How it works
You do not sit in the product hunting. Set your patches once; we email or text you when something new hits them. Hear only when a job is submitted and you are in the same pile as every other letter that week. The other four public moments sit months apart, far less crowded. Add the sales and the poor EPCs that never file at all, and you are no longer fishing in a third of the pond.
01 — Where it comes from
Every planning authority is obliged to publish what has been applied for: the address, the proposal, and where it has got to. Public, and scattered across several hundred portals that each work differently and none of which notify anybody. We read them each day and put them on a map.
Every completed sale in England and Wales is lodged with HM Land Registry with the date it went through. Owners spend in the first two years. None of that kitchen, boiler or loft needs permission, so none of it appears on a planning lead list. We hold the sales, matched to the same streets.
A domestic EPC rated D to G, with a better potential already printed on it, is a boiler, insulation or windows you can quote for. We hold those homes as leads of their own — not a footnote on planning.
Your areas are checked against everything that arrived. What matches goes out in one message, daily or weekly, by email or SMS. You do not have to log in to find out if anything happened — and on a quiet day nothing goes out at all.
02 — The life of an application
Read down, these are not five features. They are one application growing up. A trade who only hears about the first is chasing the same lead as everyone else, on the same morning.
Day one
Someone wants a loft, an extension, a garage turned into a room. The drawings are in, the council has stamped it valid, and it is on the register that morning. Someone wants the work done; every trade after that is still an open question.
Alert: New applications in your patch
8–12 weeks on
Permission granted. The owner has waited two or three months, has a decision in hand, and is at the exact point of working out what it costs and who can do it. This is the week the phone calls start — outgoing ones, if somebody has given them a reason to make them.
Alert: Newly approved jobs
Or it is refused
A refusal is not a lost job. It is somebody who wants to build and has been told no. Of the refusals we hold at addresses precise enough to be a single building, 47% were followed by another application at the same address — most within three months. We hold these back a fortnight, because a letter landing the week of a refusal reads as circling.
Alert: Owners who were turned down
Before a spade goes in
Most permissions carry conditions that must be cleared before work can start: materials, drainage, foundations near a protected tree. An application to discharge them is the strongest signal in the entire register that a job is about to become real — and it is filed weeks before anyone breaks ground.
Alert: Jobs about to start
Up to 3 years on
In England a permission normally lapses three years after it is granted unless the work has begun. Plenty are granted and then sat on — money, a baby, a quote that came in too high. Six months out, the owner has a decision to make and a deadline to make it by, which is a conversation worth having.
Alert: Permissions running out
03 — Side by side
Almost every lead service in this market is a feed of new planning applications. Useful, and crowded. Tradecue watches the rest of the public record as well — and the other four moments in the same job — for £29.99 a month.
Other products
Tradecue
£29.99 a month for all of it. No contract.
04 — Quiet months, and then
A quiet month is when a full book is decided, not when the phone happens to ring. Permissions, sales and poor EPCs keep being published. Write in the trough; ignore the digest when you are already booked. Knowing first still only counts if you are the one who knocks.
Keep the ones you like and see what has changed on them since you last looked — a decision, a new document, a condition cleared.
Stages, contact history and won or lost, so a job you wrote to in March is not a job you write to again in April.
Open a job and the letter for that job type is already loaded — extension, loft, garage — on your own letterhead. Print a round at a time, with a reminder to send the second one three weeks later. Or we post it for you: £1.50 a letter, all in. Not a scattergun: every envelope is going to a house with permission, a fresh sale, or a poor EPC.
A monthly summary of what we sent and what you did with it, plus CSV export if you would rather work somewhere else.
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.
05 — Straight answers
The limits are as much of the product as the features, and better said here than discovered in month two.
No. You get the site address and everything the council published about the proposal and its status — enough to write to the property. We do not harvest personal contact details out of planning portals, and any service that offers you them should be a worry rather than a selling point.
No. We show you dates and what the council actually published — granted on this day, lapses on that one, conditions discharged last week. A percentage likelihood would be us guessing dressed up as a number, and you would find that out on the third one that came to nothing.
We cover English local planning authorities we can actually keep current — districts, unitaries, metropolitan boroughs and London boroughs whose register we can read. They do not all publish at the same speed or in the same detail, so coverage is honest rather than uniform — the coverage page lists every authority in the feed and when we last saw a new application. We do not cover Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. If a council is missing from that list, we cannot read its register and we will not pretend otherwise.
Not from planning — a kitchen refit, a rewire, a bathroom needs no permission and is recorded nowhere on that register. What we can show you is the household most likely to be commissioning it: every completed sale is lodged with HM Land Registry with its date, and the first two years of ownership is when that work gets done. A poor domestic EPC is the other public record of fabric that needs work. Both are inferences from published facts, not job adverts, and we say which they are.
The council's, always. Every application we show links straight back to the authority's own page for it. If we disagree with them, they are right and we have a bug to fix.
Try it against your own postcodes.
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