Alteration & Repair Dominates 90744, Los Angeles

If you are a remodeling contractor or a listing agent weighing whether ZIP 90744 belongs on your route, this report is the short answer: it is a small, repair-driven market, and the work that exists here is almost all one kind. Across the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window, this Wilmington corner of Los Angeles, CA logged 24 residential building permits, and the leading category is Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling — alteration and repair on existing homes — at 19 of them.

That is the decision you came for. A neighborhood where alteration and repair carries 19 of 24 filings is a neighborhood of standing houses being fixed and updated, not lots being cleared for new builds. Every figure below is a slice of the Los Angeles metro's sealed daily snapshot, filtered to this single ZIP code.

Scope: residential building permits (single-family and small multi-family); commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest. This is not a count of all construction permits issued in each city.

Key Findings

• Alteration and repair leads ZIP 90744 with 19 permits, per the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata).

• ZIP 90744 recorded 24 residential building permits in the window, according to US Tech Automations' sealed permit snapshots.

• The median permit valuation in 90744 is $5,100, per the same Department of Building and Safety records.

• Reported permit valuation in the ZIP totals $0.7M for the window, according to the sealed snapshot data.

• The surrounding metro logged 4,042 permits worth $201.2M, per the sealed Los Angeles snapshot.

Alteration and repair work accounts for 19 of the 24 residential permits filed in ZIP 90744 during the window, at a median permit valuation of $5,100.

Frequently Asked Questions

The numbers in a small ZIP are easy to misread, so the plain answers go first. A building permit is the public authorization a city issues before construction can legally begin, and a sealed snapshot is a point-in-time copy of those records — hashed and stored before any analysis runs — so nothing in this report can drift after capture. The sections below add the depth; these pairs are the post in brief.

Q: Is the 24-permit count all construction in 90744?
A: No. The scope is residential building permits — single-family and small multi-family. Commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest, so 24 is the residential slice of activity in the ZIP, not every permit issued there.

Q: What does the dominant alteration and repair category actually cover?
A: Work that changes or restores an existing one- or two-family home without enlarging its footprint. Think rewiring, re-roofing, plumbing replacement, structural repair, window swaps, and kitchen or bath remodels. Alteration and repair accounts for 19 of the 24 permits in 90744.

Q: Why is the median permit valuation only $5,100?
A: Because most filings are small jobs. With alteration and repair carrying 19 of the 24 permits, the typical work is a single-trade repair or modest improvement. That holds the median permit valuation at $5,100, below the metro-wide median of $7,000.

Q: What does $0.7M across 24 permits tell me about the market?
A: It signals many small jobs rather than a few large ones. A low median next to a compact total of $0.7M is the fingerprint of distributed, maintenance-grade demand — owners reinvesting in homes that already stand, not developers building from the ground up.

Q: Who actually pulls these permits in 90744?
A: Largely homeowners and the licensed contractors working for them. An alteration-heavy mix points to owner-occupants and long-hold landlords filing for rewiring, roofing, plumbing, and remodel work on existing one- and two-family dwellings.

Q: Can I trust these numbers will not change later?
A: Yes. Each day's records are hashed and stored append-only the moment they are captured, so the sealed snapshot behind every figure here is fixed and independently checkable against the published Socrata source.

What the Permits Are For

Volume aside, the category mix is where 90744 shows its character, and it is heavily one-sided. The dominant permit type is Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling, carried below under its friendly label Alteration & Repair, which accounts for 19 permits of the ZIP's 24 — the large majority of the slate.

In Los Angeles, an alteration-and-repair permit on a one- or two-family dwelling authorizes work that changes or restores a home that already stands, without enlarging its footprint or adding a separate structure. Common triggers are an electrical panel upgrade or rewire, re-roofing, replacing or relocating plumbing, structural repairs after damage, window and door replacements, interior reconfiguration, and kitchen or bath remodels. The unifying thread is that the house exists and the owner is putting money back into it rather than starting fresh.

A building permit categorized as alteration and repair means an existing home is being changed or restored in place, not expanded or rebuilt.

A ZIP weighted this heavily toward alteration and repair is a market of owner-occupants and long-hold landlords maintaining what they own, not a development zone where builders are assembling parcels. The work arrives as many small filings rather than a few headline projects, which is exactly why the median lands at $5,100 and the window total stays compact at $0.7M. In a built-out, working neighborhood like Wilmington, renovating in place is usually the rational move, so the permit record skews toward fixes and upgrades rather than demolition and new construction.

The metro confirms that ordering at scale. Citywide, alteration and repair is the largest residential category at 2,486 permits, ahead of additions at 422 and new construction at 359. ZIP 90744 reproduces that shape in miniature — leaning almost entirely on the alteration line, with little visible presence from the addition or new-build categories that surface in busier ZIPs. The full metro-wide category and valuation breakdown that frames every ZIP in this set is in our Los Angeles building permit report, and a near-identical alteration-led profile shows up across the harbor in the 90732 ZIP report.

Reading the 90744 Slice on Its Own

Pulled out of the metro and read by itself, the 90744 cut is compact and consistent. The table below is the ZIP-level slice of the sealed Los Angeles snapshot; the valuation figures reflect what applicants declared on their filings, not independent appraisals, and the compact total is reported exactly as the snapshot rolled it up.

