What a parcel can actually become, before money changes hands.
The most expensive entitlement risk in any deal is the one you take on before you’ve closed.
Once the land is yours, every constraint you didn’t know about is a cost you absorb. A sewer allocation that isn’t available for two years. A density provision that reads two ways and the town has never had to decide which. A neighbor with legal protections no site plan can design around. Any one of them can turn a deal that penciled on every other axis into one that doesn’t.
All of them are knowable before you close. Most diligence doesn’t look for them, because the search is slow and the window is short.
What we look at
- The political record. What that board has approved on comparable sites, at what density, with what conditions, and what they’ve turned down.
- The code, applied to your program. What’s permitted by right, what needs discretion, and where the ordinance is ambiguous enough to need a written interpretation before you go hard.
- The dirt. Utilities and capacity, access and traffic, streams and buffers, floodplain, topography, and what all of it does to yield.
- The path and the clock. Which approvals, in what order, decided by whom, and how long that realistically takes in this jurisdiction rather than in general.
What you get
A written read you can put in front of a land committee: what it will approve, what it will yield, what it will cost you in time and obligations, and a recommendation. Where the answer depends on something you don’t have yet, we name it precisely, so you can structure the contract around getting it in writing before your deposit goes hard.
Two ways in. A QuickCheck is the fast version, $1,000, two days, one parcel, no call required. A full pre-acquisition engagement goes deeper and is scoped to the deal. Most people start with the QuickCheck.
Under contract with a clock running? Start with the fast read.