Home/FAQ
The honest answers.
What BuildsConnect is, where the data comes from, and how it reaches you. If your question isn’t here, email us and we’ll answer it straight.
Where does the data come from?
Public NSW planning and development-application data, reused under the terms each custodian publishes, with no licence version asserted because none is stated in the sources. We turn that public record into signals: which developments are happening and which trades they need. We don’t scrape private contact details and we don’t send spam.
Which councils and trades do you cover?
All 128 NSW councils are in the planning dataset, 465,000+ projects, and that is what the dashboards, target lists and hazard overlays read. Trade alerts are narrower and we will not pretend otherwise: they fire on projects whose lodged documents we have read and classified, and that document corpus now spans 77 councils that carry a Statement of Environmental Effects we have read, and those numbers move as we read more councils. If your council is not in it yet, you will see the dashboards and the statewide record, and your alerts will start when we reach you. You choose the trades and councils you want either way.
How does the trade matching work?
We read each development application and work out which trades the project is likely to need, based on what’s being built. You set your trades, and only matching DAs reach you. There’s a full walkthrough on How it works.
Is this legit and compliant?
Yes. It’s built entirely on public NSW planning data (each custodian attributed by name): development signals, not personal contact lists, with no cold-contact scraping and no marketing list of homeowners. That’s our design, not a certification of legal compliance.
Do you contact the homeowner for me?
No. We tell you a job exists, where, and what it needs, with the DA reference so you can verify it. Reaching out and winning the work is yours to do. We just make sure you know about it first.
What happens on day one, after I sign up?
Two different things, and it’s worth knowing which is which. Once, shortly after you sign up, you get a starter digest: the matching work already on the public record in your councils, up to 30 rows, labelled as backlog. That’s the catch-up. After that, Different feeds fire on different moments and each one states its own: a document feed on the day the document reaches the register, a conditions feed on the determination that carried the condition, a lifecycle watch on the stage it names. What they all share is that nothing already on the record when you signed up is ever sent to you as though it just happened. We deliberately never replay history as though it were new, so an alert landing in your inbox always means something actually just happened. The practical effect: day one is one digest, not a flood, and it is not a measure of how busy your patch is.
How will I get the alerts?
Email. SMS is not available. There’s no app to download. Signing up is immediate and there is no queue for it. Alerts fire in the councils whose documents we have read, so if yours is not one of them yet you see the statewide record and your alerts begin when we reach you.
How do I get started, and when can I start?
Sign up in the app and you are live on a free trial straight away: every surface, all of NSW, for 14 days. Then pick a tier.
I’m not a tradie. Is BuildsConnect still for me?
Probably. The catalogue is 40 live products organised into 13 buyer groups: trades, building-product manufacturers, niche vertical builders (granny flats, solar, knock-down-rebuilds), property professionals, finance & risk, professional services, government & utilities, data & technology buyers, community groups, recruiters, consumer-trigger services, strata managers, and the lateral angles. Browse the full catalogue by who it is for, or start from who you are.
Can I pull the data by API, or license it in bulk?
Yes. Several products ship with metered API access, the OpenAPI catalog is public so you can read the spec before you spend a dollar, and the Data-Licensing Feed serves structured bulk access by contract: the same live rows our own products run on, with honest coverage notes on every response.
How do you keep the numbers honest?
Every figure is traceable to its DA reference on the public record. Values are DA-stated estimates and labelled that way; inferred approvals are labelled inferred, with the unknown share shown; partial document samples are sold as samples; and where a row is a stand-in for the thing you want rather than the thing itself, it says so. We never invent an approval rate or dress a mention count up as market share. The receipts live on the Methodology page.