Four months ago, we officially launched Planda Portal into a planning system that hadn't experienced necessary and meaningful change in two decades - one where, on average, half of all applications submitted to councils result to be invalid. An underlying catalyst for this preventable bottleneck is the data involved, which has been held under a de-facto monopoly for years, limiting space for the innovation needed to keep up with growing demand, increasingly complex projects and declining planning recruitment. From day one, AVA, our AI validation engine built into Planda Portal’s interface, has been working to close that gap: catching application issues at the source, before they land on the council’s desk and cause delays and incremental iterations.

Four months on, we're proud of how far things have come - and here's everything that's happened along the way.

Fast and impactful new features, requested by the community. 

We shipped fast, and paid attention to the feedback that came back from agents, planning consultants and applicants - the people using our platform every day. By April, we'd reshaped the AI validator to better suit our end-to-end submission process for users - a new model and a redesigned interface. This is also where the council dashboard became a working product with fully embedded payment integrations with LPAs, off the back of LPA feedback we received during our live roadmap discussion. May brought a new site picker that removes manual boundary drawing almost entirely, plus an automatic CIL generator that's already cutting down on avoidable rejection letters. 

And as we pass by June, this last month has seen the biggest and most exciting updates to the platform yet. The validator got smarter again, implementing feedback from councils and how they look at the validation phase, council by council.

Expansion into Prior Approvals

We've started expanding what Planda Portal can actually submit. Prior Approvals for Larger Home Extensions launched in a deliberately controlled rollout - we wanted to watch closely how councils handled the new application type before opening it up further. More application types are in the pipeline given the great success of Prior Approvals and the support from the community.

Our newest feature: Organisations

Organisations & Teams is now live. A feature for larger teams, with admins / managers and users. Orgs brings the whole firm onto one account, so every planning application your team is working on lives in one place, with shared visibility and control across the practice. The benefit here is about working the way teams actually work: applications, planning queries, and submissions are rarely a one-person job, so having colleagues set up under a shared organisation means noduplicated effort, better visibility across a team's applications, and a smoother onboarding experience for anyone joining an existing account rather than starting from scratch.

What architects and agents are telling us

Some of the best feedback has come straight from the people using Planda Portal every day. Anthony Minchella at TM Design  told us plainly that he switched because he wanted a tool that got out of his way - and the feature that's stuck with him most is the auto location plan, which fills in site area automatically instead of him calculating it by hand on every application. That feedback directly shaped our latest location plan upgrade.

Brian Strong, a high-volume agent at Home Countries Architectural Services, was even more direct: our AI validator wasn't doing much for him personally, because he already knows what councils want. Fair enough - that's exactly why we built the bypass option in the first place. What he did love was the colour-coded map view of all his applications at a glance: approved, draft, submitted. Feedback like Brian's is pushing us to keep refining the validator so it works just as well for veterans as it does for first-time applicants.

By the numbers

The numbers tell a consistent story - that applications received via Planda Portal are more likely to arrive valid. Our most recent (in)Valid Report put applicants' invalid rate at roughly 35%, against a reported 50% industry standard. Where our validator flags an issue, 96.4% of the time it had already caught it before the council did. Applications that pass every Planda Portal check go on to be validated by councils 85.8% of the time. Altogether, using our AI checks cuts the chance of getting an invalid letter by around 30%. And we’re not stopping there, our next goal is to bring the overall invalid rate down to 25%!

What's next

As usual, we have lots of developments on the Planda Portal horizon. From partnerships, to new features, and events coming soon - we’re excited for what’s ahead for our industry.

- The Planda Portal Team