8 building consents approved within 27 calendar days

A recent project needed 8 separate building consents. We cleared all 8 in 27 days. Those are calendar days, weekends and public holidays included. In Auckland the average is 55 working days per consent, longer still on a real calendar. The gap comes from one decision: we find the problems the council's processors would find, and fix them before we lodge.

1 · A consent is read by more than one person

No single person checks a building consent. Once it is lodged and accepted, it moves across several desks, each looking at a different thing: a planner checks it against the zone and planning rules, a development engineer works over the civil and geotechnical detail, a structural engineer checks the structure, and a building processor works through the Building Code. On some projects an external certifier does that last part. Auckland Council lays out the full path in its [10-step guide](https://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/en/building-and-consents/building-consents/building-consent-10-step-guide.html).

Any of those processors can stop and issue a request for further information (RFI). Every RFI freezes the 20-working-day clock until you answer it.

2 · Why that adds up to months

With that many independent checks, the queries pile up. In Auckland, a consent takes 55 working days to grant on average, according to [BRANZ's ModelDocs research](https://www.branz.co.nz/design-build/publications/modeldocs-transforming-building-consenting-behaviour-for-better-housing-2024). The council spends only about 19 of those processing. The other 36 wait on the applicant to answer RFIs.

The RFIs are predictable. The average consent draws around 30 of them, and 66% are for the same thing: missing or inconsistent documentation. A detail reference that points to a detail nobody drew. A cladding called up on the plan but specified as something else. A bracing line that doesn't match the structural sheet. These are not hard problems. They are the same handful of gaps, on package after package. So we can catch them before a council ever sees them.

3 · How we get ahead of every desk

So before we lodge, every package goes through an internal AI review that anticipates each of those processors. It runs in 4 stages.

Stage 1 — Read the set. The hard part isn't judging the drawings, it's reading them. A consent set is a stack of PDFs laid out for a person, not a machine: title blocks, general notes, schedules, callouts. This stage turns every sheet into structured data — what each drawing is, what it references, the materials and dimensions on it, and the specification behind it. Nothing downstream works until this does. It's where most of the engineering went.

Stage 2 — Run multiple checklists. We audit the package against the council's processing checklist, item by item — the exact criteria it will be judged by. Then our own stricter checklists go further, catching the reference gaps and drawing-to-spec conflicts that never make the official list but reliably trigger an RFI.

Stage 3 — Check every item 3 ways. We test each item against the drawings, the Building Code clause behind it (E2 weathertightness, B1 structure, and the rest), and the project specification. The AI flags a sheet listed in the drawing index but missing from the set, or a spec that contradicts the drawing. The aim is not to guess. It's to surface the conflict a processor would raise, while there's still time to fix it.

Stage 4 — Flag, then judge. The machine does the exhaustive part at speed — the same checks on every sheet, every time, nothing lost on a busy week. That leaves us to make the design decisions, and more. The speed is the machine's; the judgment stays human. It happens before we lodge, not after an RFI has restarted the clock.

4 · The result

We catch the gaps in our office, not on the council's clock. Fixed before lodging, they cost hours. Found later, each is an RFI, and an RFI costs far more than its answer. It drops your application back into a queue of busy processors. Reply while your file is open and it moves; reply late and they have moved on, and you wait for every desk again. A small gap becomes weeks.

All 8 consents reached a technical decision within 27 calendar days of receiving the successful lodgement letter, weekends and holidays included. The 55-day benchmark counts working days only, so the real-time gap is wider than the numbers first suggest.

5 · What it means for you

A more predictable timeline, less rework, and an earlier start on site. The national data is clear about where consent time is lost. We built the thing that stops losing it.

*That is the review side. Producing the drawings that fast is the other half →* [**Building consent lodged in 7 calendar days**](/ai/building-consent-lodged-in-7-days/).