Early notice of development filings
Know about the subdivision years before it goes out to bid.
By name, with the developer's name on it. A site contractor normally hears about a job when the plans hit the street, at the same moment as five other bidders. The application that started that job was public two to four years earlier.
A bid list is not a pipeline. It is the end of somebody else's two-year conversation.
By the time plans go out, the developer has an engineer, a budget, and a site plan drawn around conditions he has already agreed to. He usually has a contractor he trusts as well. Everyone else on that list is pricing a decision that was made while they were not in the room.
The estimate is where the job is won. The invitation to estimate is where it was lost, and that happened years earlier.
None of it was secret. The application, the staff report, the hearing and the conditions are public on the day they happen, in the town's own records. They are simply unreadable at the speed a business runs.
One person watching agendas covers two towns, a week late.
A county and the towns inside it publish on separate calendars, in separate systems, with packets posted whenever the clerk posts them. Following one of them is a habit. Following twelve is a job nobody has.
In a ten-jurisdiction pilot, KnowToYes captured 438 development filings and 118 board items between 23 June and 18 September 2026. 214 of the filings were tagged major site work, which is roughly sixteen a week.
Source: KnowToYes Development Application Tracker pilot, ten North Carolina jurisdictions, 23 June to 18 September 2026.
An estimator cannot read sixteen a week on top of his own work, so he reads the two towns he already knows and finds out about the rest when the plans go out.
One site contract can change the trajectory of a company, and it is decided by who the developer already knows.
Site work is won on relationships, and relationships take years to build. At the application stage the developer is being told what the site will cost to put in, and he has nobody to ask. That conversation happens once, with whoever is there for it.
Two years later the same project is an email to five bidders and a spreadsheet. Being early on a handful of the right projects is worth more than being on every bid list in the state.
Source: KnowToYes Development Application Tracker pilot, ten North Carolina jurisdictions, 23 June to 18 September 2026.
Start the relationship at the filing.
The Development Application Tracker is a running list of the new development applications that local governments in your counties publish, and the land use items their boards take up. It is taken from the jurisdictions' own public records as they post them.
One row is a project: what was filed, where, by whom, which board has it, and what that board did. Every row is tagged major site work or minor, so a grading contractor is not reading past sign permits to find the subdivisions.
It is not a map, a parcel database or a bid service. It answers one question, asked every week: what is being built here that nobody is building yet.
| Stage | What it is | Who is competing for the work |
|---|---|---|
| Application filed | Rezoning, preliminary subdivision, pre-submittal or technical review | Nobody yet |
| Board hearing | Planning board or council takes the item up | Nobody yet |
| Site plan review | Construction drawings and the conditions drawn into them | The engineer's own list |
| Plans out to bid | Scope, on a deadline | Everyone, at once |
| Dirt moves | The job belongs to somebody | It is over |
The Development Application Tracker starts at the first row. Bid services start at the fourth.
What is in a row
| Field | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Jurisdiction and board | Who has it, and which calendar it moves on |
| Filing date and case number | When it became public, and the identifier the town uses for it |
| Project name | What to call it in the first conversation |
| Applicant and representative | Who to call, and who is already advising them |
| Application type and stage | Rezoning, preliminary subdivision, site plan, technical review |
| Site work tag | Major or minor, so the list is readable in a minute |
| Board action and date | What the board did, and when the item is back in front of it |
| Link to the source record | The town's own document, so nothing has to be taken on faith |
Source: KnowToYes Development Application Tracker record fields, as of 18 September 2026.
What we will not claim.
The first time a portal omits a record or a town changes its software, a loose promise turns into an argument. So the limits are stated here, in the same place as the claim, and they stay stated.
| We do not say | We say |
|---|---|
| Everything filed | All eligible public filings captured from the jurisdictions we cover |
| Real time | Added as each jurisdiction publishes, on that jurisdiction's own schedule |
| Every county in the state | The counties named in your agreement, and more as they go live |
| We track permits | We track development applications and board actions |
Two more, straight out. Agendas and packets reach us on each jurisdiction's own schedule, so a board item can appear a few days after the meeting was noticed. And a filing is in the list only if the jurisdiction published it, so a project still moving through pre-application conversations will not be there.
Neither of those changes the argument. A few days behind the town is still years ahead of the bid list.
Who reads this list
It is written first for a grading and site work contractor, because the value is visible to him in one screen. Four other readers use the same list for different reasons.
| Reader | What they take from it | Territory they buy |
|---|---|---|
| Site and utility contractors | Early relationships on major site work | County to regional |
| Material suppliers: pipe, stone, concrete | Volume forecasting and early quotes | Regional to statewide |
| Engineering and survey firms | Who filed without a consultant yet | County to regional |
| Residential builders and land buyers | Where entitled lots are coming | Regional |
| Lenders and land investors | Entitlement activity as a market signal | Statewide |
A contractor buys the counties he can physically work in. A supplier or a lender buys the state, because his market is the state. Those are two different agreements, not two sizes of the same one.
Ten jurisdictions, one quarter, 438 filings.
A pilot across ten North Carolina jurisdictions captured 438 development filings and 118 board items between 23 June and 18 September 2026. 214 of the filings were tagged major site work, roughly sixteen a week. The stages they sat at were the upstream ones: pre-submittal meetings, technical review committee, preliminary subdivision, and zoning map changes.
Those are real projects with real names on them, and the fastest way to judge the list is to read a week of it in counties you already know.
Source: KnowToYes Development Application Tracker pilot, ten North Carolina jurisdictions, 23 June to 18 September 2026.
Built from the public record
If the question is whether it will be approved
This list tells you a project exists and where it stands. It does not tell you whether the board will approve it, and it never predicts one. If that is the question, the reports read the board's own history on your use, and YES takes the calls the record cannot make.
Take control
Name your counties. We will show you a real week.
Tell us the counties you work in. We build the list for those counties and show you one real week of filings in them, with the names on them. If you already recognise three of them, you will know inside a minute whether it is worth paying for. If you recognise none of them, that is an answer too.
Coverage is built to your counties. A county we are not in yet goes live as part of setting you up, which is why we ask which ones before we quote.