Building A-du · Part Seven: A-du Build
Building A-du: Part Seven
Chris Koss, AIA|Published May 18, 2026|Last updated May 29, 2026
The pre-approved ADU plan you've never heard of. Cities and counties across California have published pre-approved ADU plans for years; most homeowners and most architects don't know they exist. A-du Build surfaces them, and lets the people who designed them claim the listing.
The problem
Building an ADU should be simpler than it is. One reason it isn't simpler is that the pre-approved standard-plan programs that several California cities have published, programs specifically designed to shorten permitting time and lower cost, are buried inside city websites that almost nobody finds. LADBS, the LA Department of Building and Safety, has a standard ADU plan program. The City of Riverside has one called DWELL. Other municipalities have their own. Each one is a list of plans, each plan is the work of a real architect or engineering firm, and each one represents a faster, cheaper permitting path for a homeowner who picks one.
The problem is that nobody finds them. They're scattered across city sites, none of which were designed for browsing. The architects whose work appears in those programs don't get any discovery from the listing. The homeowner who would benefit from picking a pre-approved plan never sees it.
I've thought about this from both sides. As an architect, I know what it takes to get a plan through a municipal pre-approval. It's real work. Having that work hidden inside a PDF on a city subpage is a quiet waste. As someone who cares about ADU adoption, I know that the homeowner who finds a pre-approved plan early is dramatically more likely to actually finish their build. The permit risk has been compressed, the design has already been vetted, the cost is more predictable. That's exactly the kind of friction-reduction that turns "thinking about an ADU" into "having an ADU."
What we built
A-du Build's plan marketplace pulls from two sources. The first is plans that vendors create and list on A-du directly: architects and design-build firms putting their work into a discoverable marketplace. The second source is the municipal pre-approved programs themselves. We scrape those programs and surface every plan in the A-du Build marketplace, clearly labeled by source.
The pipeline mirrors the rental side from the last post.
A scraper visits each program's published plan list, on a respectful cadence, and pulls the plans, the canonical municipal URL, and the source attribution into A-du. Each plan becomes a listing tagged with its origin. For a plan from LADBS, the listing shows "Source: City of Los Angeles" and links back to the original municipal page. We're not trying to hide where the plan came from. We're trying to make it discoverable.
Two related, careful pieces of design.
Vendor claims. When the architect or firm that originally designed a pre-approved plan finds their work on A-du, they can claim it. They submit their license number, a portfolio link, and any supporting evidence. We review the claim manually, verify it against the original program's published designer credit, and on approval the listing transfers to that vendor. From that point forward, leads through the listing flow to them, not to a generic "find a vendor" pool. The listing keeps the municipality attribution, but the vendor gets credit and visibility, which is the whole point.
Takedowns. If an architect or rights-holder wants their plan removed from the marketplace, for any reason, we have a clean takedown path. They fill out a form with their identity and the reason; we review it; the listing comes down. We were deliberate about building this before we needed it. The right time to design a removal flow is the day you launch, not the week you get your first complaint.
Listings on hold for the right vendor. While a plan is unclaimed, anyone interested in it can express interest, and we'll notify them once a vendor claims the listing. That way the homeowner who finds the plan first doesn't lose touch with it just because it doesn't have a vendor attached yet.
We started with LADBS, added Long Beach and Riverside (DWELL), and the architecture is built so the next municipality is a small, reproducible piece of work rather than a custom project. There are roughly fifty California municipalities with pre-approved ADU programs. The goal is for A-du Build to host all of them.
What it means for you
If you're a homeowner thinking about an ADU, A-du Build now shows pre-approved standard plans from your municipality alongside vendor-created plans, in one place, browsable and filterable. That's a real shortening of the path from "I'd like to add an ADU" to "I have a plan I can permit faster because the city has already vetted it."
If you're a vendor (an architect, a design-build firm, an engineer) and one of your plans appears in a municipal pre-approved program, you can claim the listing and get discovery for your work. Uploading your own pre-approved or vendor-created plans to A-du Build is free. There's no listing fee, ever, for plan uploads. The leads from your listing come to you.
If you're a rights-holder and you'd rather not have a plan listed, the takedown path exists and we'll act on it.
What I learned
The first lesson here is the one I keep relearning across the platform: the right way to seed a marketplace is to do the work for the people who will eventually own the listings. A-du Build doesn't ask architects to upload their pre-approved plans cold. We surface them ourselves, attribute them to the city that approved them, and invite the original designer to claim the listing if they want it. That's a more respectful ask than "please come build the marketplace for us."
The second lesson is about attribution. Public-record data shouldn't pretend it isn't public-record. Every scraped plan listing on A-du Build carries the source municipality and a link back to the original page. We're not laundering anyone's work. We're using what's published to make discovery better, and we're crediting the source.
The third lesson, and this one feels foundational, is that adjacent flows on a platform should look similar. The rental-permit-to-postcard pipeline from the last post and the plan-broadcast-and-claim pipeline from this one are deliberately structured the same way. Scrape, surface, invite the right person to claim, give them control. That symmetry isn't an accident; it's how we keep the platform's rules consistent across components, so a vendor and a landlord don't have to learn two completely different products.
Next in the series: what "verified vendor" actually means on A-du Build. License fields, a real bid lifecycle, and the workflow underneath.