The planning picture before you exchange

15,000+ small site decisions across 33 London boroughs. Every refusal reason classified. Every finding evidence-graded. What your borough actually approves, based on the data.

Get a Site Assessment → Browse borough dashboards →
Same scheme type. Different borough. Very different odds.
Kensington & Chelsea
Small sites (1-9 units)
Approval rate
85%
Median determination
8 wks
Applications
230
vs
Croydon
Small sites (1-9 units)
Approval rate
33%
Median determination
8 wks
Applications
878
A 52 percentage point gap between two London boroughs. Same planning system. Same determination time. The borough changes everything.

The problem

The current acquisition model is buy first, learn second. You commit £15,000 to £25,000 on drawings, consultants and a planning submission, then wait 12 weeks to find out whether the borough was ever going to say yes.

44% of London small-site applications are refused. In Havering, Croydon and Waltham Forest it’s closer to 7 in 10. Most of that outcome is visible in the data before you bid.

Of the schemes that do get through, 1 in 4 loses units during determination. The typical cut is 2 units. At a six-figure residual per unit, that’s the margin of the whole acquisition.

Published policy tells you what a borough wants.
The data tells you what it approves.

Four patterns that move your odds

37%
Where beats what
Inner London refuses 37% of small sites. Your borough choice is the dominant variable, before design or agent.
Verified
−42%
Cross unit 10, residual falls
Affordable-housing obligations bite at the 10-unit threshold. Per-unit residual drops 42% the moment you trigger them.
Verified
2×
Pre-app is the biggest lever
Same scheme, double the approval odds. Consistent across every borough with enough data to test.
Verified
25%
Know if you’re in the 25%
1 in 4 approved schemes lose units. Typical cut is 2 units. Find out where yours sits before you bid.
Verified

Every Site Assessment is built on findings like these. Each one graded on sample size and statistical significance, not vibes.

Two ways to use this

For a specific site
Site Assessment

Should I buy this site?

£1,000 · 48 hours
You tell us the address. We tell you the planning odds, the approvable unit count, and the maximum bid, drawn from every comparable decision the borough has made.

Risk rating. Capacity. Viability. Refusal flags. Comparables. Process intel.

See what you get →
Free

What’s happening in this borough?

Free · no sign-up
Every London borough has a public dashboard: approval rates, scheme types, refusal patterns, and 13 quarters of trend. Updated each quarter from the council’s own register.

All 33 boroughs. Interactive area maps. Quarterly refresh.

Open the dashboards →

How it’s made

01

Every application coded

Three years of small-site decisions per borough. Each one coded by site type, area, PTAL, density, conservation status, and outcome.

02

Every document read

Officer reports and decision notices parsed for refusal reasons, conditions, case officers, and design commentary. Over 30,000 documents processed.

03

Every finding graded

Four evidence tiers based on sample size and statistical significance. Small samples are flagged openly, and every claim is qualified.

Does it work?

What you actually get for £1,000.

We tested the Site Assessment scoring against 4,646 real London decisions the model didn’t see in advance. Training stopped at December 2024; every decision since is a blind test. Here’s what held up, framed the way you’d actually use it.

3 in 4

Bid with confidence. Sites we flag Low Risk get approved. London average sits at 1 in 2.

±2 units

Bid the right number. The capacity model calls the approved unit count within 2 units, 74% of the time. Six-figure swing on residual, quantified.

£20k

Or don’t bid at all. Typical abortive cost on a refused small-site application. One £1,000 assessment pays itself back the first time we flag a loser.

About

Abre Etteh

I built the tool I wished existed.

I’ve sat on every side of this table. Designing schemes as an architect. Assessing them at a London council. Acquiring sites and managing planning as a developer. Fourteen years of watching the gap between what policy says and what officers actually approve.

The planning system publishes the data. Nobody was synthesising it. So I built Perfect Scale: every application coded, every document read, every finding graded.

Better data → better schemes → more homes.

Abre Etteh, ARB Registered Architect

The data exists. Use it.

15,000+ decisions across 33 London boroughs. Every finding evidence-graded. The planning picture, before you commit.

Get a Site Assessment → Browse borough dashboards