Pflugerville adopts high-tech research tool for developers

"People can find out pretty much anything about development in Pflugerville," Akers said. "Anyone who wants to develop can look at a property, look at who owns that piece of property and see [the property's] closest three neighbors."

Users can access Zonability 24 hours a day through the PCDC website or via smart phones and find information on more than 22,000 parcels of land in the city. Additional zoning and property data offered by the app include whether an area is in a flood zone, its public data and assessed land value. Another tool matches users with possible business locations based on parameters set by property owners.

"It uncovers data that would otherwise take hours to put together yourself," Zonability founder Leigh Budlong said. "It fuses Williamson County and Travis County property data with local zoning."

The concept for Zonability was born in 2008. Budlong, who has a background in commercial real estate, noticed tools such as Google made it easy to access property information but not zoning data. In 2010 she introduced the app's first beta model.

To build off of the app's success with the PCDC, Budlong and Beyond Value are working to market Zonability to businesses such as engineering companies and developers. One of Zonability's next target markets will be the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.

"Our future is to continue to make Zonability the place for fast information and to [expand the app's] information about zoning potential," Budlong said.