If you would like to clarify individual legal questions regarding the permissibility of your building project before submitting the building application, you can submit a preliminary building inquiry. In the preliminary building application, you should formulate your question clearly and with sufficient specificity to enable a clear answer. Attach the documents required to assess the questions to be decided to the preliminary building application. The responsible lower building supervisory authority will provide you with binding information on these questions in a preliminary building permit.

A preliminary building application is useful, for example, if it is unclear whether a property can be built on at all in accordance with the applicable urban development planning law or whether deviations from individual building regulations requirements can be permitted. In addition, the developer receives planning certainty at an early stage regarding the buildability of a property or the permissibility of deviations.

In principle, builders can submit a preliminary building application. However, if the lower building supervisory authority deems it necessary for the preliminary building application to be prepared by a designer, then such a person is required.

The preliminary building inquiry includes the building documents required for the assessment of the preliminary building inquiry. A preliminary building inquiry can save financial expenditure, as not all the documents required for a building permit are necessary. The required documents and the specifications for the files are set out in the Lower Saxony Building Documents Ordinance (NBauVorlVO).

All documents required for the assessment of the question posed must be submitted. As a rule, these are

• Site plan or extract from the cadastral map,
• description of the project and
• the construction drawings required to assess the question posed