The awkward truth about planning data is that it decays. Not slowly, either. State governments amend planning schemes continuously — statewide amendments that rewrite whole clause families, council-specific amendments that change one schedule’s minimum lot size, rezonings that redraw a boundary through a street.
Victoria alone has run amendments in the last eighteen months that introduced an entirely new zone class — the Housing Choice and Transport Zone, with mandatory height provisions, and rewrote parts of Clause 55, the ResCode standards that govern residential development. A tool that snapshotted the rules before those landed isn’t slightly out of date. It’s answering questions about a planning scheme that no longer exists.
This is the quiet failure mode of scraped planning datasets: they’re built once, demoed while fresh, and left to rot. Nothing on the screen tells you the number you’re reading was true in autumn.
What monitoring actually looks like
Feasibly treats currency as an engineering problem with named parts:
- Daily amendment monitoring. Every morning at 6am AEST, the monitor checks every Victorian planning scheme for new amendments. When one lands that touches data we codify, a human reviews it and approves the correction — the update ships with the amendment reference attached.
- Weekly spatial cross-checks. Zone calls are re-tested against the state’s own spatial services, so drift between our data and the authority’s map gets caught by a machine, not by a customer.
- National data-currency detection. For NSW, SA, Queensland, WA, the ACT and Tasmania, we track the government datasets’ own currency stamps against a baseline and alert on change, including watching the statewide instruments (the R-Codes, the Queensland Development Code, the Tasmanian Planning Scheme provisions, the Housing SEPP, the Territory Plan) for new versions.
- A deploy gate with teeth. Every value we ship carries a last-verified date. If metropolitan council data goes more than 90 days without re-verification against the live scheme, our own deploy pipeline blocks the release until it’s re-checked. Staleness isn’t a dashboard metric we glance at — it’s a build failure.
90 days is the maximum staleness our own deploy pipeline tolerates before it refuses to ship.
Why this matters more than features
A planning lookup is only ever as good as its date. Zones, overlays and schedules are legal instruments that change on the government’s timetable, not ours, so the real product isn’t the data, it’s the system that keeps the data true. That system is why we can put a guarantee behind the zone call, and why every value tells you when it was last verified rather than asking you to hope.
Recent scheme changes and what we did about them are public on the amendments page. And as with everything at screening grade: the lookup frames your question — council and qualified professionals confirm the answer.