The job
Single-storey rear extension and a loft. Hove, BN3. Validated Monday — months before anyone is hired.
Plan
For builders, roofers, electricians, heating engineers and more
See the houses about to spend. Before they start calling for quotes.
Planning leads from English councils, plus a sold home or a poor EPC. Set your patches once. We email or text you when something new lands.
The sale
Completed this week. Brighton, BN1. The kitchen and heating system need replacing.
Sold
The ping
Email or text
The certificate
A poor EPC rating, boiler, windows and insulation all need upgrading.
E → B
The letter
On your letterhead, already addressed. Print it yourself, or we post it for £1.30.
£1.30
Already published, in five authorities.
About 1,004 new Trades jobs a month, from just 5 authorities.
Can you afford to miss out on that much potential work? It is already published in those five, before a sold home or a poor EPC is counted — and there are 269 authorities we read.
- Enfield244jobs a month
- Birmingham224jobs a month
- Barnet223jobs a month
- Westminster220jobs a month
- Worthing93jobs a month
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.
269
English planning authorities we cover
77k
householder planning jobs last year — not the archive
525k
sold homes last year — new owners who spend
51k
poor domestic EPCs last year — fabric that needs work
01 — What we do, and why
New leads, sent to you automatically.
Ten minutes to set up. £29.99 a month.
Tradecue monitors planning applications, sold homes and the EPC register for 270 councils across England. When a new application for your patch or work type shows up, such as an extension, a new loft or a garden landscape, we alert you instantly.
If you want to win that work, you choose one of our letter templates, already set up with your branding and company info, and send it to the homeowner. We can even print and send it for you.
A busy patch can be hundreds of new leads a month, and these are owners who are ready to spend, not just a blind list.
You tell us the streets you cover and the work you take on. Setup is about ten minutes, once. We do not restrict you to one postcode. Your patch can run a hundred miles if that is the ground you already work. We watch those records every morning, so you do not have to go looking.
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01
Draw the patch
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. You only hear about the work you actually do — loft extensions, plumbing, whatever suits the business.
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02
Say what you do
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.
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03
Get the ping, not the homework
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
The alert
Email or SMS: new jobs in the patch, already read for your trade.
Same morning
The job
Open a ping and you get the map, the constraints and the council reference.
When you write
The letter
Choose one of the inbuilt templates. Already addressed, on your letterhead. Print it, or we post it for £1.30.
02 — The register
The work is public.
Almost nobody reads it.
A planning application is a matter of public record from the day the council validates it. The address. The drawings. What is proposed. 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
A sold sign is a job
nobody has quoted yet.
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
A D-rated house is a boiler,
insulation, windows — already named.
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
By the time you hear, it is a tender.
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
The phone goes quiet.
The registers do not.
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.
What you get
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.
Five moments, not one
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.
Read for your trade
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.
Plotted, with the constraints
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.
What it is likely worth
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.
The right letter, already open
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.
Energy upgrades, in view
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
Records you can act on.
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.
08 — What it costs
One price. Less than an hour of your time.
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
Tell us your patch. We will tell you what is in it.
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.
- —A reply within one working day, from a person
- —No cold calling, and your details are never sold on
- —Nothing to install, and no card to look around