KnockPortal

Pick a city and a trade

The live permit map opens — free to browse, no account needed.

Live today: San Francisco · Roofing, San Jose · Roofing

KnockPortal at a glance

KnockPortal helps contractors decide where to send direct mail. It uses public permit records for your trade to show where recent permitted work is concentrated, filters out homes with prior permits for the same kind of work, and builds postcard mailings to nearby homes based on the areas you choose. Autopilot is the main way to use KnockPortal: you set a mailing rule and a spending cap per run, then authorize automatic sending under those settings. Sending depends on the required checks and payment, and you can pause or stop the rule. You can also build, approve and pay for a one-off mailing yourself. It shows where permit activity is happening; it does not predict who will hire you.

Available in San Francisco · Roofing: Autopilot (Neighbors of new permits) and one-off mailings.

San Francisco · Roofing snapshot: Oct 17, 2026, 13:30 UTC. It covers the last 30 days of permits: 442 permits, 230 of them in 52 groups.

Subscription for San Francisco · Roofing: $99.00 a month. Postcards: $0.89 each, printing and postage included.

One job covers a month of the subscription and 100 postcards if at least $188.00 is left from it after the job's direct costs, such as materials and crew. This is arithmetic, not a forecast.

Permit records show where permitted work is concentrated, not where work is under way or which homes need it. A home with no permit on record may still have had the work done.

More about KnockPortal: About · Pricing · How it works

How KnockPortal works

The hard part of direct mail is not sending a postcard — it is deciding where to send it. Building permits are public records, and recent ones show which blocks have activity on record. KnockPortal turns that activity into an addressed list you can act on, and shows you the rule it used.

  1. Look

    The whole city: every permit in the window, the blocks where work is clustering, and the houses on those blocks with no permit of their own. Free, no account.

  2. Pick

    For an autopilot: a zone of ZIP codes and a radius around each new permit. For a one-off mailing: the blocks, houses and addresses you choose on the map. Your exclusions and repeat window leave out addresses you do not want to mail again. Nothing is assigned to you.

  3. Set up

    The postcard: logo, return address, contacts, text, license number where the law asks for it. Addresses follow the postal rules. Every new text and logo is reviewed before it prints.

  4. Approve

    An autopilot is approved once — its zone, its weekly cap and the price per postcard, with a saved card. Each run is charged only for the postcards in it, never more than the cap, and you can pause or stop it at any time. A one-off mailing shows the addresses, the count and the full price on one screen, and you pay when you approve it.

  5. Send

    Every postcard goes through the required checks before print. Printing and mail go out through a vendor, and each address gets a delivery report — the latest postal scan or status. A daily summary records each run.

  6. Remember

    History stays on the address: when it was mailed, when it was walked, what you excluded. Upload your inspections and jobs, and matches show where they meet your mailings — a match does not prove a postcard brought the job.

  7. Repeat

    The map moves every day, your autopilots run every week, and the history adds up. The subscription buys the cycle rather than access to the data.

The same pick has a second output: a walk list and a route for a door-knocking crew.

What is free and what you pay for

  • Looking, picking and building a mailing are free, and none of it needs an account.
  • A subscription covers acting on it: turning on an autopilot, sending a one-off mailing and taking the addressed list out. You are asked to subscribe when you act — not before.
  • One subscription covers one city and one trade.
  • Postcards are paid per postcard, on top of the subscription.

Where the data comes from

KnockPortal reads the City of San Francisco’s public building-permit records and republishes them as a dated snapshot — the map says which day the records were pulled. Every permit shown on the map links to its own record on the city’s data portal — check any line you like. A house shown without a permit means no qualifying roofing permit was found in the available public records. No permit found does not mean that roofing work was never performed. Results reflect the available public permit history.

What KnockPortal does not do

KnockPortal does not sell leads and does not promise them. It does not assign territories: every contractor sees the same city and picks their own blocks. The map is not gated — browsing and selecting are free, without an account.

Who runs this

KnockPortal is operated by Abalon Construction Management LLC, registered in North Carolina. 4030 Wake Forest Rd, Ste 349, Raleigh, NC 27609. Questions, corrections, or anything this page does not answer — write to a person.

About and contact