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Forelandby Blindspot Labs
Planning intelligence for Irish housing

See the planning risks before you commit to a site.

Foreland turns fragmented Irish planning records into cited, decision-ready intelligence. Search relevant precedent, uncover refusal patterns and produce an evidence-backed site brief in minutes.

Findings link back to their source planning records. AI-generated analysis should be reviewed before it is used for professional decisions.

496,343 planning records indexed · all 31 Irish local authorities

Site investigation · Drumcondra, Dublin 9

Illustrative example
Proposal
4-storey apartment scheme, ~40 units, 0.4 ha infill site
Search area
Dublin City Council · 800 m around the site

Comparable applications

  • 3141/21Demolition of workshop and construction of 44 apartments in one 4-storey block with communal open space and 22 car-parking spacesGranted
  • WEB1436/2236 apartments in two blocks of 3–4 storeys with reduced car parking (0.4 spaces per unit) adjacent to a quality bus corridorGranted
  • 4550/2028 apartments in a 4-storey block on a backland site accessed via existing lanewayRefused
  • 2907/2132 apartments in a part 3, part 5-storey building with ground-floor retail unitRefused

Recurring refusal reason

Overlooking / loss of privacy to adjoining gardens · 2 of 2 refusals

Common conditions

Construction & demolition management plan · Section 48 development contribution

Every finding cites its source records — inspect the full exampleExportable site brief
The problem

Planning history exists. Decision-ready insight does not.

The information that decides whether a site is worth pursuing is already public — spread across portals, decision documents and authorities. Getting from that raw record to a defensible view of risk takes hours of manual searching, and important patterns are easy to overlook.

Fragmented records

Planning history is scattered across 31 local-authority portals, appeal files and scanned documents — with no common format and no way to search across them.

Time-consuming review

Assembling the planning story around one site means hours of manual portal searches, reference by reference, before feasibility work can even start.

Hidden precedent and risk

The refusal three streets away, the appeal that reversed a decision, the condition that keeps recurring — the patterns that decide site risk are easy to miss.

How it works

From site question to cited brief.

  1. 01

    Describe the site

    Enter a site, address or planning reference — plain language is fine.

  2. 02

    Foreland gathers the record

    It identifies the relevant applications and source material around the site, across councils and appeal decisions.

  3. 03

    Patterns surface

    Comparable precedent, recurring refusal reasons, common conditions and open uncertainties are pulled into one view.

  4. 04

    You decide, with evidence

    Review each finding against its cited source records, then export a decision-ready site brief.

What Foreland does

Four ways into the planning record.

01

Planning precedent

Find nearby or comparable applications and examine how they were decided — filter close to half a million records by council, year, development type and outcome, then open any record in full.

Browse the precedent database
02

Risk patterns

Surface recurring refusal reasons, decision times, appeal outcomes and approval-rate trends per authority — the issues most likely to affect a proposed development, computed from the full corpus.

See planning analytics
03

Cited planning answers

Ask questions in plain language and get answers grounded in retrieved planning records and development-plan policy, each with traceable references you can open and verify.

Ask a planning question
04

Site intelligence briefs

Pull the planning history of an address into one report, and turn the evidence into citation-grounded draft documents for feasibility discussions and early decision-making.

See what's included
Who it's for

Built for people deciding on sites.

Development & acquisition teams

The primary use case.

Screen sites before committing serious time or money. Understand what has been approved and refused around a site, what conditions to price in, and where the planning risk actually sits — before the option agreement, not after.

Planning professionals

Faster early feasibility.

Ground feasibility advice in precedent rather than recollection. Pull comparable decisions, recurring refusal reasons and relevant development-plan policy into one place, with references ready for the client note.

Property & investment teams

Evidence for the committee.

Bring planning-record evidence into acquisition and lending decisions: the history of an asset, the direction of decisions in its area, and the uncertainties that should shape pricing.

Why Foreland

Not a generic chatbot. Not another document folder.

Foreland does one job: source-grounded planning research for early site decisions. That focus shapes everything about how it works.

01Planning-specific retrieval
Search built around planning records and development-plan policy — references, decisions, conditions and appeals — not a general-purpose model guessing from the open web.
02Comparable precedent
Answers are anchored in what was actually decided on comparable applications, so a view on a site starts from evidence rather than opinion.
03Source-level evidence
Every finding carries references to the underlying records. You can open the source, read the decision and check the interpretation yourself.
04Explicit uncertainty
Where the record is thin, pending or ambiguous, Foreland says so — missing evidence is a finding, not something to paper over.
05Decision-ready output
The end product is a brief someone can take into a feasibility discussion — not a chat transcript or a folder of PDFs.

Investigate the planning record before committing to the site.

Start with an address, a site description or a planning reference. The evidence — and its sources — takes minutes, not days.