Frequently asked questions

What it is

What exactly is Zoning Firehose?

A monitoring service for Raleigh–Durham-area land-use activity. We watch the Planning & Zoning agendas of 28 municipalities, pull every rezoning, specific-use permit, plat, variance, and PD amendment the moment its packet posts, parse the PDF into structured fields — location, acreage, current and requested zoning, applicant, hearing date — and email you the ones that match filters you set (a city, a submarket, a corridor, a property type, a name). You get the case in a format you can act on in 30 seconds, days before the hearing.

How is this different from checking city websites, Google Alerts, or a VA?

Coverage: we watch 28 cities at once, not the two or three anyone checks by hand. Speed: alerts land within hours of the packet posting, not whenever someone next remembers to look. Structure: you get parsed fields and a map pin, not a link to a 200 MB, several-hundred-page packet you still have to read. Reliability: Google Alerts never see the PDFs inside agenda packets, and a VA misses the case that doesn't say the word they searched for. We match against the full text and every structured field, every cycle, without days off.

Isn't this data public?

Completely — and it's buried across dozens of portals in 200-page PDF packets that post at unpredictable hours. You're not paying for the data. You're paying to be the first to have read it, in a format you can act on in 30 seconds.

If the data's public, why doesn't everyone just build this?

Because it's genuinely hard — and that's the point. Every city publishes on a different system: we support a dozen agenda platforms (Legistar, CivicClerk, Granicus, Municode, CivicPlus, PrimeGov, DestinyHosted and more), and plenty of towns bury their agendas in bespoke websites, JavaScript apps, or image-only scans that resist automation entirely. Each city also meets on its own calendar and posts on its own clock — Texas requires 72 hours' notice, some Tennessee cities drop packets nearly a week early, Georgia rezonings run on ~15-day notice — so a single scraping schedule would silently miss half of them. So for every city we build a purpose-built adapter for its platform, tune a polling schedule to its real packet-drop timing, and run an AI extraction layer that turns wildly inconsistent 200-page PDFs into the same clean structured fields. It's months of plumbing plus constant upkeep as cities migrate systems and change formats. That's the work you'd never want to do — so you never have to.

What you get

How fast will I know?

Typically within hours of the agenda packet being posted. Open-meetings laws in every state we cover force cities to post agendas ahead of the meeting (Texas requires at least 72 hours; Georgia rezonings run on roughly 15-day notice), and most cities post close to that minimum: across the cases we have seen ahead of their hearing, half posted 2 days out and the top tenth 9 days or more. That window is short, which is the point — it is why checking portals weekly by hand misses cases entirely, and why an alert that arrives hours after the packet drops is worth more than one that arrives a day later.

Do I get one email per case, or updates as it moves?

Updates as it moves. A rezoning isn't an event, it's a process, so we alert you at each stage we can see: first appearance on an agenda, hearing date scheduled, continued to a later date, and advanced from Planning & Zoning to Council. Knowing a case slipped or cleared a stage is often worth more than the original filing — and it is the part manual checking almost always misses.

What if a case is tabled or continued?

You get an update alert. Continuances and revised agendas are exactly the movements manual checking misses.

Do you cover City Council decisions too?

We track a case reaching Council: when it reappears on a Council agenda after clearing Planning & Zoning, you get an alert that it has advanced. What we don't publish is the vote itself. We read agendas, which are posted before a meeting; the result lives in the minutes, published afterwards. We'd rather tell you a case is about to be heard than tell you last week's outcome.

Can you tell me which deals are in trouble?

Yes, and you can filter down to only those. We flag a case when the city planner has recommended denial — the best early read on the outcome, and it lands with the packet, before the hearing it is written for — and when an applicant keeps pushing their hearing back, which usually means a deal is struggling. A rezoning that gets denied often means that dirt is about to trade cheaper, which is a buy signal if you are looking for one. Switch on “Only send me cases in trouble” in your filters.

Can you alert me about land I already own?

That is what the watchlist is for. Add the properties you own or have under contract, pick a radius, and we tell you when something is filed nearby — how far away it is and which of your properties it sits next to. It fires whether or not the case matches your keywords, because something proposed across the street matters regardless of what it is called. Texas only obliges a city to notify owners within 200 feet; our default ring is 1,000. Alerts stay inside the area your plan covers, so a watchlist spanning several cities works best on a metro plan.

Can I get this in Slack, Teams, or Zapier instead of email?

Yes — every plan includes a private RSS feed of your matches at /feed.xml?token=…, running the same filters as your email. In Slack, typing /feed subscribe followed by your feed URL posts new cases straight into a channel, which for a team beats a text to one person. Teams and any RSS reader work the same way, and Zapier's RSS trigger lets you push cases into a CRM, a spreadsheet, or whatever else you already run. No API key needed. If you would rather work in JSON, metro plans include the public API and an MCP server for querying cases from your own tools — see the API docs.

Where we cover

Which cities do you cover?

28 Raleigh–Durham municipalities today, with more added regularly. The full list — each city's portal, meeting cadence, and observed packet-drop timing — is on the coverage page. Working a city we don't cover yet? Reply to any email and tell us.

Do you cover other metros?

Yes — Zoning Firehose runs metro by metro, and every metro gets its own site with the same pipeline, alerts, and API. See every live metro and what's next. Your subscription covers one metro at a time; you pick which one (and can switch) on your filters page.

Plans, price and cancelling

Why does this matter — what's it actually worth to me?

Because in this business the cost of finding out late is measured in deals. A competitor quietly ties up the site you wanted while you're still unaware it was in play. A hearing where you needed to appear — to object, to support, to negotiate conditions — happens without you. An assemblage forms one parcel at a time and you spot it after the third tract trades instead of before the first. Zoning filings are the earliest public signal that land is about to change value, and the people who see them first set the terms. Time is the edge, and this buys you time.

Isn't $599 a month expensive?

Set it against what one signal is worth. A single rezoning tip that gets you into a deal — or keeps you out of a bad one — pays for the service for years. It's less than an hour of a broker's or a land-use attorney's time, once a month. And the alternative isn't free: manually checking 28+ city portals, downloading agenda packets that routinely run 200 MB and several hundred pages, and reading them before your competition does is a part-time job you'd pay someone far more than $599 to do — badly, and late. Against the size of a single land transaction, $599 rounds to zero. Cover a single city for $99 or one county for $299 if you want to start smaller.

We're a firm, not one person. Is there a team plan?

Yes — the Corporate Account, at $999/month. It exists because the three tiers above are priced by geography, and geography stops describing what a firm needs at a certain size. A group chasing sites in several markets would otherwise hold one subscription per metro: several invoices, several filter sets, and no single view of what's moving. And the person who needs the alert is rarely the person who bought it — forwarding a land-use email to the analyst who actually works the deal loses the filters that made it relevant. Corporate covers every metro we watch, including ones that go live later at no change in price, and gives up to 10 colleagues their own logins, keywords, counties and watchlisted parcels. If we don't yet cover a city or county you need, corporate accounts get it added on request.

Can I cancel?

One click, any time, and the trial requires no commitment. If the alerts don't pay for themselves, you shouldn't keep them.

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