How to find newly opened businesses: 5 ways compared
Auspector ·
There are five practical ways to find businesses that just opened: company registry filings, local licences and permits, walking the area, searching map listings by hand, and a daily new-business data feed. They differ in what they catch — a legal company or an actual storefront — how early they catch it, and whether a phone number comes with it.
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1. Company registry filings
Most countries publish new company registrations. You get a company name, a registered address and a registration date. You rarely get a phone number, and you never get a storefront: a registration is a legal event. Many companies register months before they open anything, some never open a place customers can visit, and the registered address is often an accountant’s office or a home.
Registry data is the right list when your customer is the legal entity itself — business banking, bookkeeping, company formation. The difference is covered in newly registered vs newly opened.
2. Local licences and permits
Opening a restaurant, a salon or a shop usually needs a local licence, an inspection or a sign permit. These are tied to a real address and a real trade, so they sit close to an actual opening. The catch: they are issued city by city, in different formats, and are often not published as a list at all. They work when you sell in one or two cities and can collect them regularly.
3. Walking or driving the area
A rep who covers a territory sees new signs, fit-outs and “opening soon” banners before any database does. It is accurate and it lets you judge a place in person — but it does not scale beyond a few neighbourhoods, and nothing is written down unless someone types it up.
4. Searching map listings by hand
Most new businesses add themselves to map apps and online listings around opening day, with a category, an address and often a phone number. Searching by hand works for one neighbourhood and one category. It breaks down at scale: listings are not sorted by when they appeared, so you cannot ask for “only the new ones”, and you end up re-checking the same places every week.
5. A new-business data feed
A feed does the re-checking for you. Auspector re-scans every day and keeps the businesses that are new in a separate section, filterable by country, city, category and whether a phone number or website is on the record (how fresh it is). Two limits worth knowing: a record is dated by when it reached the feed, not by the day the business opened; and there are no email addresses or named people in it.
In the 30 days to October 23, 2026, 716,052 records entered the feed across our 15 priced markets, and 71.3% of them carried a phone number.
Side by side
| Way | What it catches | How early | Phone number | Many cities |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Company registry | A legal company | At registration — often before opening | Rarely | Yes, country by country |
| Local licences | A trade at an address | Close to opening | Sometimes | Hard — city by city |
| Walking the area | A storefront | Before or at opening | If you ask | No |
| Map listings by hand | A listed place | Around opening | Usually | No — manual |
| New-business feed | A listed place, filtered | Within a day of being found | Often | Yes |
Which one should you use?
It depends on who your customer is. If it is the company as a legal entity — a bank account, bookkeeping, formation services — use registry data; Auspector carries registry records for 14 countries (AU · BR · CA · CY · DE · EE · ES · FR · IL · NL · NO · SG · GB · US). If it is a place that serves people — payments and POS, insurance, supplies, cleaning, telecom, a website — you need openings, not registrations. Many teams follow both lists in the same area; the use cases show eight ready-made searches.
Check the count before anything else: how many new businesses arrive per month in your category and city. Search and counts are free on every Auspector plan (pricing). For a country-level view, the New Business Index ranks 30 countries by new records.