We get land approved, and we get it developed.
The weekly read on what the public record says about entitlement risk.
Current Conditions The last five issues argued that entitlement work is a reading problem, that the reading got cheap, and that the practice has not moved because the cost of not reading never arrives itemized. That leaves an obvious question, and it is the one that closes this run. If some people have already changed…
Current Conditions Four issues in this run have argued one side of a case. Vol. 19 named the gap between a record that became readable and a practice that did not notice. Vol. 20 priced the manual baseline at roughly 150 to 300 senior hours per jurisdiction per deal. Vol. 21 showed a Gwinnett County…
Current Conditions Three issues in this run have argued that the record deciding a deal is now cheap to read (Vol. 19, Vol. 20, Vol. 21). This issue tests that argument against a case where reading the record correctly and reading it completely turned out to be two different things. On July 10, 2026, this…
Current Conditions Two prior issues in this run have made an argument in the abstract: the record that decides a deal is now cheap to read, and the practice of reading it thin hasn’t caught up. This issue puts a number on how someone actually got the right answer under the old way of getting…
There is a split in due diligence that I lived with for so long I stopped noticing it. Half of the work was a structured lookup and the other half was a manual dig, and I treated that as the nature of the job rather than an accident of “which data happened to get organized…
Current Conditions Last issue named a gap: the cost of reading the public record fell, and the practice built around expensive reading did not move with it. The natural objection is that the old way was never that expensive in the first place. “Development is local,” meaning a person good at their job can sit…
June 10, 2026 Current Conditions There is a conversation that happens in almost every land development meeting now. Someone says the old way of doing things is slow, wasteful, and expensive. Everyone nods. The diligence still takes a quarter, the entitlement still takes eighteen months, the surprises still arrive late. Then someone asks what tool…
Current Conditions The cleanest line in any due-diligence file is the one that reads “approved.” It closes the entitlement question, satisfies the lender’s condition precedent, and lets the pro forma move on to the next risk. It is also the line most likely to be read as a binary when it is, in fact, a…
Current Conditions The intuitive read of a denial cluster is that the category is cooling. Four jurisdictions in the same region denying the same product in the same thirty days is the kind of pattern that looks, at a glance, like a market signal, a class of project moving from “approvable with conditions” to “not…
Current Conditions The standard project lookback reads the zoning code on the day it is read, treats that snapshot as the operating rule set, and prices the deal against it. The lookback then assumes that the rule set will be roughly the same when the project is submitted six months later, when conditions are negotiated…