What it is
Every week the City of Toronto issues roughly 700 to 800 building permits and publishes them in one giant spreadsheet nobody has time to read. We read all of it and pull out the ground-up housing starts: new houses and multiplexes, garden and laneway suites, and new second suites — permits issued, meaning approved and shovel-ready, not applications. You get one email every Monday that reads in five minutes.
Every line carries its permit number, so you can ask the City's permit counter for the applicant's contact yourself. Nothing is invented; every line traces back to a real permit.
This past week, really (Oct 5–11, 2026)
753 permits were issued city-wide. 47 of them were ground-up housing files, plus 22 houses came down:
- 17 new houses & multiplexes
- 17 garden & laneway suites
- 8 new second suites
- 38 new low-rise homes and units in total
- 4 bigger builds, incl. a 108-unit rental building at 2901 Bayview Ave and a 170-unit one at 799 Sheppard Ave W
A few lines exactly as they appear in the digest:
- 50 Altamont Rd (M2M, North York) — Permit 26 188064 — old house down, new 3-storey fourplex, 4 units
- 521 Warden Ave (M1L, Scarborough) — Permit 26 213999 — new garden suite on a fourplex site
- 258 Lytton Blvd (M5N, North York) — Permit 26 225179 — new 2-storey detached house
- 983 Pharmacy Ave (M1R, Scarborough) — Permit 26 246774 — new basement second suite
- 2901 Bayview Ave (M2K, North York) — Permit 23 213533 — new 8-storey rental building, 108 units
Where they landed: North York 25 · Scarborough 10 · Etobicoke 7 · Toronto & East York 5.
Who it's for
- Custom-home and multiplex builders who want to see every new start first.
- Trades and suppliers who live off early-stage builds: excavation, foundation, framing, windows, lumber yards, site services, dumpsters, scaffolding.
- Coming soon — Demolition Watch: every teardown the week it's approved, for abatement crews, excavators and bin fleets.
Why it wins work: a permit issued this week means that owner hires trades and orders materials in the next 2–8 weeks. You're calling them the week they got approved, not months later.
Price
- Ground-Up Starts digest — $49/month. The Monday email described above. Cancel anytime.
- Every digest, every trade — $99/month. All digests we publish, including Demolition Watch when it launches and new city feeds as they open. Cancel anytime.
Your first digest is free. No setup, no contract.
How to start
Email permits@orbitalfour.com and ask for the sample. We'll send you the current week's digest free. If you like it, reply and your subscription starts the same Monday.
The honest part
The underlying data is the City of Toronto's open data — free to everyone. What you pay for is the filtering and the habit: the ~40–50 ground-up files pulled out of ~750 weekly permits, checked, categorized, and written to be read in five minutes, every Monday, with a permit number on every line.
Data source: City of Toronto Open Data — Building Permits (Active Permits). Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Toronto.