Raw lot cheap with 14 months of entitlement, or shovel-ready at a 40 percent premium

Third option isn't on your list and it should be. Option the raw ground with a feasibility period instead of buying it, so you're paying for the right to walk if the planning department turns cold, and you build the infill lot with the rest. It costs you an option fee and it costs you the seller saying no. I've read about it more than I've done it, so somebody who's actually optioned land should say whether sellers of four raw acres will even entertain that.

Entitlement wasn't a word I knew before this thread. If I've got it right, it means getting the government approvals that turn ground into something you're legally allowed to build on, and it's separate from the physical work of putting in roads and pipes. Tally, when you say your basis lands near 61k a lot, is that including the road and utilities, or only the approvals...

Juniper, it should include both, and if tally's 61k doesn't include the road and the utility extensions then the real number is a lot higher. Utility extensions are where land deals die. I've held raw ground for eleven years across three parcels and the one thing I'd say is that entitlement rewards patience with somebody else's schedule. If your capital needs to turn, you are the wrong owner for that dirt. If it can sit, the four lots are worth more than the one lot will ever be.

Twelve to eighteen months if nothing goes sideways. I have never once in nine years of renovation heard that sentence come true!

A utility extension quote from the water authority in February is not the price you pay in October. I've watched two of those reprice on jobs I was subbed to. Get the extension number in writing with an expiration date on it and then assume you're paying past the expiration.

I read paper more than dirt so this may be off. If you entitle and it works, can you sell two of the four lots to another builder and keep two to build on yourself? That seems like it would return capital at the exact point your carry has been worst, and it caps how much of the market risk you're holding.

Vellum's version is what I'd do, and it's how the people ahead of me in my market run it. Sell the lots, keep the corner ones, let somebody else eat the vertical risk on half of it. Tally, my honest problem with your raw acreage is not the time, it's that you're underwriting a build cost eighteen months out and materials have gone up every one of those months for four years running. Whatever you pencil for sticks and labor in spring 2027, add to it.

I've been building a lot list for eight months and the thing that surprised me is how many raw parcels are cheap because of one specific fixable thing and how many are cheap because of one specific unfixable thing. Tally, do you know which yours is? A road cut and utility extensions are money problems. A sewer moratorium or a septic perc failure is a wall. I'd want the perc test and a written pre-application meeting with the planning department before I signed anything, and both of those you can usually get during a due diligence period.

I'm in month nine of a two-lot split that was supposed to take four. The delay hasn't been the county. It's been my engineer, who has more work than staff and moves my drawings to the back whenever a bigger client calls. Nobody warns you that the labor shortage hits the desk trades too, not just the framers.

I have no deals at all, and quarry's point is the one that hits hardest. I assumed the risk in entitlement was the government saying no. It sounds like the actual risk is that everyone in the chain is overbooked and nothing has a deadline you can enforce.

Worth confirming what your state and county require in terms of who can submit the subdivision plat, because in some places it has to be a licensed surveyor or engineer of record and that person's calendar becomes your critical path. That's a check with your local jurisdiction, not something to take from a forum.

If someone brought me both of these as a place to put money, I'd price them completely differently. The infill lot is a construction deal with a known start date and a twelve month horizon. The raw acreage is a land bet with a construction deal stapled to the end of it, and the returns have to compensate for two and a half years of illiquidity, not one. Tally, if you're using your own capital that distinction is a preference. If you ever want outside money on the raw one, most people I'd talk to want a preferred return accruing from day one on land that produces nothing, and that accrual eats the lot basis advantage faster than you'd think.

Run the infill lot at 86k with a spring start and run the acreage at 112k with an eighteen month entitlement, and then run the acreage a second time at twenty six months with 8 percent more build cost and see whether it still beats the infill lot. If the second version still wins by a wide margin, the entitlement path is genuinely better. If it wins by a hair, you're being paid nothing for the extra two years and the extra risk. That single sensitivity is doing all the work in this decision and I'd want to see it before I voted.

Before any of this, pull the recorded documents on the four acres. I've found an access easement that was described in the deed but never actually recorded against the neighboring parcel, which meant the legal right to the road cut was a conversation somebody had in 1994 and nobody wrote down. Also read the utility authority's extension policy, the actual policy document, because plenty of them require the developer to fund the extension and then dedicate it back with no reimbursement. Recording practice and what counts as adequate access vary by state, so a local real estate attorney has to be the one who tells you whether the access is good. What I can tell you is that the answer is in the paperwork and it's usually free to go look.