Don’t spend a dollar on your land development project until you’ve done these five things.
1. Confirm the zoning allows what you want to build
Sounds obvious. Skipped constantly. The current zoning district either permits your product or it doesn’t — and if it doesn’t, everything that follows is a rezoning timeline, not a site plan timeline.
2. Read the ordinance — all of it
Allowed uses, conditional uses, dimensional standards, buffer and parking requirements, and what a rezone actually requires. The ordinance is where deals quietly die: a use that’s “allowed” but conditional, a setback that eats your yield, a frontage rule that kills your layout.
3. Draw a real concept plan
Not a broker sketch. A concept plan that accounts for topography, utility availability, floodplain, wetlands, streams, and the planning regulations — because yield on paper and yield on this dirt are different numbers, and the difference is your margin.
4. Sit down with the jurisdiction
A pre-application meeting puts staff’s concerns on the table while they’re still free to fix. Their checklist becomes yours, and the site plan you eventually submit is the one they already expect to approve.
5. Check the clock
Verify your due diligence period outlasts the entitlement timeline. If approvals take 120 days and your DD period is 60, you’re buying blind on the single biggest risk in the deal.
The shortcut
These five steps are — not coincidentally — the Pre-Development Playbook: zoning analysis, concept plan, and desktop due diligence in 10 business days, then the pre-app meeting and a milestone permit timeline, for a flat fee. Run the checklist yourself, or hand it to the team that runs it every week.
What did we miss? Tell us — genuinely.