Build + Parallel: Live Geofenced Alerts for Real Estate Development

How we built always-on project intelligence with Parallel

Information Is Everything

Real estate developers exist because of information arbitrage. You believe a site is worth more than the seller thinks. You see a zoning change coming that others don't. You know a substation upgrade will unlock capacity before the market prices it in.
This is why CoStar flies planes over cities to photograph construction activity. It's why developers cultivate relationships with utility contacts and planning officers. It's why the best firms have people whose entire job is tracking council agendas.
The edge is knowing first.

The Problem at Scale

This is why Build has built the most comprehensive geospatial database in the world for real estate development, giving its agents access to over 700 data sources across 12 countries in the US and Europe. Everything from municipal zoning maps in Finland to available power capacity by county for data centers in the US.
But static data doesn't catch changes in motion.
Build works with some of the largest asset managers in the world,  firms with hundreds of billions in AUM across thousands of sites. When you're managing that many projects, you can't have someone watching every council agenda, every utility filing, every regulatory docket.
That's when things slip through:
**New planning committee members with prior opposition. **An industrial developer had a logistics facility moving through approvals when newly elected committee members — who had previously campaigned against similar projects — took their seats. The developer found out when their permit was called in for review, months after the election results were public.
A grid upgrade timeline slips. A data center developer had a site dependent on a substation upgrade. The utility pushed the energization date by 18 months. They learned about it from their utility contact, weeks after it appeared in a regulatory filing. The project is now on hold.
**Air quality non-attainment designation. **An energy developer had a natural gas project in permitting when the region was designated non-attainment for particulate matter. The new regulations restricted the overall generation capacity they could build. The designation had been working through regulatory channels for months.
All of this was public information. It just wasn't surfaced in time.

What We Built

A live monitoring system that watches for changes relevant to each development project and delivers structured, location-validated alerts.

The Build platform showing live alerts for an example project. 
Build specifies over 50 different monitors per project, designed by industry experts for each asset class. The configuration varies depending on whether you're tracking a data center, industrial facility, energy project, residential development, office building, or telecoms infrastructure.
What it tracks:
Category
Examples
Planning & Permits
New applications, committee decisions, consultation windows, appeals
Political Context
Council leadership changes, planning commission reshuffles, election results
Power & Grid
Capacity constraints, substation upgrades, interconnection queue movements
Nearby Projects
Competitor filings, construction starts, transaction announcements
Infrastructure
Road closures, transit changes, utility works affecting site access
Policy Changes
Zoning amendments, new regulatory requirements, incentive programs
A data center project gets monitors tuned for grid capacity, interconnection queues, water availability, and fiber routes. An industrial project gets monitors focused on traffic studies, labor agreements, and environmental review. A residential project tracks school capacity, housing allocations, and inclusionary requirements.
Each alert includes the source, a summary, and validated geolocation.

How It Works

Always-On Monitoring

The foundation is Parallel's Monitor API, which flips web search from pull to push. Instead of querying for updates, you define what you care about and get notified when something new appears.
We set up monitors for each project with natural language queries describing what we want to track. Events come back pre-categorized (planning, political, grid, etc.) via structured outputs, and push to our system through webhooks as they're detected.

Process diagram for Build Live Monitoring System. 

Validation & Dynamic Geofencing

Monitoring catches relevant events, but "relevant to real estate development" and "relevant to this specific project" aren't the same thing. Early testing surfaced alerts from across the country that matched our query terms but had nothing to do with our sites.
We use Parallel's Task API as a validation layer. When a monitor event fires, we check whether it's actually relevant to the specific project — filtering out noise before it hits the dashboard.
A fixed radius sounds simple, but real estate doesn't work that way. When someone says "monitor activity near my project in Austin," what do they actually mean? A 5-mile circle? The city limits? The county's jurisdiction? The utility service territory?
Our solution uses dynamic geofencing. The agent interprets the target region from the query, then identifies the relevant polygon through OpenStreetMap. If you're tracking a project in a specific municipality, it pulls the actual city boundary. If you specify a radius, it uses that instead.
This means:

• A city council election gets captured because the jurisdiction polygon overlaps with your project
• A highway expansion gets captured because the proposed route crosses your site's primary access road
• A grid upgrade 15 miles away still surfaces if it's the substation that feeds your site's distribution network
  The geofencing adapts to the query. State-level policy changes get state polygons. Local planning decisions get city or county boundaries. Physical infrastructure gets radius-based filtering.

On-Demand Context

Some alerts need more than a one-line summary. When a user wants to dig deeper — or when we detect a high-impact event — we trigger Parallel's Deep Research API to generate a full briefing with regulatory implications, timeline considerations, and recommended next steps.

We're Hiring

Build's data and retrieval team is growing. If you're interested in building the infrastructure that powers real-time intelligence for real estate development, check out our open roles.
Build is the world's first agentic development firm, enabling CRE professionals to accelerate projects from concept to completion. Parallel builds web search infrastructure for AI agents.
build.inc · parallel.ai