How do you get real exposure to land development if you don't own any dirt yet

I've done the third one for eight months and it's more useful than I expected and less useful than I wanted. What you get from staff reports is a map of where the friction is. Two counties over the staff recommends approval on almost everything and the commission follows. In my own county the staff recommends approval and then three commissioners talk about traffic for forty minutes. That's real information and it's free.

What you don't get is any sense of cost. Nobody at a hearing says what the sewer extension priced at.

Start small with your own dirt, but pick the small deal on purpose so it isn't trivially easy. A four lot split where all four lots front an existing paved road with water and sewer in it teaches you the recording process and nothing else. A four lot split where you have to build 300 feet of road to county standard and get it accepted for maintenance teaches you almost the whole business in miniature. Same lot count, completely different education.

I'm three deals in and the ceiling I keep hitting is capital, not knowledge, which argues for @arbor's second path if you're honest about where your constraint is.

The three paths teach different things and the useful question is which gap you're actually trying to close.

Entitlement judgment, meaning the ability to look at a parcel and estimate whether a jurisdiction will approve what you want and how long it will take, is learned by watching many cases. Attending hearings and reading staff reports builds that faster than one deal will, and it costs you time only.

Cost estimating for horizontal work is learned from bid tabs and change orders. You get that from working near a developer or an engineering firm, or from running one small project where you actually sign the contracts. Reading won't give it to you, because the number that matters is what a specific contractor in a specific market will sign for this quarter.

Carry discipline is learned by paying the carry. A passive position doesn't teach it, because your capital is at risk without your calendar being at risk. That's the argument for owning a small deal.

On scale, @keystone's point is the important one. Lot count matters less than whether the deal contains the mechanisms a bigger deal contains, public improvements built to a municipal standard, a subdivision improvement bond or letter of credit, an inspection and acceptance process, and a plat that has to be recorded. A split with those elements is a small version of the real thing. A split without them is a different activity.

One caution. Passive positions in someone else's development project are securities in most structures, which means the offering has to be done properly and the sponsor has to be able to tell you how. That's a question for a securities attorney, and how it applies depends on the structure and the state.

Working for a developer is the fastest of the three and almost nobody does it because the pay is bad. I had a guy shadow my last project for six months for basically nothing and he now knows more about grading permits than people who've bought three parcels. If you can afford a year of low income it's the cheapest tuition available.

The catch is you learn one developer's habits, including the bad ones.

Nobody's mentioned the engineering firm side and I think it's underrated. The civil engineer sees every deal in the county, the ones that got approved and the ones that died in review, and they know which staff planner will actually pick up the phone. If I were trying to learn this I'd try to get a seat in a small civil shop before I'd try to get one with a developer.

Different question, is entitlement consulting a business on its own, or is it something developers only ever do for themselves?

@beacon it's a real business, land use consultants exist and get paid by the hour, though in some states parts of what they do brush against surveying or engineering licensure so the scope depends on where you are.

On @arbor's actual question I voted for the small by-right deal because I'm trying to work out what a first deal costs and I can't do that from a hearing. My rough sketch on a four lot split with a short road was around $95k of improvements before I priced anything, and when the engineer gave me a real number it was $148k. That gap is the whole lesson and you only get it by asking for a real bid on a real parcel.

Attending meetings for a year sounds like a lot until you compare it to carrying a parcel for a year, which is the alternative timeline on the same calendar. One of them costs you evenings.