About
Who builds this, and what it can actually tell you
RealDevelop reads the zoning ordinance so you don't have to. It takes a parcel, works out what the code permits on it, and shows the sections it relied on — so the answer is checkable rather than trusted. This page is who is behind that, how the data is produced, and, just as importantly, the questions it deliberately doesn't answer.
Who
RealDevelop is built by Hasham Tahir and Ali Shah.
Hasham hosts RealTalk The Podcast, where he spends his time in long-form conversation with the people who actually do this work — developers, architects and operators talking through real projects and what went wrong on them. That is where the product's brief comes from: not from a market-sizing exercise, but from hearing the same bottleneck described from a dozen different chairs.
Ali builds it — the ordinance corpus, the parcel geometry, the envelope maths and the report that comes out the other end.
It is a small operation, and that is deliberate. The product only works if the whole chain fits in one room — what the ordinance says, what the parcel is, what will fit on it, and what the report claims. When something is wrong, it gets fixed by the people who built it, not routed to a queue.
Reach us at team@realdevelop.io — corrections, coverage requests, volume and white-label enquiries all land in the same inbox.
Why it exists
Working out what a site permits is not conceptually hard; it is just slow, and the slowness is the problem. The answer for a Chicago parcel is spread across the base district's bulk table, the use tables, overlay districts, transit-served-location rules, parking standards and whatever amendments landed since the last printing. Doing it properly takes a day. Doing it for forty candidate sites takes a month you don't have, so in practice most sites get screened on a guess and the good ones get missed.
RealDevelop does that reading once, structurally, and keeps it current — then applies it to a real parcel with real dimensions and gives you the envelope, a massing that fits inside it, and the citations behind every constraint that shaped it.
How we try to be trustworthy about it
Zoning data is easy to publish and hard to publish honestly. Three rules the site is built around:
- Every figure carries its citation. Chicago district pages cite the section each number came from, field by field — not a footnote at the bottom pointing at Title 17 generally.
- Quoted and derived are labelled differently. A verified figure is read from the ordinance text. An approximation is computed or inferred, and says so. Collapsing the two would make the site look more authoritative and be less useful.
- We don't publish numbers we can't source. Several things developers ask us about — the Affordable Requirements Ordinance percentages and fees, coach-house dimensional standards, the Department of Housing pre-certification process — sit outside the corpus we've verified. The pages that touch those topics say so and stop, rather than filling the gap with a plausible number.
The full chain, including where each tier of data comes from and where it is weakest, is on the methodology page, with per-tier limitations on coverage and provenance.
What we don't do
Read this before you rely on a report
We are not a substitute for the City. RealDevelop does not issue zoning verification letters, does not give legal advice, does not represent anyone in an entitlement process, and does not survey. A report tells you what the ordinance says about a parcel; it cannot see recorded easements, prior variations and administrative adjustments, planned-development ordinances that supersede base zoning, or a map amendment filed last week.
Use it to decide what is worth pursuing and to arrive at the City with the right questions. Confirm before you commit.
What's actually covered today
Two different things, at two very different depths, and it's worth being blunt about which is which:
| Layer | What it is | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Parcel-level analysis | The paid product: real parcel geometry, buildable envelope, generated massing, feasibility report with § citations. Chicago metro only. | 2.62M parcels255 jurisdictions, 6 counties |
| Chicago zoning reference | Free. Every base district with its bulk standards, cited field by field to Title 17. | 53 districts |
| Parcel + district lookup | Free. Type an address, get back the real parcel's district and boundary — no bulk standards, no citations, no massing scheme. | 51 cities31 states, 10.2M parcels nationwide |
| National zoning reference | Free. Who holds the zoning power in each state and under which statute, plus district rosters for the cities where development actually happens. | 50 states306 cities · 3,904 districts |
The national layer is a reference, not an analysis — it will tell you what a district is called and what it broadly permits, not what your specific lot can hold. A full feasibility report exists for the Chicago metro only; real parcel data reaches further than that, but stops at a district-and-boundary lookup everywhere else, and the order we add report coverage in is set by who asks. Coverage by state →
Common questions
- Is a RealDevelop report a zoning verification letter?
- No, and the distinction matters at closing. A zoning verification letter is issued by the municipality itself — in Chicago, by the Zoning Administrator — and is the document a lender or title company will accept as the City’s own position on a parcel. A RealDevelop report is an independent analysis with the ordinance sections cited so you can check every figure. It is built to tell you whether a site is worth pursuing, and to prepare the questions you take to the City. It does not replace the letter.
- Is any of this legal advice?
- No. We are not attorneys and nothing on this site or in a report is legal advice. Zoning outcomes turn on facts we cannot see from a desk — recorded easements, prior variations, administrative adjustments, pending map amendments, planned-development ordinances that supersede base zoning. Every project should be confirmed against the current adopted code and with the jurisdiction before money moves.
- Where do the numbers come from?
- Every field carries its section citation plus a badge saying whether it is quoted from the ordinance or derived — but the districts were not all read from the same source or on the same date, and each district page states its own. The manufacturing districts come from the current adopted Municipal Code of Chicago, Title 17 (Zoning Ordinance), edition 2026-S-73; the downtown districts from the City-published text read in June 2026; the residential, business and commercial districts from a Title 17 excerpt inside a third-party report dated September 2024, which is the oldest source here. State and city pages are sourced from each jurisdiction’s own enabling statute, ordinance and published zoning layer. The full breakdown is on the methodology page.
- What happens if you have something wrong?
- Tell us and we fix it, and we would rather hear it than not: email team@realdevelop.io with the page and the section you think we misread. Corrections to the Chicago layer are made against the ordinance text; corrections to a city roster are checked against that city’s own published zoning layer. We would rather publish a narrower claim than a confident wrong one.
- Who is RealDevelop for?
- People deciding whether to buy, entitle or design a specific piece of land — developers, architects, brokers and the lenders behind them. It is not a homeowner tool. The free zoning reference is useful to anyone; the paid parcel work assumes you are underwriting something.