About KnowToYes
Built in the field, not in a lab.
KnowToYes started as a research tool inside an entitlement consulting practice. The goal was narrow: walk into a hearing knowing what this board did the last time someone asked for something like this. It worked well enough that we opened it up.
The limit was never judgment. It was reading.
For most of the history of this business, the record that governs an entitlement was public and almost completely unreadable at human scale. So practitioners read a thin sample, layered memory on top, and called the result experience. That was the right strategy when reading was the bottleneck. It is not the bottleneck anymore.
“I spent 23 years sitting in council chambers running entitlements. We built the layer the way someone who has lived that process would build it, not scraped from the outside.”
Charlie Yokley, AICP, founder, KnowToYes. Quoted in BriefGlance, July 2026.
Founder
Charlie Yokley, AICP, has spent more than 23 years running land entitlements for homebuilders, developers and landowners, on all sides of the table: the municipal side writing staff reports and recommendations to boards, the builder side, and the consulting side. He built the KnowToYes collection and extraction pipeline himself, and he still reads the output the way a practitioner would, looking for the passage that tells you how the board is going to treat the next case.
KnowToYes and YES
KnowToYes is the data, the Development Application Tracker and the self-serve reports. YES is the consulting practice: due diligence, entitlements and development services, with a person at the podium. They are separate companies.
The line between them is simple. If software can answer it from the record, it is KnowToYes. If the answer needs someone's judgment on a hard set of facts, it is YES.
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Whether it is a county for the Development Application Tracker, a municipality you want added to coverage, or a market you want us to walk your team through, start with where you are working.