KnowToYes, a new platform venture founded by land entitlement expert Charlie Yokley, AICP, has launched to provide commercial real estate consultants, developers, municipal staff, and data managers across the US with a comprehensive intelligence tool for land use and zoning.
The platform unifies thousands of pages of zoning codes and political transcripts into a single, searchable resource. Users can access property, permitting, and parcel data, along with critical political and planning intelligence, in a machine-readable format for integration into their own tools, databases, or dashboards. This functionality aims to reduce hundreds of hours typically spent on due diligence.
Charlie Yokley, known for his two-decade track record in entitlement challenges within the public and private sectors, originally developed KnowToYes as a tool to support clients of his firm, Yokley Entitlement Services (YES). The platform transforms transcripts, zoning codes, and board decisions into structured, searchable insights, enabling users to track cases, understand zoning regulations, decode regional politics, and identify trends.
“As someone who has been in and worked alongside professionals in all links of the development food chain, I know how frustrating and time consuming it can be to gather data for a site development decision,” said Yokley. He added, “I made KnowToYes for myself, but after showing it to some very enthusiastic colleagues, it became clear how much this is needed in the field. We’re filling a gap by providing direct, programmatic access to structured zoning and political datasets. Instead of reading mountains of PDFs, transcripts, and ordinance documents, KnowToYes users can now pull all the meaningful information they need in a machine-readable format that slots directly into their own tools, databases, or dashboards.”
Yokley, who has managed entitlement strategies for thousands of residential lots and millions of square feet of commercial space, noted that the tool has evolved into a platform for transparency. “I’m excited to be able to get this into people’s hands and make their jobs so much easier and their project selection process so much more successful,” he stated. More information is available at know-to-yes.com.
