Answers to the questions UK property developers most commonly ask about Scapely, planning regimes, HMO licensing, flood risk and Title Register lookups.
Scapely is a UK property intelligence dashboard for buyers, developers and investors. Search any address and Scapely returns an AI development appraisal, EPC and MEES position, planning and heritage constraints, permitted development eligibility, flood and PTAL scores, sale history and Companies House owner intel — all in one screen, with a one-click PDF report. A companion Chrome extension brings the same overlay to portal listings.
Scapely Free gives you 3 AI development appraisals per month with the core data set — EPC, planning constraints, flood, tenure and heritage. Scapely Pro is £29/month for unlimited appraisals, build-cost modelling, objection-risk scoring, HMO saturation, PTAL and a 7-day appraisal history per property. Scapely Enterprise is £59/month and adds Companies House owner intel, Class MA eligibility, CIL, MEES 2027 commercial warnings, Biodiversity Net Gain scoring, business rates and priority support.
Per property: the AI appraisal (GDV, build cost, fees, finance, profit on cost), EPC band and MEES 2027 status, planning and heritage flags (Article 4, conservation areas, listed buildings, AONB/SSSI), a permitted development verdict across the key classes, HM Land Registry sale history and comparables, plot intelligence (footprint, area, height) on a map, flood and PTAL scores, Companies House owner intel where the owner is a company, and HMO saturation, CIL and business rates where they apply.
The dashboard runs eligibility checks for the routes that matter most to buyers and developers: Class MA (commercial to residential), Class Q (agricultural to residential), Class L (C3 to C4 small HMO), Part 1 Class A house extensions, Class AA upward additions on houses, and Part 20 Class AA upward additions on flats and commercial buildings. Each check produces a plain-English verdict with the reason.
Pick a strategy — refurbishment, extension, new build, HMO conversion, Class MA conversion — and Scapely builds a full end-to-end appraisal: indicative GDV from local comparables, build cost from current UK benchmarks tuned per strategy, fees, finance and CIL, ending in profit on cost and profit on GDV. The same numbers feed the investment view's yield and ROI projections.
Sale history and comparables are pulled from HM Land Registry Price Paid data — real transacted prices on the same street and postcode, not portal asking prices. Scapely deliberately does not scrape listing prices from property portals.
Article 4 directions, conservation areas, statutory listed buildings, AONBs, National Parks, the Broads, World Heritage Sites, SSSIs, SPAs, SACs, Ramsar sites and Scheduled Monuments. Each constraint is flagged with severity and a link to the source record where one exists.
Yes. Every property shows its current EPC band, expiry date and the cheapest credible route to band C, with cost ranges per measure. The dashboard flags lets that would fall foul of the proposed band C minimum from 2027 with a clear 'cannot legally be let' warning when relevant.
When the registered owner is a company, Scapely pulls the live Companies House record into the dashboard — company profile, registered office, directors, persons with significant control, charges, and other companies registered at the same address. Useful for tracking down off-market opportunities and stress-testing counter-party risk.
Tenure (freehold vs leasehold) is only authoritative when sourced from HM Land Registry's Title Register. Scapely offers an optional £5 verified Title Register lookup that pulls the official record. Without that, tenure isn't guessed — it's left blank with a Verify CTA.
Flood risk uses the Environment Agency river, sea and surface-water flood-zone datasets — the same data insurers and lenders rely on. For London properties Scapely shows the TfL PTAL public-transport accessibility score from 0 (poor) to 6b (excellent), which is the metric planners use for density and parking arguments.
Yes. The dashboard surfaces Class MA eligibility, CIL liability, MEES 2027 commercial obligations, Biodiversity Net Gain risk and a Valuation Office Agency business-rates estimate for any commercial floorspace on site.
Yes. Every property can be added to your watchlist, which appears as a horizontal carousel along the bottom of the dashboard. Appraisals are cached for 7 days per property and strategy — re-opening a saved property within that window is instant and does not consume a monthly scan, even on the Free tier.
Yes. The Generate Report button produces the full Scapely PDF — cover, appraisal, intel, planning, EPC and comparables — entirely in your browser using pdfmake. Nothing leaves the device during generation, so the report is safe to share with solicitors, brokers or partners.
The extension is a companion to the dashboard. When you visit a listing on Rightmove, Zoopla, OnTheMarket, Realla, Allsop or Savills auctions, it overlays Scapely's appraisal, EPC and key planning flags inline so you can triage portal listings without opening the web dashboard for each one.
Yes. Scapely covers all four UK nations including Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Cardiff, Swansea and Belfast, with planning-regime context appropriate to each jurisdiction (Scottish Planning Policy, Planning (Wales) Act, Northern Ireland LDPs).
No. Scapely is a screening and underwriting tool — it tells you within seconds whether a property is worth pursuing and what the major risks are. Once a deal moves into legal due diligence or detailed planning strategy, you should still engage a qualified planning consultant or solicitor.
Scapely aggregates open data from HM Land Registry, Companies House, planning.data.gov.uk, the Environment Agency, Historic England, Natural England, Ordnance Survey NGD, the Valuation Office Agency, EPC Open Data Communities, TfL Unified API and Google Maps. Title Register data is purchased on demand from HM Land Registry.