Site research — what your address returns
From just your address, Draftly pulls the official facts about your land so you know your site before you build. This all happens in the site research step, usually within seconds.
What Draftly finds
- Planning zone — the zone that applies to your lot.
- Overlays — any overlays affecting the land, such as heritage, bushfire or flood-related controls. Overlays that touch only part of your lot are included too, labelled "Covers part of the lot" — nothing the official map shows on your land is left out. If an overlay can't be identified with confidence, it's shown as unclassified with a prompt to confirm it on the planning portal rather than being hidden.
- Your real lot boundary — the actual shape of your lot, not an approximation.
- Hazards and controls — the constraints that apply to what you can build.
- The actual rule wording (Victoria) — for each zone and overlay, Draftly fetches the official clause text from the state planning scheme, labelled with the amendment version and gazettal date, plus a link to the gazetted scheme PDF. This version stamp is carried into your submission pack so the certifier can see exactly which wording the design was checked against.
- Your approval pathway — whether the project looks exempt, complying, or likely to need a development application.
Where the facts come from
Every planning fact comes from official government planning data. Nothing is guessed. If a detail can't be verified from an official source, Draftly leaves it out rather than filling it in — so what you see, you can rely on. See Data and accuracy.
Reviewing what was found
Draftly shows you exactly what it found so you can check it against what you know about the site. From here you move on to placing your build — see Placing your build on the lot.
If some facts are missing
Some states have full automatic planning data and others are in manual-entry mode, where you enter the details yourself. If a field is blank, it usually means it couldn't be verified automatically for your area — you can confirm it on your state's planning portal and enter it by hand.