An addition, a second unit, a shop out back, a bigger space, a different use entirely — the question is simple and the answer has been weirdly expensive to get. This reads the zoning and building code for your one address and cites where every line came from.
Which authority governs the property, its zoning district, whether a recorded plan or overlay applies, and the code editions in force are free for any address in a covered jurisdiction. The computed figures and the cited analysis are the $99 report.
You are standing in the back yard, or walking a building you are thinking of buying, and the thought is completely ordinary: could we put something there? Could this be two units. Could the shop take a mezzanine. Could this space be a café instead of an office.
Everyone you could ask that question of costs money to engage, and most of them cannot answer it on the phone anyway — not properly, not for your specific parcel. So the question sits. Plenty of projects die right there, not because the answer was no, but because finding out was too much friction to bother.
Free, authoritative, and the right thing to do eventually. But they answer questions, they do not do your research, and they will not tell you what a recorded plan on your parcel says. It is also a weekday activity, and the question rarely arrives on a weekday.
The municipal code is public and genuinely readable. What is hard is knowing that you also need the local amendments, the overlay, the recorded plan the district defers to, and which of the four is actually governing. Missing one is not a small error — it is the whole answer.
Correct, and the thing you will do if the project goes ahead. The problem is the order: you are committing real money to discover whether the project is worth committing money to. That is the trade this exists to remove.
None of these are wrong. They are just all downstream of a question you can answer first, in a few minutes, for less than the consultation costs.
The questions change shape and the stakes usually go up. Can this building take the use I want to put in it. What does a change of use trigger — sprinklers, accessible route, a second exit, an energy upgrade to the envelope. How much of a tenant fit-out can happen before the whole building is pulled up to current code. Is there parking enough, and is that even still required here.
These are answerable from the same two sources as a house — the zoning that governs the parcel and the building code the authority adopted — and the answer decides whether you sign the lease. We report them the same way, cited, and we say plainly where a threshold depends on a design that does not exist yet.
Earnest money, a lease signature, a design retainer — the three points where the answer stops being free to act on. The constraints are knowable before any of them, and right now almost nobody checks, because checking has been the expensive part.
The first phase of any design engagement is somebody reading the zoning for your address. That is real work and you are billed for it at their rate. Walk in with it already done and you are paying them to design, which is what you wanted them for.
A contractor says the setback is ten feet. He is probably right, and he is reading the district. What he may not know is that a recorded planned-development plan governs your parcel instead — those override the district and they are genuinely hard to find.
Finding out the lot will not take the thing you wanted is not a wasted hundred dollars. It is the cheapest version of that discovery you will ever get, and it arrives while you still have every option.
It is not a permit, and it is not a promise of one. We report what the jurisdiction has already published about your address and show you where each line came from. Whether a particular project gets approved is decided by that jurisdiction, at review, against drawings that do not exist yet.
It is not a substitute for an architect or engineer. It is the reading they would do first, done first — so the money you spend with them goes on design and judgment rather than on research you have already paid for.
Where we do not hold something, it says so. A recorded plan we have not obtained, a topic not yet written for that authority — the report names the gap and tells you who to ask. That is the product working correctly, not failing.
If you go on from a report to actually designing something on that property, the $99 credits in full toward the $299 workspace on that same address. You are never charged twice for having started small.
Type it in and you will see which authority governs the property, its zoning district, whether a recorded plan or overlay applies, and the code editions in force — before deciding whether the rest is worth $99 to you.
A question about your particular property before you spend anything? Ask directly — joshua@addwell.design.