Signal for planning & zoning
Planning Permit Reminder Software
A planning approval isn't forever — build within the window or lose it. Signal tracks commencement deadlines, condition dates, and extensions across your whole pipeline.
Approvals you fought for can quietly evaporate
Winning a planning permit can take a year of drawings, hearings, and consultant fees — and the approval arrives with a fuse: commence development within two or three years, or it lapses. Market conditions shift, financing takes longer than planned, and suddenly the approval that cost six figures is ninety days from evaporating. Re-applying means the fees again, plus a planning environment that may have turned less friendly since.
The dates hiding inside a planning approval go beyond commencement: conditions precedent with their own deadlines, contribution payments due at stages, extension applications that must be lodged before — not after — expiry. A developer with a pipeline of sites is carrying dozens of these dates, each buried in a decision notice PDF that nobody re-reads until it's too late.
What development teams track with Signal
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Commencement deadlines
The lapse date on every live approval, reminded at 12, 6, and 3 months — early enough that an extension application is still an option.
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Condition deadlines
Conditions precedent, contribution payments, landscape bonds — the mid-approval dates extracted from the decision notice and put on schedule.
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Extension application windows
Extension requests usually must be lodged before expiry. Track the lodgement deadline as its own item with its own runway.
How Signal handles it
- Long-lead reminder schedules. Planning timelines are measured in years, so offsets of 365, 180, and 90 days are natural — with tighter reminders layered near the date.
- Folders per site. Each development site is a folder holding its approval, conditions, and related permits — the whole pipeline is filterable by site.
- Multiple recipients. The development manager, the planning consultant, and legal can all share a schedule — approvals stop depending on one person opening a PDF.
- Renewal tracking. Extensions granted are logged as renewals with notes, building a clean history of each approval's life — useful for lenders and JV partners.
Frequently asked questions
Can reminders start a year or more before the lapse date?
Yes — offsets are unlimited. A 365-day first reminder on a commencement deadline is common, because deciding whether to build or seek an extension takes months, not weeks.
How do we track the many small dates inside one approval?
Create an item per date — commencement, each condition deadline, each payment — grouped in the site's folder. Each gets its own schedule and recipients, and the folder view shows the site's full timeline.
What happens when an extension is granted?
Renew the item with the new lapse date and a note. Signal keeps the extension history on the item and regenerates the reminder schedule against the new date.