not "started." A permit can sit for months. The county data has a separate construction flag; the city data does not.

The county figures are unincorporated areas only. The other 87 cities in LA County each run their own permit system. Long Beach, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Burbank and Glendale are all absent from both datasets here.

Valuation is what the applicant declared. It is a reasonable proxy for scale and a poor proxy for actual cost.

What we take from it

We are planning around a flat, not rising, market, with the single largest concentration of high-value residential work in the county sitting in one ZIP code, and a second concentration in unincorporated Altadena. Both are fire rebuilds: hundreds of individual single-family finals, geographically tight, arriving over the next eighteen months rather than all at once.

That is a different business from chasing one big commercial job. It rewards crews who can do a 2,500 square foot final clean properly, in a day, on a street where nine other houses are also being built.

We refresh this pull each quarter. The queries and date windows are ordinary Socrata and ArcGIS requests against the two datasets linked at the top, so anyone can reproduce the numbers.