City will let me plat 4 lots administratively, 5 triggers a road. Do I take the 4?

Question

I own 9 acres behind one of my small buildings, picked it up years ago with the rest of the site and it's been sitting in grass. Planning tells me up to 4 lots goes through an administrative plat, staff level, no hearing, existing frontage counts, maybe $8k to $12k of survey and engineering and a couple of months.

Five or more lots and I'm in a full preliminary plat, public hearing, and they'll require a public street with sidewalk, curb, storm, and a water loop instead of a dead end. The engineer's rough number for that is $520k to $600k, and yield goes to about 11 lots. Lots in the area trade in the $70k to $85k range for the sizes I'd be creating.

So 4 lots for almost no cost versus 11 lots for $600k of improvements plus a hearing I might lose. The 11 lot version looks better on a spreadsheet and worse on every other axis, including the fact that I'm a buy and hold person with no development staff. What am I not weighing correctly?

devon_pierce · Answer

The number I'd want before anything else is what the remaining 5 or 6 acres are worth after you carve off 4 lots along the existing frontage. If the administrative plat leaves the back acreage landlocked with no legal access, you haven't taken the small deal, you've killed the big one permanently and the residual dirt is worth almost nothing.

Ask the engineer to lay out the 4 lot version with a stub easement or a reserved 50 foot strip to the back, and see whether staff will still approve it that way. Some jurisdictions won't, they'll call the reserved strip evidence you're phasing around the subdivision rules, and it varies a lot by ordinance.

I don't have a view on whether 11 lots is worth $600k to you. But the 4 lot version being cheap doesn't make it reversible, and that's the part I'd nail down first.

City will let me plat 4 lots administratively, 5 triggers a road. Do I take the 4?

1 reply