Flanders › Method

How we build Flanders's planning figures — method and sources

Every number on the Flanders pages comes from Departement Omgeving, Vlaanderen’s own published record, joined only to the official reference lists named below. This page says exactly how, and what the record does not contain.

What each Flanders product holds. Public works: the permits whose applicant is a public body — a municipality, province, public social-welfare centre (OCMW), police zone, or a regional or federal authority — decided by the applicant’s legal form as the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (KBO) publishes it, never by its name. Commercial permits: the permits whose applicant is a registered company that is not a public body. A permit with no enterprise number is in neither.

Each figure is counted by its own rule, so they are not the steps of a funnel: a permit can be placed on the map from its commune even when the register gives it no description.

3 records name no municipality we can identify in the register. They count in the total but are not listed under any locality.

Where this data comes from

We read what the authority publishes for bulk reuse. We do not scrape the public search interface, and we never sign in to anything.

What the register publishes

From a published record to a lead

1. Ingest. We take the authority’s published file or API and keep the raw response, dated and unchanged, so every figure can be traced back to the exact bytes we received.
2. Normalise. References, dates and decisions are mapped to one shared vocabulary so Flanders can be compared with the other countries on this site.
3. Locate. The authority publishes the site boundary and we keep it: a subscriber sees each project on its real outline on its own page. The country map groups projects by locality.
4. Match to a trade. Each description is read against a vocabulary for each trade. A project can need several trades. The vocabulary is written in the authority’s own language, because that is how it describes the works.
5. Time it. Each trade has a procurement window: a permit granted today means glazing is usually bought nine to eighteen months later and HVAC twelve to twenty-four. Every permit appears once its register publishes it and our nightly run reads it - some registers publish daily, some weekly, some monthly - and each one shows, trade by trade, the window in which that work is usually bought, so you know when to call.
6. Find who to contact. Where the published record names a party, the lead carries it directly.

What we deliberately do not collect

Where an application is made by a private individual rather than a company, we discard their name and address at ingest. They are never stored. Company and institutional applicants are recorded, because they are acting commercially. Privacy.

Known limits, stated plainly

These are the things this country’s pipeline does not yet do fully. They are tracked in public and updated as they close.

This table is the full list of known limits for this country.

How current is it

We check our sources every night. Each register publishes on its own schedule - some daily, some monthly - and every country page shows the date of the newest record we hold.

Source: Departement Omgeving, Vlaanderen · Modellicentie Gratis Hergebruik · rebuilt 2026-10-12.