Zoning Watchdog FAQ

Zoning Watchdog is a web service that reads city planning agendas and notices every hour, pulls out each rezoning, variance and special-use filing, and emails you when one matches your keywords. Every alert links to the original public document. It is made by Kente HQ, a product line of Accidental Genius LTD.

It is built for real estate investors, developers, land buyers and acquisition teams who want to hear about zoning changes before the hearing instead of after it. It also suits brokers and consultants who track several towns. If you only follow one town, the free plan covers it.

Each hour it checks every watched city's agenda and notice pages for new PDFs and reads the text. A language model (Claude) turns each agenda item into a record with the address, filing type, applicant, case number and hearing date. If a record matches one of your keywords, or you asked for all high-value filings, you get it by email, and by text where available.

Scout is free and watches 1 market with up to 5 keywords and one daily email digest. Investor is $49 per month or $490 per year for every market, unlimited keywords and instant alerts. Desk is $199 per month for 5 seats, a CSV and JSON export API and city requests. Prices are in US dollars.

Coverage is United States cities, listed on the landing page under Markets watched now. Prices are in US dollars, and you can receive email alerts from anywhere. Text alerts depend on text messaging being available for your number.

Reading packets yourself is free and thorough, but it costs about an hour per packet and depends on remembering to check. General alert tools such as Google Alerts watch the web for keywords; Zoning Watchdog reads inside agenda PDFs item by item and extracts the address, type and hearing date. City agenda mailing lists and Legistar calendars publish the agendas, and Zoning Watchdog reads them for you and filters by your keywords.

Planning agendas, notices and hearing packets are public records that the city publishes on its own site. Zoning Watchdog reads those pages, respects each site's robots.txt, identifies itself in the user agent, and waits two seconds between requests to the same host.

Each market is checked every hour. On Investor and Desk, matching alerts are emailed within about five minutes of being found, while Scout sends one digest email a day. It cannot be faster than the city: if the packet is posted Friday at 5pm, that is when the clock starts.

A scrape that breaks fails loudly: the error shows on that market in the operator console, and the source is fixed and re-tested. Scanned PDFs are read directly by the AI model, up to a page limit, so a scan is not a dead end.

Good, not perfect. A language model (Claude) reads each agenda and records each item, and every alert links to the source PDF. Always confirm the details with the city before you act on them.

Your email, your keywords and markets, and a phone number if you turn on texts (stored encrypted). There is no password: you sign in with a single-use emailed link. Payments are handled by Dodo Payments, so Zoning Watchdog never sees your card, and the Privacy page lists every service that touches your data.

Stop alerts from the unsubscribe link in any email, or reply STOP to a text. Cancel a paid plan from the billing portal in your account and keep it until the period ends. You can also delete your account, which erases your data.

Desk subscribers can request a city from their account, and anyone else can email support@kentehq.com with the agenda page. Adding a city means writing a small source description and testing it against the live site, which usually takes minutes when the city posts PDFs on a plain web page.