44 Permits, $7,000 Median: ZIP 91401 — June 2026

Van Nuys keeps a steady hand on the permit counter. ZIP 91401, the heart of that San Fernando Valley district, filed 44 residential permits during the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window — and the typical one of them was valued at $7,000. Hold those two figures together and a question opens up: is that a busy ZIP doing small jobs, or a quiet one doing serious ones? The answer is the whole point of this report.

Every number here is a slice of our sealed Los Angeles snapshot, narrowed to a single ZIP and nothing more. The scope is deliberately tight: 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. A building permit, put simply, is the municipality's written approval to do a defined piece of code-compliant construction — the public record every honest job leaves behind.

Key Findings

• ZIP 91401 filed 44 residential permits over the window, according to the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata).

• The median permit in 91401 was valued at $7,000, sitting level with the citywide median rather than below it.

• Alteration & Repair led the ZIP with 31 permits, the dominant work type by a wide margin.

• Total declared valuation for 91401 reached $0.8M, drawn from the same sealed Los Angeles snapshot.

• The Los Angeles metro logged 4,042 permits at a $7,000 median, the citywide frame for this neighborhood.

A median of $7,000 against a $0.8M total, under a count of just 44, is the read in one line: a small file of mid-sized residential jobs, with the typical ticket landing right at the metro midpoint. That is an unusual signature for a lower-volume ZIP — most of the quiet ones run a thinner median. Here, 91401 does fewer jobs but each one is a touch heavier than the bargain-basement repairs that dominate elsewhere.

How 91401 Stacks Up Against the Metro's Busier ZIPs

Because this report leads on comparison, start with the field. The table below sets 91401 beside the most active ZIPs in the same sealed Los Angeles window, then anchors everything with the citywide headline row. Count and total declared valuation come straight from the closed set; read the two columns against each other rather than down one.

Two readings jump out. First, 91401 sits near the bottom of this field on count, well behind the 388 permits that 90272 logged and below the cluster of busier Valley ZIPs above it. Second, its $0.8M total is the lightest on the board — a reminder that a ZIP can carry a metro-median ticket per job yet still post a small aggregate when the file is short.

ZIP 91401 filed 44 residential permits for $0.8M in declared value, the lightest aggregate among the metro's most active ZIPs.

The contrast with the high-dollar ZIPs is the lesson. 90272 reaches $66.2M on 388 permits; 90039 hits $6.0M on just 67. Those are markets where a handful of large projects move the total. ZIP 91401 is the opposite shape — a short list of ordinary jobs, none of them outsized, summing to a modest figure. For anyone allocating effort, that distinction matters more than the raw count: it tells you whether to chase a few whales or work a steady stream of routine projects.

What the Permit File in 91401 Is Actually Made Of

The clear center of gravity here is Alteration & Repair, recorded in the raw source as Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling. With 31 of the ZIP's 44 permits filed under that one heading, it is not just the leading category — it is most of the file. Everything else in 91401 is a minority of the activity.

So what does an Alteration & Repair permit on a one- or two-family home actually authorize in Los Angeles? It is the workhorse residential filing — the one a property owner opens to modify, fix, or upgrade an existing house without enlarging its footprint. Re-roofing after a leak, swapping a failing electrical service panel, re-piping aging plumbing, replacing windows, doing foundation or seismic retrofit, or remodeling a kitchen or bath all land here. The permit is triggered the moment work touches structure, the building envelope, or a life-safety system.

The small table below isolates that leading category against the ZIP's full count and the median sitting beneath it — the most concentrated read on the page.

Alteration & Repair accounted for 31 of the 44 permits pulled in 91401 — the clear majority of the ZIP's residential file.

That concentration names the trades. A ZIP carried this heavily by Alteration & Repair is a market for remodelers, roofers, electricians, and plumbers — the people who keep an established Valley housing stock livable — far more than it is a market for ground-up homebuilders. Much of 91401's housing is mid-century, single-story stock on flat lots, exactly the kind of inventory that needs recurring roof, panel, and plumbing attention rather than expansion.

What makes 91401 distinct from the metro's true low-median ZIPs is the dollar figure under those repairs. The typical job here sits at $7,000, the same as the citywide median — so these are not the smallest possible filings, but solid mid-range improvements. Read the distribution, not just the total: a short file of metro-median jobs implies a homeowner base willing to invest real money in upkeep, one project at a time.

Where $7,000 Falls in the Citywide Spread

A single ZIP's median means little without the metro's range around it. Across all of Los Angeles, declared permit valuations ran from $2,500 at the lower quartile up to $35,000 at the upper quartile, against a citywide median of $7,000. That spread is wide on purpose — it stretches from minor repair filings to substantial additions.

ZIP 91401's $7,000 median lands precisely on the citywide midpoint. That placement is the quiet headline of this report. Many of the Valley's lower-volume ZIPs sit down near the $2,500 lower-quartile mark, where the file is dominated by the cheapest possible jobs. 91401 does not — its typical permit matches the broad-metro middle, which says the work here, while small in aggregate, is genuinely mid-range rather than nominal.

