June 2026 · Guide

How subcontractors find work before it goes to tender

Meet a project at tender and you are one of three quotes. Meet it at planning and you are the relationship.

The tender trap

By the time a package goes out to tender, the main contractor already has a shortlist, often the trades they have used before, and you are competing on price to break in. It is reactive, it is crowded, and the margin is thin because everyone is quoting the same defined scope.

Winning more work is rarely about quoting more tenders. It is about reaching projects earlier, before the shortlist forms, so you are a known name rather than a late price.

Where work actually starts: the planning register

Every building project in the UK is public at planning stage, on the council register, often months before any package goes out to tender. That is the earliest reliable signal that a scheme is real and moving, and it is free to anyone who watches it.

Most subcontractors never look at it, because searching one council portal at a time for relevant work is a chore. But the firms that do see projects while there is still time to build a relationship with the developer or main contractor.

Reading a planning application like a subbie

The application type tells you most of what you need: whether it is your kind of work, and how far off it is. A full permission is costable and close; an outline consent is further away; a major scheme means a sustained programme of packages. Our guide to planning application types breaks down which categories mean work for which trades.

From there it is a matter of filtering to the schemes worth your time, by category, scale and region, so you are not wading through extensions and conservatories to find the projects that carry a real package.

Get to the decision-maker first

Once you can see a relevant scheme early, you can find out who is behind it and start a conversation before the tender list exists. A short, useful introduction to the developer or main contractor, months ahead of the package, puts you on the shortlist rather than chasing it.

This works across the supply chain, from groundworks contractors and steel fabricators catching frames early, to fit-out and finishing trades tracking the schemes that will need them later.

Filter to the work worth chasing

The point is not more leads, it is the right ones. SiteLens classifies every new UK application by trade, project type and estimated value, and you can browse any area on the council pages, so you only see the schemes that match what you do, in the patch you work.

It is a different job from a pre-qualification database like Constructionline, which makes you visible to buyers running tenders (see SiteLens vs Constructionline). This is about finding the projects yourself, early, rather than waiting to be shortlisted.

A simple weekly routine

Set an alert for your trade and region once, then make it a habit: each morning the matching applications land in your inbox, you shortlist the ones worth a look, and you make one or two genuine approaches a week. Over a few months that becomes a pipeline of relationships, not a stack of lost tenders.

None of it depends on inside information. It is all public planning data, watched well, and turned into a routine before the competition has even heard the project exists.

Frequently asked