Building Real-Time DA Alerts with the Council DA API

This tutorial builds an alerting pipeline on the Council DA REST API: define an area of interest, detect new development applications, and push notifications into your own systems. The same pattern powers proptech dashboards, trade lead-gen tools, and internal research feeds.

Step 1 — get a key

Create a free account and generate an API key from the dashboard. The Free tier allows 25 calls a day, which is plenty for developing against; move to Starter ($49/mo) when you go live. Authenticate every request with the X-API-Key header.

Step 2 — define the watch query

The /v1/applications endpoint accepts filters for council, suburb, state, status, category, lodgement dates, and estimated cost. A watcher is just a saved set of filters — for example: suburb=Parramatta, state=NSW, lodged in the last 7 days.

For geographic rather than administrative boundaries, the proximity search endpoint takes a latitude, longitude, and radius — useful for "everything within 2km of this site" monitoring.

Step 3 — poll, or subscribe

The simple version is a scheduled job: run your query daily, keyed by lodgement date, and diff against the IDs you have already seen. Our scrapers run Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so a daily poll captures new records within a day of us ingesting them.

On Professional plans and above, webhooks flip the model: register an endpoint URL and filter criteria, and we POST matching applications to you as they arrive — no polling loop, no missed windows. Verify the webhook signature on receipt and return a 2xx quickly; retries handle transient failures.

Step 4 — route the signal

Once the pipeline produces "new DA" events, routing is your choice: a Slack or Teams message for internal teams, an email digest for clients, or a CRM record for sales workflows. Keep the DA number and council in every notification so recipients can trace the source record.

The full endpoint reference, including request and response examples, lives in our API documentation. If you build something interesting on the data, tell us — we feature integrations.