For a supplier or contractor, that read changes the pitch. A ZIP stuck at the lower quartile rewards volume on cheap parts; one at the metro median rewards mid-tier materials and a fuller scope of work per job. ZIP 91401 belongs to the second group despite its short file — fewer projects, but each one worth a real conversation. The broader citywide context, including how the dominant Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling category carried 2,486 permits across the metro, lives in our Los Angeles building permit report for June 2026.

Methodology

This ZIP report is a filtered cut of the same sealed daily snapshots that produce every metro report in the edition; there is no separate 91401 dataset. We narrow the citywide Los Angeles corpus down to this ZIP and aggregate over the window. Source attribution: Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety via data.lacity.org (Socrata).

All figures are computed directly from US Tech Automations' sealed daily permit snapshots; nothing is estimated, modeled, or extrapolated. That honesty statement holds at the ZIP level exactly as it does at the metro level — a slice of sealed data is still sealed data, and 91401 is read the same way every other ZIP in the edition is read.

This edition is cross-sectional. It describes one window and makes no claim about trends, growth, or change over time, because comparable historical windows do not yet exist in this series. When you read 44 permits, read it as a count for this window only.

The pipeline runs in four plain steps:

1. Collect. We pull the Los Angeles residential permit feed from the public Socrata endpoint at data.lacity.org each day, scoped to single-family and small multi-family building permits.

2. Normalize. Records are deduplicated and mapped to consistent category labels, with commercial and sub-trade permits dropped at ingest and the ZIP attached to each record.

3. Seal. Each day's normalized snapshot is content-hashed and stored append-only, so the figures behind this ZIP can be re-derived byte-for-byte later.

4. Aggregate. We filter the sealed snapshots to ZIP 91401, then count permits, rank categories, and compute the median across the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window.

Across the full Los Angeles metro, 3,779 of 4,042 permits carried a declared valuation — a coverage rate of 93.5%, the share of permits with a usable dollar figure. ZIP-level cuts inherit that coverage; where a value is missing in the source, it is left out rather than guessed. The edition that contains this snapshot spans 8 metros and 7,334 permits worth $688.3M in declared value, and 91401 is one neighborhood inside that whole. We hold forward-looking claims to the same sealing discipline in our permit prediction ledger.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is 44 the total number of permits issued in 91401?
A: No. It is the count of residential building permits — single-family and small multi-family — for the May 11 – June 9, 2026 window. Commercial and sub-trade permits are excluded at ingest, so 44 is not every permit the city issued in the ZIP.

Q: Why does the median permit in 91401 sit at $7,000 when the ZIP is small?
A: Because volume and ticket size are independent. The file is short at 44 permits, but the typical job is a solid mid-range one. A $7,000 median means half the permits came in at or below that figure — the same midpoint the whole Los Angeles metro recorded.

Q: What kind of work is 91401 doing?
A: Mostly upkeep and improvement. Alteration & Repair led with 31 permits, captured in the source as Bldg-Alter/Repair / 1 or 2 Family Dwelling. That covers re-roofs, panel swaps, re-piping, and interior remodels — maintenance of an existing home, not expansion or new building.

Q: Who actually pulls these permits?
A: Property owners and the licensed contractors they hire. For the alteration and repair work that leads 91401, that usually means general remodelers, roofers, and electrical or plumbing trades filing on the homeowner's behalf.

Q: How does 91401 rank against other Los Angeles ZIPs?
A: Modestly on count. With 44 permits it trails busier ZIPs like 90272, which logged 388 over the same window. Sibling cuts like our neighboring North Hollywood ZIP report and nearby Encino report show how adjacent Valley markets read.

Q: Will these numbers change after publication?
A: No. Each daily snapshot is content-hashed and stored append-only, so the 44-permit count is computed from a fixed record set. That is the purpose of sealing — the figure is reproducible rather than a moving target.

Put 91401 Permit Data to Work

A permit record is an early, public signal of intent, and 91401 is a clean example of how to read one. The 31 Alteration & Repair permits here are 31 Van Nuys homes where work is already authorized: a roofer or remodeler can use that to qualify the neighborhood for mid-range demand, a building-supply distributor can time inventory to the trades the mix implies, and a listing agent can read steady improvement activity as a pre-listing tempo worth watching.

A metro-median ticket on a short file is exactly the kind of quiet, qualified market that the bigger ZIPs distract attention from.

The hard part is never the public data — it is watching it every day and acting on it fast. We turn sealed permit snapshots into automated workflows: monitoring a ZIP for fresh filings, routing matching permits to the right rep, and drafting first-touch outreach the moment a relevant job appears. The corpus behind this report is live and browsable at permits.ustechautomations.com, and our wider June metro report shows how Los Angeles reads as a whole.

If you work the San Fernando Valley and want permit signals like these wired into your own follow-up rather than left in a spreadsheet, see how we build it: permit-driven real estate AI agents.

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