To find construction leads before competitors, you need to know one thing most contractors ignore: a building permit is not a single moment, it is a clock that starts when an application is filed and ends when the permit is issued. That gap is your window. In Toronto, the median permit takes 32 days from application to issuance (average 82.1 days). Every one of those days is a day a project exists on paper before it shows up in the public “issued” feeds your competitors are watching. Find the lead during that window and you reach the owner before the bidding gets crowded.
This post uses SiteWire’s own permit dataset of more than 3 million building permits across 31 Canadian cities, current as of July 2026. Below are the real numbers that decide how early you can realistically get to a lead in each market, drawn from the trailing 24-month window.
Why Permit Timing Decides Who Gets the Lead First
Most lead tools sell you the same thing: a feed of permits that have already been issued. By the time a permit hits that feed, the project is public, the owner has already chosen a path, and you are one of a dozen contractors calling. The earlier signal is the application itself, and how long it sits before issuance tells you how much runway you have to act.
A market where permits issue fast leaves you almost no head start. A market where permits sit for months gives you a long window to build a relationship before the project becomes common knowledge. Knowing your city’s real timing is the difference between calling first and calling last.
Application-to-Issuance Speed by City
Here are the average and median application-to-issuance times by city, drawn from SiteWire’s permit warehouse (cities that publish elapsed processing days, with at least 50 valid records), as of July 2026.
| City | Avg days | Median days | Permits (n) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Thunder Bay | 29.9 | 11 | 1,843 |
| Kelowna | 38.2 | 12 | 2,967 |
| Montreal | 50.8 | 17 | 40,780 |
| St. Catharines | 61.0 | 31 | 1,985 |
| Toronto | 82.1 | 32 | 41,436 |
| Vancouver | 112.5 | 69 | 9,652 |
Read this as a map of your head start. In Thunder Bay, permits issue in a median of 11 days, so the lead window is short and you have to move the day an application appears. In Vancouver, the median stretches past two months, which means a project filed today may not be public knowledge for ten or more weeks. That is a long runway to find the owner, understand the scope, and position yourself before the issued-permit feeds light up.
In Slow Markets, Work Type Changes Everything
City-level averages hide a second layer. Within a single city, different kinds of work move at completely different speeds. Vancouver is the clearest example. Here is the same dataset broken out by work type for Vancouver over the same 24-month window.
| Work type | Avg days | Median days | Permits (n) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Temporary Building / Structure | 21.9 | 12 | 81 |
| Salvage and Abatement | 60.7 | 28 | 927 |
| Addition / Alteration | 71.6 | 41 | 4,953 |
| Demolition / Deconstruction | 154.9 | 120 | 1,422 |
| New Building | 198.8 | 159 | 2,301 |
A renovation contractor in Vancouver is working a 41-day median window on Addition/Alteration permits. A new-construction builder is looking at a 159-day median on New Building permits. That is more than five months between application and issuance. If you serve the new-build market, you have nearly half a year to identify a project and reach the owner before it becomes public. Treating every permit type as the same speed is how contractors miss the leads with the longest runway.
How to Turn Permit Timing Into Leads
The data above points to a concrete workflow:
- Know your real window. Look up the median application-to-issuance time for your city and your specific work type, not the city average. Your outreach urgency should match the clock you are actually on.
- Watch applications, not just issuances. The issued-permit feed is the crowded one. The application stage is where the head start lives.
- Prioritize the long-runway work. In slow markets, new building and demolition permits sit the longest, which gives you the most time to build a relationship before competitors notice.
- Set alerts so you do not have to refresh manually. In a fast market like Thunder Bay (11-day median), a daily alert is the only way to act inside the window at all.
A note on what this data does not tell you: it does not include permit outcomes or approval status, so it cannot tell you which applications will be approved or denied. Use it for timing and targeting, not as a prediction of which projects clear review.
Conclusion
Finding construction leads before competitors comes down to understanding the gap between application and issuance, and acting inside it. The timing varies enormously: a median of 11 days in Thunder Bay, 32 in Toronto, 69 in Vancouver, and 159 days for new buildings in Vancouver alone. The contractors who win are the ones who know their real window and reach owners during it, not after the project is public.
SiteWire tracks building permit data across 31 Canadian cities so you can find construction leads at the application stage and set daily alerts for your market. Take a look at the coverage for your city and start working leads while the window is still open.