Because the answers that decide a land deal sit with people who never talk to each other.

YES was founded on an observation from the other side of the counter.

Our founder, Charlie Yokley, spent twenty-two years as a certified planner, most of it working for municipalities, writing ordinances, reviewing applications, staffing boards, and watching hundreds of projects come across a public counter.

From that seat, a pattern is obvious that isn’t obvious from the applicant’s side: the projects that fail rarely fail because they were bad projects. They fail because nobody read the room. The applicant brought a proposal the ordinance permitted to a board that had, for reasons visible in its own record, been signalling for two years that it wouldn’t approve one. Or they responded to a denial by fixing the thing they assumed was the objection, which wasn’t the objection.

The information that would have prevented it was public the whole time. It was just unreadable in the time anyone had.

What we built

We read the record. Every council meeting and planning board hearing across hundreds of jurisdictions, every motion, who moved it, who seconded, who voted no, and what got said before the vote, and made it searchable and comparable.

That’s the part of this firm that didn’t exist before. Everything else we do, the diligence, the approvals, the estimating, the development management, is work other firms also do. Doing it while knowing what that board has actually done is what makes it different.

How we work

Fractionally. Clients get an experienced land team without adding headcount, scaled to work that arrives in waves.

Both halves. Entitlements answer whether it can happen. Development answers what it costs and how it gets built. Most firms do one. Doing both is why we can tell you in a single conversation whether a deal is real, and why nothing has to be handed across a gap between approval and delivery.

Without a position in your deal. We don’t develop and we don’t buy land. A firm that manages your project while also acquiring land is, at least in perception, on the other side of your table. We have no interest in your project beyond getting it approved and built on the terms you underwrote.

Wherever the work is. We don’t publish a service area, because the fractional model means we bring capacity to the work rather than restricting the work to a bench. In markets that are new to us we work alongside local counsel and local civil, and we say so up front.

What we say no to

If a project is already permitted, we say so. If it’s small enough for a client’s own team, we say that too. If a parcel’s record is too thin for us to give a useful read, we won’t sell a report on it.

None of that is modesty. A firm that says yes to everything has a yes that’s worth nothing.

The rest of the time we’re YES, and if it’s in our wheelhouse, we’ll figure out how to make it work.