We get land approved, and we get it developed.
The weekly read on what the public record says about entitlement risk.
Current Conditions Most due diligence reads the public record once, on a deadline. The deadline produces a snapshot. What was approved, what was denied, who voted which way. The snapshot is useful, but it answers the wrong question. It tells you what already happened. It does not tell you what is about to. What is…
Current Conditions We reviewed our preliminary due diligence work across dozens of development sites in North Carolina over the past 10 months. Each site was evaluated before the developer committed capital, at the letter of intent or early contract stage. The scope was the same every time: answer the questions that determine whether the deal…
Current Conditions A national builder ran the same site plan in two states. Same product type. Same density. Same engineering firm. Standard residential subdivision, the kind of project that constitutes the majority of new-home construction in high-growth sunbelt markets. In one state, the entitlement took 4 months. In the other, it took 14. The 10-month…
Current Conditions A developer put a mixed-product residential rezoning out for engineering proposals. Five firms responded to the same RFP. Same site. Same unit count. Same municipality. Same scope description. The fee proposals ranged from $335,000 to $575,000. A 72% spread on the same project is not unusual in entitlement engineering. But the spread is…
Current Conditions Every municipality has a comprehensive plan. Most of them say the right things about housing, density, mixed-use development, and growth management. The question that matters for anyone putting capital at risk is whether the municipality does what it says. We analyzed 16 municipalities in a major metro area in central North Carolina: 20…
Current Conditions A national builder filed a 931-unit conventional residential subdivision on roughly 300 acres in a growing municipality east of a major North Carolina metro. The community plan supported residential use. The site had road frontage on two sides. The product was standard for the market – detached single-family homes, no age restriction, no…
Current Conditions The word gets used a lot: NIMBY. It conjures a specific image, affluent homeowners in stable neighborhoods blocking apartments because they don’t want “those people” near their cul-de-sac. It’s a convenient villain for the housing discourse. It’s also, based on what we’re seeing in 2.3 million political meeting transcripts, largely wrong. We ran…
Current Conditions Over the past six issues, this newsletter has traced a single thread through Triangle housing economics. Infrastructure costs are hidden in fee schedules that Zillow doesn’t show. Zoning complexity drives those costs higher. Developable land is running out. The discretionary approval process adds $50,000-$240,000 per project in carrying costs. Jurisdictional fragmentation compounds all…
Current Conditions The Triangle operates as one housing market, one labor market, and one commute shed. It does not operate as one infrastructure system. Water allocation is coordinated through the Jordan Lake Partnership. Transit is coordinated through Wake Transit. Utility operations in eastern Wake are coordinated through the Raleigh merger. But impact fee structures, land…
Current Conditions Impact fees get the attention. They’re disclosed upfront, they appear on settlement statements, and they’re easy to point to as a line item. But impact fees are predictable, and predictability has a different risk profile than uncertainty. The harder cost to quantify is the discretionary approval process itself. Not the fees. The time….