What happened when parcels like this one went before the board.
Rezoning, variance, and special-exception decisions from Charleston-area boards — machine-read from the ordinances, staff reports, and roll-call votes that those bodies publish, and tied to the parcel they were about. Recorded outcomes. Never predictions.
Of case records audited against their source documents, weighted to the corpus’s real composition, 99.51% agreed with the source — measured on the Charleston Board of Zoning Appeals corpus.
What that number measures, what it doesn’t, and why we won’t publish 100% →
“There’s no way to know if the county will approve a rezoning until you put it in front of them.”
Said to us by a broker, 2026
It isn’t true. Every one of those decisions is a public record. The application, the staff recommendation, the motion, the vote, the conditions attached — all of it is filed, and all of it is disclosable.
What’s true is that the record is unusable. It lives in scanned minutes, agenda packets, ordinance indexes, and a dozen GIS layers that don’t speak to each other, across several counties and their municipalities. Nobody reads it because reading it costs more than the answer is worth.
So we read it. Then we tie every decision to the parcel it was about, so you can ask a plain question — what has this board actually done with requests like mine — and get an answer built from the record instead of from someone’s recollection.
One parcel, seven questions, one page.
Parcel and authority
Which body actually rules on it — city or county, which council district, which overlays. Getting this wrong is the most common and most expensive mistake in an early land decision.
Build by right
The envelope the current ordinance permits without asking anyone: uses, density, height, setbacks, parking, and the yield those produce — with the section cited and the arithmetic shown, computed on gross acreage. It is a reading of the published ordinance, not a zoning determination: only the zoning administrator makes one.
Decision precedent
Comparable requests before the same body, scoped to the same jurisdiction, with outcomes, conditions, roll-call votes, and time to decision. Every case listed, so a count is never asked to stand in for the cases behind it.
Constraints
Flood zone and base flood elevation, mapped wetlands, sewer and water at the line, historic and airport overlays. The four-months-later discoveries, surfaced on day one — as screening flags, never as a delineation.
Owner and basis
Owner of record, entity, years held, arms-length sale history, assessed value, and the 4% versus 6% assessment ratio that tells you whether you’re looking at a residence or a position.
Nearby activity
Permits, sales, and board actions within a half mile, and what sits on the next agenda.
Sources and gaps
Every field carries its source and pull date. Everything we don’t hold is named on the page rather than left blank — a blank field is a claim, and we don’t make it.
Our coverage is a table, not a claim.
We state what we hold per jurisdiction and per body, not as a region. A commercial parcel can border two counties, and only the named ones can be answered for. Where we hold part of a body’s record, counts are floors — “at least this many” — and the page says so.
Not every record can carry a rate, either, and that has nothing to do with how much of it we have. A body that only recommends does not decide; a source listing what was adopted cannot show you a refusal. We publish an approval rate only where the record could have shown us a refusal, and we say which sources those are.
We report what was decided. We never say what will be.
Every number on every page describes applications that were already decided. We publish base rates, vote records, and comparable case sets. We do not score parcels, rank likelihood, or issue an opinion on the merits of anything you’re considering.
This isn’t modesty. A recorded outcome is verifiable and a forecast isn’t, and the moment we start forecasting we’d be asking you to trust our judgment instead of the record. The record is the product.
Early, and working directly with a small number of people.
We’re working with a handful of brokers and developers in the Charleston area while the coverage deepens. If you have a parcel you’re already thinking about, write to us and we’ll tell you plainly whether the record covers it — including when it doesn’t.