Neither agent involved has read the sewer capacity letter on a 22-acre split-zoned parcel
Take a parcel like this: 22.4 acres under contract at $410k, 90 day due diligence, $15k going hard at day 30. Front 6 acres zoned for two-unit residential, back 16 agricultural with a split line running diagonally through the parcel for reasons the county can't explain. Listing says "potential for 40+ lots." Say the buyer pulls the utility district's capacity letter from last year directly. It allocates remaining treatment capacity by service area, and the service area this parcel sits in is close to committed. Whether that stops a 40 lot plan or just delays it depends on a will-serve determination that hasn't been requested yet, and that process commonly runs 60 to 90 days. Rezoning the back 16 is a separate track through the planning commission, and how any of that applies to a specific parcel is a question for a land use attorney in the state where the land sits. The agent on a deal like this is often a residential agent who knows every seller in the township and made the introduction, but has never done an entitlement deal. The alternative is a land broker who quotes 8% on raw land, wants a 12 month exclusive if the buyer goes to disposition with him, and can talk yield per lot fluently. Run the numbers as they stand: $410k in, call it $28k of soft costs to get through study, and if the will-serve comes back limited the layout probably drops from 40 lots to something like 12, which moves the per-lot basis from about $10k to about $34k. That still works at current finished lot pricing in a market like this, but the margin gets thin enough that a bad quarter eats it. The decision that scenario forces: keep the residential agent through closing and bring the land broker in only for disposition, or move now and risk the relationship with the person who actually knows the sellers.
