How to find building sites about to start in your county

What a commencement notice is, and what the law says

A commencement notice is the notice a building owner gives the building control authority before work starts. The rule is in Article 8 of the Building Control Regulations 1997 (SI 496 of 1997): a person who intends to carry out works, or to make a material change of use, of a building to which Part II applies must give notice in writing not less than fourteen days and not more than twenty-eight days before the works begin. That wording is in force as made in 1997. The Building Control (Amendment) Regulations 2014 (SI 9 of 2014), in operation from 1 March 2014, changed how the notice is filed, requiring it to be filed electronically on the Building Control Management System (BCMS) or set out in the prescribed form, and did not change the 14 to 28 day window. We checked the 1997 text and the 2014 amendment; we have not checked later amending regulations.

The BCMS is the national system, hosted by the Local Government Management Agency, through which all 31 building control authorities receive notices. The National Building Control Office publishes the commencement and completion data from it as open data. That is the source of the notices we read.

Why it is the best start signal available

A planning permission says a site may be built at some point in the life of the permission, and some permissions are never used. A commencement notice is later in the chain: someone has appointed a builder or decided to start, and has told the council the date. For anyone selling into the first packages of a job (site clearance, groundworks, drainage, scaffold, plant, ready-mix, blocks), it is the point at which the buying decision is being made or has just been made.

Where we can link a notice back to its planning permission, the notice arrives a median of 207 days after the planning decision. That figure covers the 11,255 notices in the last 12 full months that we can tie to a permission with a recorded decision date, which is 77.1% of all notices in that period. It says nothing about permissions that have not started. Treat it as a typical gap for the ones that did.

What the register shows

Each notice we hold carries the council, the site address and coordinates, the use of the building, the number of homes, the floor area and the declared end date, plus the planning permission number it relies on. The date we use is the date on the notice as it reached the register. We call it the notice date and never the date it was filed, because the register records when a notice arrived, and the work itself starts on a date the owner chose inside the 14 to 28 day window.

Use class is the first filter. Of the notices in the last 12 full months, 88.9% carry a use class we could classify, and of those 90.5% are residential. The rest are commercial, industrial and other uses. Size is the second filter: 859 notices in the same period are for 10 or more homes, which is where multi-trade packages and bulk supply orders sit.

The notice does not name the builder in the data we read. To find who is behind a site, follow the notice to its planning permission, where an organisation applied, the applicant is shown. Individuals who applied for their own homes are never profiled.

What the register leaves out

Not every piece of building work appears. Article 6 of the 1997 Regulations exempts some works altogether, for example works by a building control authority in its own area and works connected with certain State buildings such as Garda stations, courthouses and defence barracks. Part II applies to the erection, material alteration or extension of a building and to a material change of use, so work that does not fall into those groups needs no notice. We cannot say what share of all building work the register captures, and no figure on this page claims to.

A notice is an intention, not a site visit. Work can start later than the date given, or be dropped, and the register does not record that. A scheme built in phases can appear as several notices, so a count of notices is a count of filings, not of projects. Notices also reach the register and then our feed with a delay, so the freshest few days are the thinnest.

A workflow for a contractor or supplier

Start with the geography you can actually serve. The register is by council, not county: Dublin is four authorities, so a Dublin call list is four filters.

• Pick the council or councils you serve, then the use class and the size of job you price (a single dwelling and a 40 unit scheme are different buyers).
• Sort by notice date, newest first. A notice dated this week is a site starting within roughly a month, so there is time to be priced in.
• Open the planning permission behind the notice for the applicant organisation, the description of works and the conditions, which tell you what the site needs (archaeological monitoring, surface water attenuation, a construction management plan).
• Check the permitted but not yet started schemes in the same council on the council pipeline at /commencements. They are your next quarter, not your next fortnight.
• Save the filter as a weekly alert instead of re-running it by hand, and log what you have already called.

Using the monthly series to plan a sales calendar

Notices are a flow, and the monthly count shows how steady it is. Twelve months is one cycle, not a seasonal pattern, so use it to size the flow you are fishing in rather than to predict a peak.

How this differs from the CSO commencement figures

The commencements tracker at /commencements uses the Central Statistics Office series of new homes commenced, which counts homes, by county, published monthly. The register used here counts notices, down to the individual site, and names the council, address and permission. Use the CSO series for the size of the national and county market, and the notices to decide who to ring this week. The two will not match, because a notice can cover several homes or none, and because the CSO series is a statistical release rather than a list of sites.

Limits to keep in mind

The register gives you a lead, not a contract. A notice can be lodged by a builder who already has every supplier lined up. The page counts how many sites are starting, not who has won them. Treat each notice as a reason to make a good first call, and check the permission for conditions before you quote.