Why planning activity near your assets matters
A new development next door can lift your asset's value — or undermine it. A neighbour's approved extension changes the comparables. A major scheme down the road signals regeneration (or congestion). For a single home you'd never bother tracking this; across a portfolio of dozens or hundreds, these signals are material to valuation, refinancing, and exit timing — and they're all public, if you can see them in one place.
The problem: every council is its own island
Your assets don't sit neatly in one local authority. A portfolio spread across the country touches dozens of council portals, each with its own search, its own quirks, and no way to watch "everything near my addresses." Manually checking is unworkable, so most owners simply don't — and find out about a nearby development when it's already built.
The setup: monitor by postcode and radius
With one API covering every UK planning authority, you express your portfolio as a set of locations and let new applications come to you. Two patterns cover most needs:
- By postcode — watch each asset's postcode (and neighbours) for new applications.
- By radius — watch a distance around each asset's coordinates to catch nearby development, not just the exact address.
curl "https://api.planwire.io/v1/applications/nearby\ ?lat=51.2362\ &lng=-0.5704\ &radius_km=0.5\ &date_from=2026-05-13" \ -H "X-API-Key: your_api_key"
Loop that across your asset list on a schedule, store what's new, and you have a living planning view of the whole portfolio.
From polling to push: webhooks
Polling works, but the cleaner setup for a real portfolio is webhooks — PlanWire pushes a new matching application to your system the moment it's published, so your asset-management dashboard or alert inbox updates itself with no scheduled job to maintain. For a non-technical team, scheduled email alerts per area do the same job without code.
The signals worth wiring up: applications adjacent to your assets, refusals nearby (development pressure meeting resistance), and major/outline approvals in the wider area (regeneration signals).
What this changes
Portfolio planning monitoring turns a blind spot into an early-warning system. You spot the development that affects a valuation before the next review, you see regeneration forming around an asset you might hold longer, and you catch the neighbour application you'd want to comment on while you still can. At portfolio scale, that's not a nice-to-have — it's basic asset hygiene that almost nobody automates. The ones who do are simply better informed than the ones who don't.