Most firms answer one of the two questions that decide a land deal. We answer both, which is why we can tell you in one conversation whether a deal is real.
There are three things you need to know about a piece of land before you commit capital to it: whether the town will approve what you want to build, how long that takes, and what it costs to build once it’s approved.
On most deals those three answers live with three different specialists who never speak to each other, none of whom is looking at your pro forma. The gaps between them are where deals die, and they die without announcing it, in a plat review comment or a condition nobody read, months after the decision that caused it.
Entitlement Services
Pre-acquisition due diligence, so you know what a parcel can actually become before you close on it. Then the approvals themselves, rezonings, text and map amendments, site plan approval, variances, special use permits, subdivision and plats, and the hearings and appeals that come with them.
And the project management that carries the application through the jurisdiction: submittals, staff comments, revisions, hearing prep, conditions.
Development Services
Estimating, priced early enough that the number can still change the decision. Value engineering, so the project pencils. Land review, so you know what’s actually buildable.
And development management that holds the schedule, manages the budget and the subs, and owns the closeout, so your money comes back when you planned for it.
Why project management appears on both lists
Because it’s the same discipline in two different rooms, and if we don’t say so plainly, clients reasonably assume it’s a billing trick.
Entitlement project management manages the jurisdiction. Getting an application across a public counter, staff, review cycles, hearings, conditions.
Development project management manages the build team. Holding a schedule across a private one, consultants, subs, agencies, budget, closeout.
One is a political process with a technical component. The other is a technical process with a political tail. They require different instincts, and the firms that are good at one are usually not the firm doing the other.
Why they belong on the same project
The most expensive failures in land development happen at the handoff. Conditions negotiated by one team and inherited by another surface at plat review, which is the worst possible place to find them. Commitments made out loud at a hearing never make it into the ordinance, and the only person who knows what the board believes they were told has already been released. Closeout, bond release, final acceptance, is condition-compliance work handed to a construction team with no relationship at the planning counter.
One accountable team from diligence through closeout means the person who negotiated the conditions is the person who closes them out. That’s a structural choice, and it’s cheaper than any of the failures it prevents.
One thing we don’t do
We don’t develop, and we don’t buy land.
A firm that manages your development while also acquiring land is, at minimum in perception, sitting on the other side of your table. We have no position in your deal beyond getting it approved and built on the terms you underwrote.
How we price it
QuickCheck is a flat $1,000, delivered in two days. One parcel, in writing, no call required.
Development Services runs 4 to 5% of the site development budget, depending on complexity, how many jurisdictions are involved, and whether we carried the entitlement. On residential that generally lands near $1,750 a lot. There’s a $40,000 minimum. Fees step with the project, hourly with a cap through approvals, a monthly management fee through construction, a fixed closeout, billed monthly against progress, and it capitalizes into your development budget rather than coming out of pocket.
The fee is set off the approved budget at contract, not off actuals. That’s deliberate: it means when value engineering takes cost out of your project, you keep all of it.
Entitlement Services is scoped per project after a call. The scope depends on which approval you need and how contested it is, and quoting it off a rate card before we’ve read the jurisdiction would be a guess dressed up as a number.
Bring us your hardest parcel.
Send the parcel number and what you want to build, and we’ll come to the call having already read what that board has approved nearby.