Do you buy the parcel that's already zoned for the split, or the one that needs a rezone and costs half as much?

Pike, the thing that decides this isn't the zoning, it's whether the seller on the cheap parcel will give you time. If you can get a contract with a long enough feasibility period to take the rezone through a hearing, and you can walk with your earnest money if it fails, then the entitlement risk mostly turns into a bill for engineering and legal work. That's a number you can put a cap on before you sign. If he won't do that, you're paying full price for a coin flip and I'd let it go.

My crew has done survey and site work for people on both sides of this. The ones who got hurt were the ones who closed first and applied after. Every single time. One of them had a preliminary conversation with a planner that went well and treated it as a green light, then the hearing turned into forty neighbors talking about traffic on a gravel road.

On your clean parcel at 15 percent, check what you're actually counting as costs. People forget the carry while lots sit unsold, the commission on each individual lot, and the surveyor coming back to set corners. Fifteen percent on paper can be five in the bank if the lots take eighteen months to move.

I'd take the clean one and I'd take it knowing the margin is small, because the fifteen percent isn't what you're buying. You're buying the experience of watching your own plat go through a county review process, which teaches you things about that county that no amount of reading the ordinance will.

But cobalt is right that the contingency changes the answer completely. If the cheap parcel comes with real feasibility time then the downside is capped and the question stops being interesting, you just do it.

The other thing nobody's priced here is what the rezone does to the neighbors' willingness to fight you on the next one. I'm in a service business, and I've watched clients win a rezone and then find every subsequent application in that township drawing a crowd. Planning boards remember. That's not a reason to skip it, it's a reason to not treat approval as a one-time cost.

And check the septic side on both before you rank them. Perc results have killed more splits around here than zoning ever has. A parcel zoned perfectly for six lots is worth two lots if only two spots will perc, and the health department rules on that vary by state so read the actual county standard rather than what the agent tells you.