How we find developments before the agents do.

Every new development in England leaves a paper trail long before a single brick is laid, and that trail is public. Planning applications are the earliest reliable signal that a scheme exists. Earlier than the hoarding, earlier than the agent instruction, earlier than any listing.

Most marketing companies wait for a developer to come to them. Most agents wait for the instruction. We read the planning registers instead. That is the whole trick, and we are happy to explain it, because reading a register and doing something useful with it are two very different jobs.

Start free: your council's own planning portal

Every local authority runs a public planning portal. Register an account, save a search for new major residential applications in your patch, and the council will email you when one lands. Major is the classification that matters. It filters out loft conversions and extensions and leaves the schemes with real unit counts.

That is it. That is the free version, and it works. For our own patch we run saved searches on the Bexley portal and its neighbours, and the alerts arrive before most of the industry knows the site exists.

Widening the net: paid tools

One council portal is free. Twenty gets tedious. If you want coverage across a wider area there are services built for exactly this:

PlanTrack covers over 300 councils with postcode and radius alerts. Planning Signal indexes tens of millions of applications with similar alerting. Glenigan is the industry standard, priced accordingly, and leans more towards construction supply chains than marketing. For most purposes the first two do the job.

Timing is the real skill

Submission is the earliest signal, but it is also the noisiest. A meaningful share of applications get refused or withdrawn, and chasing every submission means spending time on schemes that will never break ground.

The sweet spot is right after approval. The scheme is real, funding conversations are moving, and in most cases no sales or marketing partner has been appointed yet. Our approach is both: a light touch at submission so the developer knows our name, then a proper conversation once permission is granted.

Why we give this away

Because the alert is not the product. Anyone can register on a planning portal. What the alert buys you is time, and time only matters if you can use it: to name and brand the scheme, produce the content, build the development site, run the campaigns and have a qualified buyer list waiting before release.

That part took us ten years of production work to get good at. So we will happily tell every developer in Kent how we found them. It has never once been the reason they hired us.