Planning Leads for Plumbers: Find Bathroom and Extension Jobs Before the Quotes Start
New bathroom in a loft conversion. New kitchen plumbing in a rear extension. Full first-fix in a new build. This work exists months before anyone calls a plumber, sitting in a planning application on the council website, free to view, completely public.
Nobody’s watching it though. Checking council portals across a patch takes real time, and reading through PDF application forms to find out who actually applied is a slog most plumbers skip entirely. So the lead gets found by someone else — usually whoever the main contractor already knows.
Planr checks the portals every week so you don’t have to.
How Planr finds planning leads for plumbers
Every week, Planr scrapes planning portals across Herts, Essex, and London (expanding), pulls every new application, and extracts the applicant’s name and address from the documents — including redacted PDFs that are a pain to search manually.
Each application is then scored by an AI model for relevance to plumbing work, so the jobs likely to need new bathrooms, kitchens, or full plumbing installs rise to the top of your list.
What gets scored highly for plumbers
- Loft conversions — nearly always include a new bathroom or en-suite
- Rear and side extensions — new kitchen plumbing, sometimes a utility room
- New build houses — full plumbing install from scratch, multiple bathrooms
- Basement or cellar conversions — new bathrooms and drainage, often complex work
- Change of use conversions — houses split into flats, each needing its own bathroom and kitchen
What you get
A scored weekly list of applications relevant to plumbing work, and a personalized letter for each, ready to download and post. Planr reads your website before writing, so the letter reflects your actual services — bathroom installs, boiler work, whatever’s listed — matched to the specific project in the application.
You don’t write a word of it yourself.
How much time this saves
Checking multiple portals properly, opening documents to find out what’s actually being built, takes about 2 hours a week done consistently — and most plumbers don’t have 2 spare hours to spend hunting for leads that might not pan out.
With Planr, that drops to about 10 minutes: scroll the scored list, download what’s worth sending. Roughly 7 hours back every month.
Pricing and free trial
- Starter — £29/month. 1 council.
- Growth — £59/month. 3 councils.
- Pro — £79/month. 15 councils.
7-day free trial, no card required, with 3 letters included so you can see it working on real local applications first.
FAQ
Do all extensions need new plumbing work? Most rear and side extensions include a kitchen or utility space, which is why they score well. The application documents will show you the layout so you can judge the scope yourself.
Will this cover boiler and heating work too? Planr also has a dedicated scoring profile for heating engineers (boilers, heat pumps). If you do both plumbing and heating, the Growth or Pro plan lets you use multiple councils and both trade profiles are covered under one login.
How do I know if the homeowner has already appointed a plumber? You don’t know for certain — but planning approval usually comes before final trade appointments are made, especially for anything beyond a small refit. Early contact tends to beat late contact.
Does Planr cover flat conversions and HMOs? Yes — change of use applications, including houses converted to flats or HMOs, are scored highly since they typically need multiple new bathrooms and kitchens.
What area does Planr currently cover? Herts, Essex, and London councils currently, with more being added regularly.
Stop waiting for the phone to ring on jobs you could’ve written to first. Start your 7-day free trial — no card required.