GapSense has launched a site screening tool that grades whether a site has a realistic route to planning permission, aimed at brokers, lenders and landlords assessing planning risk.
Planning technology firm GapSense has launched an AI site screening tool for brokers, lenders and landlords.
The tool is designed to assess whether a site has a realistic route to planning permission in minutes and without requiring application documents.
Users can enter an address, postcode, grid reference or draw a boundary directly on a map.
GapSense said the tool reads the council’s adopted local plan alongside the relevant national framework, checks 15 national constraint datasets and reviews nearby approval and refusal decisions.
It then returns a graded verdict of realistic route to approval, marginal or unlikely, with a confidence level and a citation for every policy used.
The company said the launch is aimed at cases where planning risk sits beneath a lending decision, including development finance, bridging against sites bought for planning gain and buy-to-let conversions that depend on a change of use.
GapSense said conversions are expected to be a key use case. Its analysis of decided applications found that house in multiple occupation applications had been refused in close to a third of cases since 2023, compared with roughly 1 in 7 across all application types.
The firm said the most common single cause of a conversion failing is an Article 4 direction, a local restriction that withdraws permitted development rights street by street and does not appear on the title.
The screening tool checks for Article 4 directions automatically, alongside green belt, flood zone, conservation area, listed building, tree preservation and protected habitat designations.
Where a proposal may not need a full application, GapSense said the system flags cheaper routes such as prior approval or a certificate of lawfulness.
For development lending, the firm pointed to the cost of finding out late, with applications for new dwellings decided since 2023 refused in more than 1 in 4 cases and refusals taking an average of 108 days to arrive.
Martin Alderson, founder at GapSense, said: “A development or bridging case is often underwritten on the assumption that permission is a formality, and the answer arrives three or four months later when the loan is already drawn.
“The information needed to form a view was public the whole time. It was just spread across a local plan, a constraints register and a few hundred neighbouring decisions, and nobody had the hours to read it.”
Site screening is live now for onboarded councils across England and Wales, with further councils added on request.