Frank Conrad can’t do anything to speed up the building permits or zoning applications at Dallas City Hall, but he can save time for those interested in local development.
In February, the 28-year-old architect quit his job and began working in earnest on Ultraground, an incorporated business that monitors permit issuances, zoning boards, and planning commissions in 18 markets representing more than 33,000 ZIP codes.
“Our mission is to build housing,” Conrad said. “Anything we can do to make that happen is going to be interesting to us. I really see zoning reports as a first step and we’ll expand based on customer feedback.”
Back in 2020, Conrad was already monitoring zoning news for his architecture firm, but it wasn’t easy to follow many markets at the same time.
“I joined a pretty good architecture firm in Los Angeles, and we were doing multi-family projects,” Conrad said of his life after graduating with a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Southern California. “I wanted a new way to build homes and wondered why the process was so hard. I wanted to learn more about zoning and how the process works. We had to go to meetings and stay current on local news. I was thinking, ‘Why isn’t this news more available for those in development?’”
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, more meetings became available to stream online.
The concept of Ultraground was born out of Conrad watching three-hour zoning meetings and digesting the action items into a summary that can be emailed the next day to subscribers, who select their city of interest for biweekly reports. They can also log in and compare data among other cities in Conrad’s network.
Going Ultraground
Conrad now lives in New York and works full-time on Ultraground. He has a few people who help him out, but no official employees yet.
“We’re looking to hire soon to help with the automation software,” he said. “I use a few proprietary online tools. Google is a huge help. I use Airtable to stay organized. I’m not a software engineer but I do some website stuff. There’s some light-touch automation; it’s all online.”
Ultraground newsletter, August 2022
With a mix of computer software and manpower, Conrad and his team cull through agendas, watch a lot of zoning board meetings, and prepare an email digest for cities including Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, Cincinnati, Miami, Orlando, and Graham, N.C.
Ultraground’s newsletter-style emails began rolling out in June.
“My eyes don’t go through every minute of every meeting,” Conrad said. “The level of detail in the report is focused on the most important projects, the most important aspects of those projects, and how can we serve that in a five-minute-or-less read, with the option of going deeper, by linking staff reports.”
People like Dallas investor and apartment developer Barrett Linburg use the service to get updated information that’s useful when planning projects.
“I connected with Frank through Twitter,” Linburg said. “He’s an architect and understands the value of having boots on the ground in planning and zoning meetings. You can quickly click a link and see the pertinent documents and, ‘Here’s the outcome, and here are the commissioners or the council members who had the most to say about it, and here’s what they said.’”
The Ultraground digest provides relevant information for anyone who wants to know what’s getting approved, what’s getting denied, and what other developers are doing, Linburg added.
“It helps you figure out where the path of progress might be,” he said.
Most Ultraground users are developers and investors, Conrad said.
“They’re interested in acting on the information,” he said. “We’ve gotten good feedback. We submit polls on each report and we have a high click-through rate. People weren’t able to get this information without going to the meeting. If you can get zoning news without going to the meeting, we’ve saved you time.”
The site is funded by investors and subscription fees. The first month is free, then it costs about $99 per month or $1,000 per year to get the reports. Conrad can’t disclose how many subscribers they have due to investor guidelines, but he confirmed he has a good following in Dallas.
“Dallas came from a user request, an individual customer,” he said. “The real estate community there is pretty active on Twitter. It’s a cool community to watch grow. Once we have an initial request, we look to expand that market. Since then, we’ve had requests for Denton and Collin County.”
Dallas vs. Other Cities
Email reports are fact-checked and reviewed before they’re issued to the public, and Conrad decides what makes the cut.
“My background in real estate and architecture determines which projects move to the front. We look at a lot of multi-family and residential,” he said.
Unlike traditional real estate news, Ultraground didn’t start with the main hubs, Conrad explained.
“Our first publication was out of Graham, N.C.,” he said. “We’re really just following the demand. We’re continuing to expand.”
Covering multiple markets has opened Conrad’s eyes to how different cities operate.
“I wish I was licensed in Cincinnati,” he said. “The zoning board there is really constructive and developer-focused. When they have a denial, it’s more about, ‘How can we make this an approval?’ That’s one area that’s been interesting.”
Self-storage is a hot topic in Miami, and short-term rentals are being discussed just about everywhere.
And then there’s Houston.
“It’s like the wild west,” Conrad said.
The architect said he’s hopeful that Ultraground will prove to be a useful tool for those in the Dallas real estate industry, where new development seems to move at a snail’s pace.
City leaders recognize the delays and cumbersome processes and recently allocated budget funds to make improvements in zoning and permitting processes.
“It seems like it’s anti-growth for no reason,” Conrad said of Dallas. “You can respond to an email every day of the week, but it takes eight months for zoning to go through. You can’t respond for eight months? That’s almost a year.”
