The filter panel on every listing page has grown a third tab. Alongside the filters everyone uses - date, status, type, keywords - Pro filters holds the ones professionals asked for.
Contacts: search by who, not where
Every search on Plota used to start with a place. Contacts turns that round: type an agent firm, an agent, an applicant, or any of the email and phone fields on an application, and the list becomes that firm's work across every council we monitor.
Names match the start of any word, on normalised company names - "drew" finds Drew Planning & Development Ltd and Drew Planning Limited alike, "smith" finds Jane Smith and Smith Planning. Email and phone want the whole value: paste the address or number you hold and you get its applications, nothing looser. Contact details are captured from 2026 onwards and cover around two thirds of applications.
Use class, where stated
When a change-of-use application states its classes - E(g) office to C3 dwellings, a Class MA prior approval, sui generis - we extract them from the description and make them a filter. Multi-select pills, England and Wales letter codes with the legacy and Scottish systems handled. Around two in five change-of-use applications state a class; the filter is honest about only matching those.
For most searches we still recommend the category filters, which cover every application we hold. Use class is for the professionals who occasionally need the more definitive answer - the stated class itself, precision over coverage.
Public response: find the contested ones
Where councils publish comment tallies we already show them on application pages. Now they filter. Set a floor - one objection, five, twenty-five - and the list narrows to the applications neighbours are actually fighting, or backing.
Counts come from the registers that publish them - just over half of councils - and update while an application is open, so a search for contested applications is a search for live fights, not old ones.
Everything composes
Pro filters stack with the ordinary ones. An agent firm plus a date range plus "refused" is that firm's refusals this year; a use class plus five objections is contested commercial change of use. The count on the Apply button updates as you set them, and the map pins follow the filtered list exactly.
Pro filters are part of Plota's paid plans, from £49 a month with commercial use included - the plans page has the detail. Everything else in the filter panel stays free, as it should be.