Frequently asked
questions

Lodgely is an AI-powered compliance review platform built specifically for the Victorian building industry. It automatically analyses architectural drawings against relevant building regulations, planning provisions, and local council overlays — helping builders, draftspeople, and designers identify potential issues before lodging a permit application.

The platform is designed for residential builders, architectural draftspeople, building designers, and project managers who regularly deal with building permits and town planning applications in Victoria. It's especially useful for volume builders running multiple projects simultaneously, where manual compliance checks can consume significant time.

No. Lodgely is a pre-lodgement tool — it helps you identify and resolve likely compliance issues before your drawings go to a registered building surveyor or council. A registered building surveyor must still be engaged to formally assess your project and issue any required building permit under the Building Act 1993 (Vic).

Think of it as a highly thorough pre-flight check that reduces the back-and-forth and saves everyone time.

Lodgely currently covers the National Construction Code (NCC) for Class 1 and 10 residential buildings, the Building Regulations 2018 (Vic), Victoria Planning Provisions (VPP) including common overlays such as Neighbourhood Character Overlays, Vegetation Protection Overlays, and Bushfire Management Overlays, as well as ResCode requirements under Clause 54 and 55.

Coverage depends on the documents you provide. Lodgely applies the zone, overlay and other provisions from the PDFs you upload for your site — so a review is only as good as the information supplied with it. The more complete your upload, the more complete the review.

We are continuously expanding coverage as regulations are updated and as we move into additional building classes.

The platform accepts PDF files.

Your drawing set — a full set of town planning or working drawings. The more complete the set, the more thorough the review. Support for DWG and IFC formats is planned for a future release.

You can also upload supporting documents for the site from a selectable list. Lodgely reads everything you upload directly, so the review is based on your actual project documents rather than approximations.

Longer than a few minutes, but not long enough to plan your day around — think of it as a coffee break rather than an instant result. Most standard residential reviews are done well inside half an hour. More complex projects with multiple overlays or large drawing sets sit at the longer end of that range.

Your report includes a summary of identified compliance issues, the specific regulation or provision triggered, the location within your drawings where the issue was detected, a severity rating (critical, moderate, or advisory), and suggested remediation notes to guide your next revision.

Yes. You can upload revised drawing sets at any stage and re-run the compliance check to confirm that flagged issues have been resolved. This is particularly useful when coordinating revisions between drafting, engineering, and town planning.

Lodgely is trained on Victorian building regulations and planning provisions and is designed to flag issues that commonly cause delays at the permit stage. However, like any automated tool, it works best as a complement to professional judgment rather than a substitute for it.

We continually improve accuracy through feedback from building surveyors, draftspeople, and town planners. If you encounter a missed issue or a false positive, please email us at hello@lodgely.com.au — practitioner corrections directly inform how we improve the platform.

Lodgely reviews against our own compliance checklists, which we maintain and update as the NCC, Building Regulations 2018 (Vic), and Victoria Planning Provisions change.

It is a review aid, not a live regulatory database — we do not hold a real-time feed of regulatory changes. Always verify against current official sources before relying on a result.

Yes — and it does so by reading the actual planning documents you upload, rather than relying on approximations.

For each project you upload your VicPlan planning certificate (which identifies the zone and overlays), plus the specific zone schedule and overlay schedule PDFs for your site. These are free to download from Planning Schemes Online and contain the council-specific provisions that vary between councils and schedules.

Lodgely reads all uploaded documents directly — so if Knox's NCO Schedule 3 has different setback requirements to Boroondara's NCO Schedule 2, the review reflects that precisely.

We offer plans to suit individuals and teams of all sizes. Our Starter plan is suited to sole traders and small practices, while our Builder plan is designed for volume builders managing multiple concurrent projects. Enterprise pricing is available for larger organisations. Full details are on the Pricing page.

Yes. The free plan includes 3 reviews every month, with no credit card required — it renews each month rather than running out. That gives you time to run real projects through Lodgely and see the quality and depth of the reports before you commit to a paid plan.

All plans are month-to-month with no lock-in contracts. You can cancel at any time from your account settings and will retain access until the end of your current billing period.

Your drawings are private to your account. We never sell your data. To generate your review, document text is processed by our AI provider (Anthropic) as described in our Privacy Policy; we don't share your documents for any other purpose. All files are encrypted in transit and at rest. Our staff only access uploaded files in limited circumstances — such as when investigating a reported technical issue — and only with your permission.

Your uploaded files, account information, and compliance reports are stored at rest on infrastructure located in Australia (Sydney region). Some processing does occur overseas: extracted document text is sent to Anthropic in the United States to generate your review, and our application hosting runs on Railway infrastructure in Singapore. Overseas disclosures are handled in accordance with Australian Privacy Principle 8 — our Privacy Policy sets out the detail.

We retain your account information, uploaded files, reports, and custom checklists for as long as your account remains active. Automated retention and deletion is still being developed — there is no fixed retention period in place yet. In the meantime you can delete any project yourself from your dashboard at any time, or request deletion of specific files, reports, or your entire account by emailing privacy@lodgely.com.au.

You can reach our support team by emailing hello@lodgely.com.au. We aim to respond to all queries within one business day.

Yes. Builder and Enterprise plan customers can book a complimentary onboarding session with our team to walk through the platform and configure it for your typical project types and council areas.