Your patch, drawn properly
Name the towns and postcodes you actually travel to, each with its own radius out to twenty miles. They are watched separately, so the village you will drive an hour for does not drag in everything between here and there.
For builders, roofers, electricians, heating engineers and many more…
Set your patches once. We watch planning permissions, sold homes and poor EPCs, and we email or text you when anything new lands — so you do not spend hours in the app. Open a lead when it is worth writing to.
Free search within two miles, to see we hold something near you. Email and SMS alerts for every new lead in your patches are £29.99 a month — no contract.
Planning
Extensions and lofts, months before anybody is hired.
Just sold
New owners who spend — work that never hits a planning register.
Poor EPC
Boilers, insulation and windows, already written on the certificate.
Other lead services read the planning register alone. This one does not.
Millions of live records — planning applications, sold homes and EPCs — read every morning. The figures below are last year’s work you can still act on, not the size of the pile. Applications expire after 3 years, so we only show you what you can act on.
01 — What we do
This is the product. You tell us the streets you cover and the work you take on. We watch the public records every morning and email or text you when something new lands — so you do not have to go looking.
Postcodes, towns, or a radius round the yard. Add as many as you cover and give each one the distance you would genuinely travel for it.
Pick your trades and the moments you want to hear about. Alerts go by email or SMS, daily or weekly, with hours you would rather not be disturbed. After that, you only open the app when a ping is worth acting on.
Each alert lands by email or SMS with the address, the proposal, the value band and a link to the council record — or a sold date, or a poor EPC. You do not have to live in the app. Write to the ones worth writing to; the rest you have at least seen.
Then a week looks like this
You set the patches once. The ping, the record and the letter are waiting when something new lands — you do not hunt through the app.
Monday
Email or SMS: new jobs in the patch, already read for your trade.
Same morning
Open a ping and you get the map, the constraints and the council reference.
When you write
Already addressed, on your letterhead. Print it, or we post it for £1.50.
02 — The register
A planning application is a matter of public record from the day the council validates it. The address. The drawings. What is proposed them. The decision, the conditions attached to it, and the date the permission runs out. Published by law, free to anyone who looks.
The catch is that there are several hundred of these registers, each built by a different supplier in a different decade, and not one of them will tell you when something appears near you. So the record sits there — entirely public, entirely unread — until the owner has already rung three builders and you are quoting against a number somebody else set.
By the time a job is common knowledge, it is not a lead any more. It is a tender.
03 — The second register
People spend on a house in the first two years they own it. The kitchen that came with it is not the kitchen they wanted, the boiler is somebody else’s decision, and the loft is the reason they stretched for the mortgage. None of that needs planning permission, so none of it appears on any register a lead service reads.
It is published, though. Every completed sale in England and Wales is lodged with HM Land Registry — the address, the date and the price paid — and released as open data. We hold it, matched to the same streets we already watch.
Permission tells you the work is coming. The sale tells you who has just found the money to do it.
04 — The energy certificate
The energy certificate is public, it names the address, and it already says what would raise the rating: a boiler, loft insulation, replacement windows, a damp course. That is work you can write to, with the gap printed on the record.
We hold domestic EPCs rated D to G where the published potential is better than the current rating. They sit in search and in the pipeline as their own lead type, with the same letters as planning and sales. A certificate is not an instruction to spend; it is the map of where the quote would land.
Permission says the work is coming. The sale says someone just arrived. The certificate says the house itself is asking for it.
05 — The cost of being late
The owner has already rung three firms from the letters that landed the week permission came through. You hear about it when a mate mentions a scaffold. You are not winning that job. You are bidding against a number somebody else set.
Everyone got day one
Lead services sell the morning an application is submitted. That is the crowded inbox. The other four public moments — granted, refused, about to start, about to lapse — sit there unread, months apart, with far fewer letters on the mat.
Most of the spend never files
A kitchen, a boiler, a rewire, a loft after a sale: none of it needs permission, so none of it appears on the list you are paying someone else to watch. The sale is public. The poor EPC is public. If you only read planning, you are fishing in a third of the pond.
£29.99 is not the expensive option
A year is £359.88. That is not a loft, not an extension, not even a straightforward boiler swap. Missing one of those because you heard last is the real bill. This is the cost of hearing first.
06 — Quiet months
January, August, the gap after a big job: inbound dries up and the diary thins. Permissions, sales and poor EPCs keep being published. Tell us the patch once and those addresses still arrive — so the trough is not empty. When you are slammed, ignore the digest. The peaks and troughs do not go away; an empty trough is the part you can do something about.
Name the towns and postcodes you actually travel to, each with its own radius out to twenty miles. They are watched separately, so the village you will drive an hour for does not drag in everything between here and there.
Submitted. Approved. Refused. Conditions discharged. Permission about to lapse. Every rival sells the first of those. The other four are months apart, far less crowded, and where most of the work actually is.
Job type comes out of the proposal text, not the address. A loft conversion is a loft conversion whether or not it happens to be on Loft Road — and a roofer never hears about a shopfront.
Every application on a map, with conservation areas, Article 4 directions, listed buildings, tree preservation orders and flood risk drawn over the top. You can see what will make a job awkward before you price it.
An estimated value band on every job, carrying a confidence score and its reasoning — so you can tell a figure built from a stated floor area from one built out of a category average. Both are useful. They are not equally useful.
We read the job type off the proposal, so an extension opens your extension letter and a loft opens the loft one — already addressed, on your own letterhead. Print a whole round as one job, and get a nudge three weeks later when nobody has replied.
Search domestic EPCs rated D to G near your patch, see the current and potential rating, and keep the ones worth approaching alongside planning and sold-home leads. A certificate shows a home’s energy performance, not an owner’s intention to buy. Domestic EPCs only; MEES enforcement is not included.
07 — Why Tradecue
Why it holds up
Straight from the record Everything we send is drawn from the official planning register and links back to the council’s own page for it.
Read every morning Authorities are checked daily rather than in a monthly sweep, so a job reaches you while it is still worth a phone call.
Honest about the gaps Councils publish at different speeds and in different detail. We show you which are worth having before you pay for either.
08 — What it costs
Have a look
Free
Search any English postcode or town within two miles, open any application in full, and see the map with its constraints. No card, no trial clock.
The working tool
£29.99 / month
Twenty-mile searches, every alert, the watchlist and pipeline, letters on your letterhead, the monthly report and CSV export. Cancel whenever.
One job a year covers it several times over. A second-class stamp is 91p, so a round of thirty letters costs less than the subscription that found the addresses.
09 — Find work near you
Send the towns you cover and the work you take on, and we will come back with what has been submitted, approved and cleared to start there in the last month — so you can judge the product on your own postcodes rather than on a demo.