A planning application is a homeowner telling you, in public, that they are about to spend money.
I think it's the most wasted public dataset in UK property, and the reason is almost aesthetic.
Take any postcode district and look back twelve months. Much of what you find isn't developers building anything. It's ordinary people doing something to the house they already live in. Rear extensions, side extensions, loft conversions, a conservatory coming out and a solid wall going in, a garage becoming a kitchen. In the district we looked at, roughly half of forty four applications were exactly that.
Each one carries a timetable that is close to certain. In the six to eighteen months after approval, that household buys a kitchen, a bathroom, windows, flooring. They hire an electrician. They do something with the garden.
And it surfaces early. Plenty of people lodge a pre application to test the water and only submit the full one months later. Through all of that, they have not spoken to a single supplier.
Now the aesthetic part. This does not look like a lead list. It looks like a government database. It is dull, inconsistently worded, and it takes patience to see what the people inside it are actually doing.
I have come to think that is the most reliable signal there is about where value sits. Information stays cheap for as long as reading it is unpleasant. The moment it gets packaged nicely, it gets priced.
If what you sell ends up installed inside somebody's house, start with your own postcode district. Twelve months. Filter for extensions and alterations. Sort by approval date.
One caveat, and it is the part that took us longest to build.
A council portal will give you the application. It will not tell you who owns that property, what it is worth, whether it is owner-occupied or let, how long they have been there, or whether the same person owns four others nearby. So you get an address and a date, and you still cannot tell a homeowner about to spend thirty thousand from a landlord doing the minimum before a tenancy.
Those are different customers, and most of the value is in separating them. That separation is the part we built.
Co-founder of Propalt and a property investor and developer for 20 years
