Frequently asked questions

What exactly is Zoning Firehose?

A monitoring service for Houston-area land-use activity. We watch the Planning & Zoning agendas of 12 municipalities, pull every rezoning, specific-use permit, plat, variance, and PD amendment the moment its packet posts, parse the PDF into structured fields — location, acreage, current and requested zoning, applicant, hearing date — and email you the ones that match filters you set (a city, a submarket, a corridor, a property type, a name). You get the case in a format you can act on in 30 seconds, days before the hearing.

Why does this matter — what's it actually worth to me?

Because in this business the cost of finding out late is measured in deals. A competitor quietly ties up the site you wanted while you're still unaware it was in play. A hearing where you needed to appear — to object, to support, to negotiate conditions — happens without you. An assemblage forms one parcel at a time and you spot it after the third tract trades instead of before the first. Zoning filings are the earliest public signal that land is about to change value, and the people who see them first set the terms. Time is the edge, and this buys you time.

Isn't $250 a month expensive?

Set it against what one signal is worth. A single rezoning tip that gets you into a deal — or keeps you out of a bad one — pays for the service for years. It's less than an hour of a broker's or a land-use attorney's time, once a month. And the alternative isn't free: manually checking 12+ city portals, downloading 200-page packets, and reading them before your competition does is a part-time job you'd pay someone far more than $250 to do — badly, and late. Against the size of a single land transaction, $250 rounds to zero. Cover a single city for $45 or one county for $95 if you want to start smaller.

How is this different from checking city websites, Google Alerts, or a VA?

Coverage: we watch 12 cities at once, not the two or three anyone checks by hand. Speed: alerts land within hours of the packet posting, not whenever someone next remembers to look. Structure: you get parsed fields and a map pin, not a link to a 200-page PDF you still have to read. Reliability: Google Alerts never see the PDFs inside agenda packets, and a VA misses the case that doesn't say the word they searched for. We match against the full text and every structured field, every cycle, without days off.

How fast will I know?

Typically within hours of the agenda packet being posted. Under the Texas Open Meetings Act cities must post agendas at least 72 hours before a meeting — and P&Z packets usually land 10+ days before the hearing itself. We check on each city's actual drop schedule, so you hear about a case while there's still time to do something about it.

Isn't this data public?

Completely — and it's buried across dozens of portals in 200-page PDF packets that post at unpredictable hours. You're not paying for the data. You're paying to be the first to have read it, in a format you can act on in 30 seconds.

Which cities do you cover?

12 Houston municipalities today, with more added regularly. The full list — each city's portal, meeting cadence, and observed packet-drop timing — is on the coverage page. Working a city we don't cover yet? Reply to any email and tell us.

What if a case is tabled or continued?

You get an update alert. Continuances and revised agendas are exactly the movements manual checking misses.

Can I cancel?

One click, any time, and the trial requires no commitment. If the alerts don't pay for themselves, you shouldn't keep them.

Do you cover City Council decisions too?

P&Z is where cases surface first — that's the early signal. Council decision alerts are coming for all covered cities.

Ready to stop reading packets by hand?

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