NZ Building Consents Monitor

New Zealand building consents from official council open data — only the ones you have not seen before. Every run checks three district-council services, emits consents that are new since your last run, and gives you the job description, value, address and map coordinates. Built to be scheduled: run it daily and it becomes a construction lead feed.

Roughly 35 new consents a day across the three councils, straight from the councils' own systems. No API key, no scraping of council web forms.

Example output

One real record, trimmed:

{
  "council": "queenstown_lakes",
  "councilName": "Queenstown Lakes District Council",
  "consentNumber": "BC240701",
  "description": "Construction of 3 x detached dwellings (House A, B and C)",
  "address": "53 ANGELO DRIVE FRANKTON QUEENSTOWN 9300",
  "valueNZD": 1800000.0,
  "floorAreaM2": 629.0,
  "dwellingUnits": 3,
  "consentType": "BCNwRelDw",
  "status": "Completed",
  "lodgedDate": null,
  "grantedDate": "2024-09-01",
  "sourceDate": "2026-08-04",
  "sourceDateField": "created_date",
  "latitude": -45.0163741,
  "longitude": 168.7107218,
  "legalDescription": null,
  "valuationNumber": null,
  "sourceUrl": "https://services1.arcgis.com/.../query?where=CONSENT_ID%3D%27BC240701%27",
  "detectedAt": "2026-09-01T04:22:10Z"
}

Councils covered

Council	New consents	Job value	Street address	Coordinates	Freshness
Queenstown Lakes District Council	~31/day	✅ 100%	✅ 100%	✅ 100%	same day
Far North District Council	~3.5/day	—	—	✅ 100%	same day
Timaru District Council	~1.2/day	✅ 77%	✅ 100%	✅ 100%	~2–3 weeks in arrears

Coverage percentages are measured, not estimated — they come from a live run over a 30-day window.

Two things worth knowing before you buy:

1. Far North publishes no job value and no street address. It gives a legal description, a valuation number and exact coordinates instead. If you set minValueNZD, no Far North consent can ever match — the run log says so.
2. Timaru publishes in arrears. Its consents appear about two to three weeks after they are granted. The actor automatically widens Timaru's lookback to 45 days so it is never silently empty, no matter what you set sinceDays to.

No New Zealand council in this set publishes the applicant's or the builder's name, so this feed does not contain one. Everything here is data the council already publishes openly.

Input options

Field	Type	Default	What it does
councils	array	all three	Which councils to check.
keywords	array	(empty)	Only emit consents whose description, consent type or address contains one of these. Case-insensitive substring match, so roof also matches re-roofing and pool matches swimming pool. Empty means everything.
minValueNZD	integer	0	Only emit consents worth at least this much. Excludes Far North entirely (it publishes no value).
sinceDays	integer	30	How far back to scan. On the first run this is your backfill; after that only never-seen consents are emitted.
maxItems	integer	200	Cap on consents emitted per run. The cap is split fairly across councils, so one busy council cannot eat it; anything over the cap arrives next run.
stateStoreName	string	nz-building-consents-state	Named key-value store holding the consent numbers already delivered. Change it to reset the monitor and re-emit the backfill.

Output fields

Field	Type	Notes
council / councilName	string	Which council, as a key and as a full name.
consentNumber	string	The council's own consent number. Unique within a council.
description	string	The council's own free-text description of the work.
address	string | null	Site address. Null for Far North.
valueNZD	number | null	Stated job value in NZD. Null for Far North and for Timaru consents with no published cost.
floorAreaM2 / dwellingUnits	number | null	Floor area and number of dwelling units where published.
consentType	string | null	The council's own consent category.
status	string | null	The council's own status wording.
lodgedDate / grantedDate	date | null	Lifecycle dates, where that council publishes them.
sourceDate + sourceDateField	date + string	The date this council's window filters on, and which lifecycle moment it is — Queenstown Lakes stamps first-published, Far North stamps lodged, Timaru stamps granted. They are not the same event, so the field is labelled rather than flattened.
latitude / longitude	number | null	WGS84 site coordinates. Present on effectively every consent, including the ones with no address.
legalDescription / valuationNumber	string | null	Far North and Timaru; the property identifiers those councils publish.
sourceUrl	string	Link straight back to this consent on the council's own service.
detectedAt	date-time	When this feed first saw the consent.

Use cases

"Find me every new house going up in Queenstown before my competitors do." Schedule it daily with keywords: ["dwelling"] and minValueNZD: 400000. In a 30-day window that is ~390 consents — new builds and multi-unit developments, each with an address, a value and a map pin, the day the council publishes it.

"I install heat pumps / solar / pools and I want the jobs, not the noise." Set keywords to your trade (["solar"], ["pool"], ["heat"], ["re-roof","roof"]). The substring match catches the way council staff actually type, and consents you have already been sent never come back.

"I need consent volumes for a market report." Run it with no filters and a long sinceDays for a clean backfill, then daily for the running feed. Every row carries the council, the value, the floor area and the dwelling count, so it aggregates directly into pipeline and market-share analysis.

How the monitor works

• First run scans your sinceDays window and emits everything matching your filters — that is your backfill.
• Every run after that emits only consents it has never seen. A rerun five minutes later emits nothing and costs you nothing beyond the start fee.
• State lives in the named key-value store stateStoreName. Change the name to start over.
• A council being down degrades the run, it does not fail it — you get the other councils plus a warning, and nothing from the failed council is marked as delivered, so it arrives on the next successful run.
• Consents are pushed to the dataset before anything is recorded as delivered, so a failed push means you get the consent next run rather than never.

Recommended schedule: daily. There is no benefit to running more often than the councils publish.

Pricing (pay per event)

Event	Price (USD)
Actor start	$0.005
New consent detected	$0.012
Council checked	$0.001

A quiet day costs under a cent. A typical unfiltered day (~35 consents) is about $0.43; a trade-filtered feed is a fraction of that because you only pay for consents that match.

Maintenance promise

The council field mappings are checked against the live services and the actor warns in its own run log the moment a council renames or drops a field, rather than silently emitting blanks. Schema checked on each release.

Changelog

0.1 — first release

• Queenstown Lakes, Far North and Timaru district councils.
• Keyword, minimum-value and per-council filtering; fair maxItems split across councils.
• WGS84 coordinates on every consent, including councils that publish no street address.
• Marlborough District Council was evaluated and left out: it publishes no usable date or sequence field, so a correct feed would have to re-read all 55,000 of its rows every run and would bill a 55,000-consent backlog on the first one. It is a candidate for a future release under a silent-seed design.