You can call the planning department. Not on a Saturday, not while the buyer is standing in front of you, and not in a form you can hand them afterwards. This answers what the property actually allows — added units, another story, a change of use — in a few minutes, with the subsection cited.
An address is all we need — no client details. Pick one where you had to say “you would have to check with the city” and see what you could have handed them instead.
Every version of this question is time-sensitive and none of them wait. A buyer deciding whether to offer. A seller deciding whether the ADU potential is worth mentioning. An investor working out whether the building can carry another use at all.
By the time a callback comes, the buyer has asked their contractor’s cousin, or decided the uncertainty is the answer. Uncertainty loses deals about as efficiently as bad news, and it does it quietly — nobody tells you that is why they walked.
The generous, probably-right answer feels like good service in the moment, and it is the one that unravels later — when the buyer repeats it to their architect and it turns out the lot has a planned-development plan nobody mentioned. Saying nothing useful is the other option, and it is not much better.
There is a third. Hand them a sourced document — the district, the standards, the subsection each answer came from, and a plain statement wherever the answer is not held. It takes about as long as the conversation you were already having, and what they do with it is between them and their architect.
We show what the jurisdiction publishes about a property. That is the scope, and it is not the whole picture: easements, utility and drainage locations, private covenants, HOA restrictions and anything else recorded against the title sit outside it, and any of them can further limit what is buildable. A full title report is what tells you all encumbrances on a property — this tells you what the code and the zoning allow on it.
And we never certify a permit outcome. We read what the adopted code and zoning say about a parcel. Whether an application gets approved is the jurisdiction’s call — so nothing here asks you to promise anything you would not want in writing.
The question arrives in the kitchen, not at the office. An answer that comes back on Tuesday has already been answered by somebody else — or guessed at.
Nobody needs another “I think so” — they need something they can act on. Hand them the district, the standards and where each line came from, in the time it takes to have the conversation.
“Zoned to allow a second unit” is worth real money in a listing — if it is true and you can show where it came from. It is worth rather less as a maybe.
Buyers walk from uncertainty as readily as from bad news. Half of what kills a deal is nobody being willing to say what the property can actually become.
One property, cited line by line — the zoning district and the standards that actually govern it, allowable use, the buildable envelope, added-unit rules including where an added unit is not allowed, adopted editions and local amendments, and the overlays or planned-development plans that quietly replace the base district.
$99 one property · 3 property reports $249 — for a run of listings
$299 per project — the one a buyer’s designer keeps working in
A report on a listing is worth having the way an inspection is worth having — it tells a new owner what the bones will allow. But the moment that actually decides a sale is different: somebody is standing in a house they are thinking about buying, weighing a real addition, a scrape, or a unit out back, and they will not write the offer until they know whether it is possible.
Finding that out the normal way costs them money, and — far worse for you — it costs them weeks. Hire a designer, wait for a meeting, wait for a sketch, wait for someone to read the zoning. Offers do not survive that, and the ones that do arrive lower and slower.
Buy the workspace on the listing, once, and it is yours on that property for a year. Then run it with whoever is standing in front of you: put the addition on the plan, see it against the setbacks and the buildable envelope, and give them the big implications in about fifteen minutes. Not a design — a straight answer about whether the thing they are picturing fits, before they decide whether to offer.
It is one property and unlimited passes, so the second buyer costs nothing, and the fourth costs nothing. The listing is the unit, not the conversation.
One listing, twelve months, unlimited passes. Place the building on the site plan and move it; read setbacks, height, coverage, floor area and the code that bites against it each time. The plan is 2D today.
What a plan like this cannot see. Easements, utility and drainage locations, private covenants and HOA restrictions, and anything that would need a survey are not in it. Those can change the answer, and none of them are in the zoning code — so treat this as “worth going further on” rather than “cleared”, and say exactly that to your buyer.
A retail bay, a warehouse, a mixed-use building downtown, a lot zoned industrial that somebody wants to put offices in — same question, larger number attached. Whether a use is permitted, what the envelope allows, and which plan or overlay actually governs are if anything harder to answer on a commercial parcel, because the district is more likely to be a planned development with its own recorded standards.
Downtown districts are the clearest case. A build-to line is not a setback — the facade has to reach the street, not sit behind it — and a minimum height can be as binding as a maximum. We read those the same way we read a side yard.
One where the buyer asked what they could do with it and the honest answer was “I am not sure.” We will run it and show you what you could have handed them on the spot. Addresses only — no client information, and it costs you an email.
Coverage is published live rather than quoted here, so it cannot go stale behind us — see which jurisdictions are answered today. Questions? Ask directly — joshua@addwell.design.