PlanSuite

"Reads the scheme" is not the same as "gets the parcel right"

Most AI planning tools are good at the same thing: given a clause, they can summarise it. That's a language task, and large language models do it well. But a planning answer has two halves. The first is what does the provision say. The second — the one that actually decides a permit question — is which provisions apply to this exact parcel. A tool that nails the first and fumbles the second produces an answer that reads convincingly and is wrong where it counts.

The second half is a spatial problem, not a language one. It depends on the boundary of the land, the geometry of each planning control, and how the two intersect. That's where the errors hide.

Affecting vs in the vicinity

Open any property report on VicPlan, the Victorian Government's planning portal, and you'll see it separates planning controls that affect the property from controls that are merely in the vicinity. That distinction is not cosmetic. An overlay that genuinely covers part of the land can trigger the requirement for a planning permit. An overlay that only runs along the street, or clips the very edge of the title, generally does not apply to the works proposed — but a naïve spatial query will happily report it as if it does.

This is the single most common way a planning answer goes wrong: a control that's merely near the property gets reported as one that's on it. A planner checking the actual controls would never make that mistake — but a tool that simply asks "what overlays touch this boundary" makes it on almost every awkward site, because a boundary touch is not the same thing as a control that genuinely covers the land.

PlanSuite replicates VicPlan's own affecting-control determination. We exclude boundary-only touches and report the controls that genuinely cover the land — so the zones, overlays and schedules we show line up with the affecting controls on the VicPlan report a planner verifies against.

The data has to be live and authoritative

The controls on a property are not a fixed fact you can memorise once. Schemes are amended, overlays are introduced, schedules change. So we don't rely on a model's recollection of what a suburb "usually" has. For every address, PlanSuite reads the authoritative Victorian sources directly — the same government spatial and planning data that sits behind VicPlan and Vicmap — at the moment of the search. The planning rules themselves come from the actual clause and schedule text, not a paraphrase, so the reasoning quotes the provision rather than approximating it.

And when a planning scheme changes, PlanSuite updates automatically. A new overlay, a varied schedule, a renumbered or amended clause — that change flows straight through, so there is no stale local copy quietly going out of date. The controls and the legislation you see are the ones in force on the day you ask, which is exactly what a planner staking a decision on the answer needs.

Every zone and overlay in Victoria — including the hard ones

Most tools handle the common zones and overlays and quietly fall over on the hard ones. The controls that govern Precinct Structure Plan areas, Activity Centre Zones and similar schemes don't live in tidy clause text — they sit in incorporated documents and PDF maps inside the zone or schedule, where a tool that only reads plain clauses simply has nothing to say.

PlanSuite reads those too. It can answer a question about any zone or overlay anywhere in Victoria — including the ones driven by PSPs, Activity Centre Zones and the maps embedded within them — rather than going quiet on the schemes that are often the most consequential. This is something no other product does; we built it deliberately, to be complete across the whole state, because a tool that covers most of Victoria still leaves a planner re-checking by hand on the cases that matter most.

The awkward parcels are where it's won or lost

Most properties are a tidy rectangle and almost any method gets them right. The accuracy of a tool is decided by the awkward ones:

• Partial coverage. When an overlay covers only part of a site, the question isn't just "is it affected" but which part — front, rear, or throughout — because that decides whether the proposed works actually fall within it.
• Multi-parcel sites. A site made of several parcels can have a control on one parcel and not another. Collapsing that to a single yes/no for the whole site loses the very detail the assessment turns on.
• Concave and flag-shaped sites. A simple "centre point" of an L-shaped or battle-axe site can fall outside the land — landing in a neighbour's overlay and inventing a control that doesn't apply, or missing one that does.

Handling these isn't glamorous, but it's the difference between a tool a planner can rely on and one they have to re-check by hand every time — at which point it has saved them nothing.

Don't take our word for it — check it

The best part about grounding everything in the relevant legislation is that you can audit us in two minutes, on any address you like:

1. Run a Victorian address through PlanSuite.
2. Open the planning scheme for that property — its ordinance and maps — through the free VicPlan viewer.
3. Compare the zones, overlays and schedules line by line, and check our reasoning against the clause text it cites.

They should match the affecting controls in the planning scheme — not a longer list padded with everything in the vicinity, and not a shorter one missing a control that covers part of the site. That's the bar we hold ourselves to, and the one we'd encourage you to hold any planning tool to.