Properties vs Permits: Which Endpoint?

You want to	Use
Build a list of properties by location, owner, type, or attributes	Search Properties
Ask “which properties have (or lack) work of type X”	Search Properties
Pull full records for property IDs you already hold	Get Properties By ID
Ask anything with an upper date bound or a date window	Search Permits
See every individual permit and its full history	Search Permits
Scope by parcel number (APN) or by permitting jurisdiction	Search Permits

You want to

Use

Build a list of properties by location, owner, type, or attributes

Search Properties

Ask “which properties have (or lack) work of type X”

Search Properties

Pull full records for property IDs you already hold

Get Properties By ID

Ask anything with an upper date bound or a date window

Search Permits

See every individual permit and its full history

Search Permits

Scope by parcel number (APN) or by permitting jurisdiction

Search Permits

What Properties Deliberately Won’t Answer

A property record keeps only the latest permit date per work type. Some questions can’t be answered correctly from that summary, so the API rejects them rather than returning a wrong answer. Each of them is an exact question on /permits/search, which holds every individual permit.

Query	Why it’s not supported
”Permits before 2020” (`permit_to`, any upper bound)	Older permits hide behind newer ones—a property whose latest roofing permit is 2023 may or may not also have one from 2019
”No solar before 2020”	Two properties whose latest solar permit is 2023 are indistinguishable, even if one also had solar in 2016
”No roofing between 2018 and 2021”	A permit inside the window is hidden by a later one. Only “ever” and “since date D” are expressible
”Has solar since 2022 and no roofing since 2022”	Only one date can be carried per query—in a mixed query, the exclusion means “never”
Search by parcel number (APN)	APNs are county-specific, roughly 9.5M collide across counties, and ~30% of properties have none. APN is returned on every record for mapping, just not searchable
Scope by permitting jurisdiction	Jurisdiction is recorded on a minority of property records, so scoping to it would silently drop properties that were never permitted

These aren’t roadmap gaps—each is a question the property-level summary cannot answer correctly, so the API refuses it instead of returning a silently wrong result.

​What Properties Deliberately Won’t Answer

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What Properties Deliberately Won’t Answer

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