How Does PropCode's Technology Work?

We talk a lot about technology at PropCode because we’re excited about what technology can do to help urban planning tasks!

But maybe you have wondered how does the technology work exactly? How do we navigate the maze of document pages and data files to get the answers you are looking for?

We have so far built three separate parts of our platform to help with urban planning tasks, so we’ll tell you about each one.

Property Details

If you’re working on a property project, you would need to know the planning rules that apply to your property. Without new technology, this is a tough task for anyone to do well, even experts. At PropCode we are well on the way to making this an easy one!

Planning documents always have a precise geography that they apply to. Usually this is most/all of the state or a Council area, but not always. Furthermore, each document usually contains a variety of maps that indicate zones, values, or areas that have particular rules.

This means we have to gather what is called “spatial data” in “GIS format” from various sources, including both the planning maps and property data. It’s the same mapping data you would find on official government mapping tools like in NSW and VIC. This data is big, weighing in at many gigabytes, and it’s no simple feat to download regularly!

We then store all this data in an easily queryable way so that when you enter an address or click the map, our platform quickly finds the relevant property data and its planning maps, usually in under 200 milliseconds.

PropCode Library

You may think that gathering documents into one place was easy, but we assure you it was not as simple as it looks.

We started with NSW state and local plans found on the NSW Legislation website, and it turned out Victoria’s planning schemes are on a similar website. We grabbed all the document content from these websites and stored it in a PropCode-customised format. In fact we recheck these sources every night to ensure we show the latest versions of the documents. Finally we built our PropCode Library document reader to quickly display the text of these documents. We also added a powerful search function using the same tech that powers AI products like ChatGPT.

Of course many other planning documents, like NSW Development Control Plans (DCPs), exist only as PDFs at scattered sources. It took us just a bit of hustle (actually a lot) to go find these documents across 100s of Council websites! We've made our own repository and list of these documents to show them as PDFs directly within PropCode Library, saving you many trips to other websites.

We have actually already checked every state and territory in Australia to build a list of the documents we’ll need for our expansion stages. Stay tuned to watch the rollout of PropCode Library to become a national tool!

PropCode CDC

Despite the order of this list, we actually started PropCode by building our NSW complying development (CDC) analysis engine. We believed, and still do believe, that technology can make quick work of checking dozens or hundreds of rules to see if they pass for a situation.

Our CDC engine does just that by considering all the relevant CDC rules including certain local rules across the state. We had to gather these published natural language rules and turn them into a structured format, grouped by Code and building type. Our engine processes 14 different building types from 8 different Codes and understands which Codes apply at any location.

We then converted all 1,000+ rules to software rules, often called “rules as code”. We used AI assistance to make this process faster, but always had a final review by CEO Will, our expert in NSW planning rules. We also had to link up these rules to the relevant data for an individual property, using the spatial data described above, so that a final pass/fail could be evaluated for each rule against that property.

Finally we built the user interface of this engine, starting with a PDF report, then adding the interactive web version you would see now. This interface had to clearly communicate a lot of complex information, so we went through several iterations to get to one we felt good about.

Where next?

We hope that gives you a bit of insight to how our platform works! We are full of many more ideas that we hope will transform the property industry’s interaction with planning regulations.

We want to hear your feedback about our technology, so please always feel free to contact us or join our beta test group!