What GatherGov is
GatherGov is a data platform that monitors local government meetings across the United States and makes them searchable. It’s built for real estate professionals - developers, investors, brokers, and owners - who need to know what cities and counties are deciding before those decisions show up in the market.
The company was founded in 2024 by Tianyou Xu, who holds a PhD in physics from Oxford and previously worked in quantitative finance. The team is eight people, mostly engineers from quant and competitive-programming backgrounds. The founder joined us on the AI for CRE podcast to walk through the product.
The problem it’s built around
Local governments hold thousands of hours of public meetings every week - planning commissions, city councils, zoning boards, economic development councils, public utilities commissions, school boards. The information is public, but it’s scattered. Every municipality records, posts, and formats things differently, the meetings run long, and they’re often scheduled for the evening. Almost nobody sits through them, so what gets decided in those rooms spreads slowly.
What it does
GatherGov aggregates that raw material - recordings, agendas, minutes, PDFs - transcribes it, standardizes it into one structure, and builds a search layer on top. According to the company, it covers roughly 6,600 municipalities and 1,800 counties (about 94% of the US population) and processes around 4,000 meeting hours a day.
From there, a user can:
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Search any keyword or topic (“rezoning,” “moratorium,” “bonds,” “data center,” “self-storage”) and pull every mention across the meetings they’re tracking, over a chosen time window.
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Set alerts to get notified when a topic or location comes up.
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Ask an AI layer about a specific meeting - what was said, who said it, why it came up - with the transcript cited as the source.
The company also offers a market-level report: an economic snapshot of a given area covering the labor market, policy activity, and the development pipeline.
How CRE professionals use it
The use cases the founder described break down by role:
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Defensive monitoring - owners tracking whether competing supply (for example, new self-storage) is being discussed in their market or adjacent ones.
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Path-of-growth research - developers querying infrastructure and public-finance terms (bonds, utility capacity, road and rail spending) to see where public money is heading.
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Policy tracking - investors watching for moratoriums and rezonings that move a market.
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Sector and site intelligence - finding where something like data center rezonings and utility upgrades are being discussed, at national scale.
What’s behind the search
The company says it goes beyond keyword indexing by building knowledge graphs over the data, which it uses to assemble histories for specific entities - how a council member has voted over time, or how a particular project or address has come up across meetings.
Pricing and availability
GatherGov sells to enterprise clients (the founder named developers, brokers, and REITs) and also offers a self-service product, plus an API. On the podcast the founder described a freemium tier; the company’s website currently leads with a demo request and does not list public pricing. You can find it at gathergov.com.
What it doesn’t cover
The platform focuses on local legislative and administrative meetings. Court cases and litigation aren’t included.