A $5,100 median against 24 permits and a $0.7M total describes a market with no long tail of large projects. At the citywide level the median permit valuation is $7,000, so the typical 90744 filing comes in below the metro middle — a smaller, more contained job than the average Los Angeles permit. There is no cluster of multi-million-dollar work here pulling the totals upward the way the metro's $4,000,000 maximum does at the citywide level.

For anyone reading demand, that low and tight profile is informative rather than disappointing. It points to recurring maintenance and modest improvement work — the steady, distributed kind of demand that keeps a neighborhood's electricians, plumbers, and roofers booked, rather than the lumpy, one-project-at-a-time flow that defines a new-construction ZIP. A median this far below the metro's middle is the signal of standing homes being maintained, not lots being cleared and rebuilt.

ZIP 90744 reports a $5,100 median permit valuation against a $0.7M window total — the signature of many small jobs rather than a few large ones.

90744 Against the Rest of the City

The 90744 figure only means something next to the rest of Los Angeles. The table below places this ZIP beside the busiest residential filers in the same sealed snapshot, plus the citywide headline row. Permit counts and compact valuation totals are copied verbatim from the snapshot; the metro figure is an aggregate over every ZIP, including ones that behave nothing like this one.

Read top to bottom and 90744 sits at the quiet end of the panel. The leading ZIP, 90272, logged 388 permits against this ZIP's 24, and its $66.2M compact total towers over the $0.7M reported in 90744. Even the mid-pack filers — 90042 at 71 permits, 90039 at 67 — run several times ahead on both count and dollars. The two columns have to be read together: 91367 and 90039 both show $6.0M, yet 90039 reaches it with 67 permits while 91367 needs 90, which means a larger typical job in 90039.

The metro-wide distribution makes the same point from the top down. Across Los Angeles the lower-quartile permit is valued at $2,500 and the upper-quartile permit at $35,000, while the most expensive filing in the window reached $4,000,000.

That spread is why the citywide median of $7,000 is held down by a flood of small jobs and pulled up by a thin band of large ones — and ZIP 90744, with its $5,100 median, clearly lives in the small-job half of that range. Los Angeles ranks #1 of the 8 metros in this edition on both permit count and total valuation, but that scale is an average over ZIPs as different as 90272 and 90744.

Across these Los Angeles ZIPs, valuation per filing varies sharply — $66.2M behind 388 permits in 90272 versus $0.7M behind 24 in 90744.

For a contractor or supplier deciding where to spend marketing dollars, that contrast is the whole argument for a neighborhood-level cut. A high-valuation ZIP signals larger projects and heavier construction; a low-valuation, alteration-led ZIP like 90744 signals maintenance-grade demand spread across many doors. A nearby 90731 ZIP report carries the same read for the adjacent San Pedro side of the harbor, and the permit prediction ledger scores sealed forecasts about this kind of activity against public outcomes later.

How the Snapshot Is Built

The source for this slice is the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata). The 90744 figures are a ZIP-level cut of the same sealed daily snapshots that drive the citywide Los Angeles report — the same records, filtered to one ZIP code, with no separate collection path and no re-query.

All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily permit snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated. Where the source feed omits a declared valuation on a filing, that filing still counts toward the permit total but contributes nothing to the valuation roll-up, so the reported valuation should be read as a floor rather than a ceiling. Across the metro, 3,779 of the 4,042 permits carried a declared valuation, a coverage rate of 93.5%.

The pipeline runs in a fixed order every day:

1. Collect. Pull the day's published residential permit records from the Los Angeles Socrata feed.

2. Normalize. Map each record to a common schema, apply the residential scope filter, and tag it with its ZIP code.

3. Seal. Hash the normalized day and store it append-only, so the snapshot cannot be altered after capture.

4. Aggregate. Sum permits and valuation across the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window and cut the result down to ZIP 90744.

Because this is cross-sectional data describing a single 30-day window, nothing here is described as rising, falling, or trending — no comparable prior window exists in this series yet. We run this collect-normalize-seal-aggregate loop across 8 metros on the same schedule, which is what lets a single ZIP like 90744 be compared honestly to the rest of Los Angeles.

Put Permit Data to Work in 90744

A single ZIP's permit feed becomes a working signal once it is monitored continuously instead of read once. In a neighborhood like 90744, where alteration and repair drives 19 of 24 filings, a roofing or electrical contractor wants to know the day a relevant permit posts; a supplier wants to time fixture and material inventory to local demand; a lender wants to read renovation activity as a credit signal; and a listing agent wants improvement permits as a pre-listing tell on the block.

We turn that raw feed into automated signal handling — monitoring new filings as they seal, routing the ones that match a service area or trade, and drafting outreach so a team can act while the job is still fresh. The same sealed-snapshot discipline behind this report runs underneath those workflows. The public permits view, including this Los Angeles data, lives at permits.ustechautomations.com, and you can compare adjacent harbor-area pockets like the 90732 ZIP report to see how neighboring ZIPs diverge.

To see how US Tech Automations builds permit signals into automated agent workflows for the trades, real estate, and lending, explore our real-estate AI agents.

Source: US Tech Automations Research — computed from sealed daily permit snapshots, May 11 – June 9, 2026.