Cracking the Code of City Hall: A New AI for Real Estate Risk

RALEIGH, NC – July 07, 2026

In the high-stakes world of commercial real estate, developers are adept at calculating risk. They model interest rate fluctuations, material cost escalations, and market demand shifts with sophisticated precision. Yet, one of the largest and most unpredictable variables has remained stubbornly opaque: entitlement risk. This is the risk that a project, despite conforming to all written zoning laws, will be derailed by the unpredictable currents of local politics. A new platform from Raleigh-based KnowToYes, however, aims to illuminate this black box, transforming the art of navigating city hall into a data-driven science.

The company has launched a suite of self-serve municipal intelligence products designed to analyze the political and regulatory climate that truly dictates development outcomes. By converting fragmented public records into structured, actionable intelligence, it promises to give developers, investors, and land use attorneys a crucial edge. As company co-founder Charlie Yokley puts it, the platform addresses a fundamental disconnect in the industry. "Parcel data tells you what you can build. It doesn't tell you what the town will actually let you build – and that's the part that kills deals," he stated.

Beyond Zoning Maps: The "Political Intelligence" Layer

For decades, due diligence in real estate has focused on the tangible: property surveys, environmental assessments, and detailed zoning code analysis. Yet, industry veterans know that the most significant hurdles often arise in the intangible realm of public hearings and council meetings. A project's fate can hinge on a single council member's long-held opposition to multi-family housing, a planning board's recent sensitivity to traffic concerns, or a vocal community group's "Not In My Backyard" (NIMBY) campaign. This is entitlement risk, and it is the single largest source of uncertainty in a development deal.

KnowToYes was built to quantify this very risk. The platform moves beyond static zoning maps and ordinances, which only provide a baseline of what is legally possible. Instead, it dives deep into the public record of how decisions are actually made. By ingesting and analyzing thousands of pages of meeting minutes, hours of video archives, and official transcripts, the system creates what it calls a "political intelligence" layer. This allows users to see historical patterns in how a specific municipality treats different types of projects, from retail centers to apartment complexes. It uncovers precedent, identifies key influencers, and tracks the voting records and stated positions of individual board members, providing a predictive lens on a process that has historically been a guessing game.

From Council Chambers to Code: An Insider's Solution

The credibility of this ambitious undertaking is anchored in the deep industry experience of its founder. Charlie Yokley is not a tech entrepreneur applying an algorithm to a new industry; he is a veteran of the very system his company now aims to decode. With 23 years of experience running entitlements from within council chambers, Yokley has lived the frustrations his platform is designed to solve. The idea for KnowToYes wasn't conceived in a boardroom but was forged as an internal tool for his successful consulting firm, Yokley Entitlement Services, to gain a competitive edge.

"I spent 23 years sitting in council chambers running entitlements. We built the layer the way someone who has lived that process would build it, not scraped from the outside," Yokley explained. This "insider" perspective is critical. It informs the logic of what data is important, how to interpret the nuanced language of a planning commission debate, and how to connect disparate events to reveal underlying trends. This origin story provides the platform with a level of domain-specific intelligence that would be difficult for a purely technology-focused company to replicate. It's a solution built by a practitioner, for practitioners.

The Technology: Turning Public Records into Actionable Insight

At its core, KnowToYes is a powerful data science engine. It tackles the monumental task of taking unstructured, fragmented public records from thousands of municipalities and transforming them into a unified, searchable source of truth. The platform's technology likely employs advanced natural language processing (NLP) to parse text and transcripts, identifying key players, arguments, project details, and, most importantly, outcomes.

The insights are delivered through a suite of targeted products. A "Council Member Profile" can reveal an official's voting history and stance on development. A "Project History Report" can trace the path of a specific past development through the approval gauntlet. For broader market analysis, "Comp Approval Reports" benchmark how similar projects have fared across different jurisdictions. This approach stands in contrast to many existing PropTech tools. While platforms like Plotzy and Gridics excel at analyzing and visualizing zoning codes to determine what is legally permissible, KnowToYes focuses on the human element. It provides the "missing piece," as the company calls it, by decoding the political dynamics that drive real-world approvals and denials, a layer of insight that major data providers have traditionally overlooked.

The Business Case: Quantifying the Unquantifiable

The strategic implications for the real estate industry are profound. By making entitlement risk searchable and comparable, KnowToYes empowers developers, brokers, and capital partners to move this critical factor from the "risk" column to the "calculated" column on their pro forma. The platform allows them to price that risk before committing significant capital to a project. The return on investment is measured not just in the hours saved from manual research—which can take days—but in the millions of dollars protected by avoiding a doomed project or a costly, months-long redesign.

By identifying potential political roadblocks early, developers can better tailor their proposals to align with a community's stated priorities, increasing the likelihood of a smooth approval process. For investors, it provides a new, critical metric for evaluating the viability of a deal. Looking ahead, the company's vision extends beyond its current self-serve reports. The underlying asset is a continuously updated municipal intelligence dataset designed to be embedded into other software platforms, internal workflows, and the next generation of AI systems, positioning it as a foundational data layer for a more transparent and efficient real estate future.