Welcome to Step 5 of the Find and Assess phase: Monitoring Opportunities.
If you're not yet confident about your shortlist, head back to Guide: Shortlisting Opportunities.
You've found promising sites, assessed them, and prepared your strongest candidates. Now it's time to stay informed. Monitoring ensures you're the first to know when something changes, whether that's a new planning application, a decision outcome, or an ownership shift that opens or closes a door.
In this guide, we'll cover:
Ownership Alerts
Planning Alerts
Strategic Layers in the Explorer
1. Ownership Alerts
Ownership Alerts notify you when the ownership of a saved site changes, including who the previous owner was and who the new owner is. Ownership Alerts apply to all sites you have saved.
This can help you:
Spot when a deal has opened up or fallen through
See land move between public and private ownership
Monitor competitor acquisitions and disposals
Track activity across your full pipeline
How to activate Ownership Alerts:
Go to Home (top left corner of your screen)
Click Alerts
Select Ownership Alerts
Toggle alerts on
Alerts are surfaced on the Home page across all your Workspaces, giving you a single place to monitor activity regardless of which Workspace a site belongs to.
Once activated, you'll receive a monthly email detailing any qualifying ownership changes across your saved sites. If you don't receive an email in a given month, it simply means no relevant ownership changes were recorded in the latest Land Registry release.
💡LandTech Tip: Treat your Saved Sites as a live watchlist. The more strategic you are about what you save, the more valuable your Ownership Alerts become.
Read more:
2. Planning Alerts
Planning Alerts notify you about planning activity on your saved sites, often within 24 hours of publication. Planning Alerts are set up individually for each saved site, giving you precise control over what you monitor and how often you hear about it.
This lets you react quickly to:
New applications
Approvals or refusals
Changes in use class
Activity from competitors
How to set up a Planning Alert:
Go to Home (top left corner of your screen)
Click Alerts
Select Saved Site Alerts
Find the site you want to monitor and click Go to site
From the site card, select Planning Alerts
Create a new alert: give it a name and edit your boundary
Add optional Search Terms (for example: 'approved' or 'residential')
Click Save
Your Planning Alerts are accessible from Home, where you can review activity across all Workspaces in one place.
You can choose to receive alerts daily or weekly, depending on how closely you want to monitor a site.
💡 LandTech Tip: Use Search Terms to cut through the noise. If you're only interested in decision outcomes, terms like 'Approved' or 'Refused' keep your alerts focused and actionable.
Read more:
3. Strategic Layers in the Explorer
Alerts tell you when something has changed on a specific site. Strategic layers in the Explorer give you a different kind of monitoring: a live view of how the broader planning landscape is shifting around your pipeline sites.
The Strategic bundle in the Explorer contains layers that track policy changes, land allocations, and long-term planning frameworks. Toggling these on periodically lets you see whether the context around your saved sites is evolving, which can be just as significant as activity on the site itself.
Layers worth keeping an eye on include:
Allocations: land formally designated for development in adopted or emerging local plans. If a site near yours gains a residential allocation, or if an emerging plan shifts boundaries, it can open or close opportunities in an area.
Neighbourhood Plan Areas: community-prepared plans that supplement local authority policy. Tracking which stage a neighbourhood plan has reached (from Designation through to Plan Made) helps you understand how planning policy in a specific area is hardening over time.
Declassified Green Belt: parts of the Green Belt no longer classified as protected. New declassifications can signal emerging opportunity in areas that were previously off-limits.
New Towns 2025: locations of proposed new towns identified by the UK government's New Towns Taskforce. If a site sits near a proposed new town, that could significantly affect long-term infrastructure and demand in the area.
Proposed SDS Areas: sub-regional geographies required to produce long-term spatial plans looking at least 20 years ahead. These plans set the framework that local plans must conform to, so understanding which SDS area your sites fall within gives you early visibility of where significant housing and infrastructure growth is expected. Available on Unlimited only.
How to use Strategic layers:
Open The Explorer on the left of your screen
Browse to the Strategic bundle
Toggle on the layers relevant to your pipeline
Use filters within each layer to refine what you see
Pan across your saved sites to check for any changes in the surrounding context
💡 LandTech Tip: Strategic layers are not just a tool for finding new sites. Revisiting them periodically against your existing pipeline can surface changes in planning context that affect how you prioritise sites you are already monitoring.
Read more:
What's next?
You're now set up to be the first to know when something changes on the sites that matter most to you.
But development is rarely a solo effort. Once a site shows real momentum, it's time to bring the right people in.
Next step: Move on to Guide: Building Your Team to learn how to share sites, collaborate securely, and keep everyone aligned around live opportunities.