Thinking to myself – now there should be a site that would allow people to add this stuff easily – county, location, area, estate size, number of houses vacant. Grisly – but interesting.

But then I see that www.ghostestates.com is already up an running.

There are currently a big number of issues with a number of councils – the screen scraping routines will need to change – and this takes time.

We’ll try to get to this as soon as possible.

Do you find it hard to keep track of new planning permsission submitted in your area or locality? We did, so we started thinking of how much easier it would be if you could check these submissions from one location.

Currently we monitor 15 planning authorities in the Republic of Ireland – Carlow, Cavan, Clare, Cork City, Donegal, Kerry, Leitrim, Limerick, Louth, Monaghan, Offaly, Roscommon, Sligo, Tipperary (North) and Waterford.

We expect to make more councils available shortly – we’ll let you know immediately when we do.

In the meantime – if you want to receive updates on planning applications in your locality – then sign up for an account. Once logged in you can create your alerts, and choose to receive them by email, RSS or a website widget (if you run a community website).