When the frontage rule allows one split instead of three at day 11 of inspection
A scenario for the room. Parcel is 9.6 acres, under contract at 61,000, penciled at 84,000 to a small builder who wants three lots out of it. Then the zoning table gets read properly. The zone allows 3 acre minimum lots, which is where three splits came from. What got missed is the separate frontage requirement of 200 feet per lot on a county road. The parcel has 340 feet of frontage total. So it is one split unless the buyer gets approval for a shared drive or flag lots, and a county planner in this situation will often say the board has gone both ways on those and decline to say more. No public sewer. No perc test on record. Soils map shows a clay unit over most of the buildable area, which the same planner would describe as workable but slow. Inspection period is 30 days, the wholesaler is on day 11, 1,000 earnest, contract is assignable. A perc test and a rough boundary sketch run about 1,400 out of pocket. The single lot version of this parcel prices around 72,000 to a retail buyer who wants one house and a barn, which is an 11k spread minus whatever gets spent and minus a marketing timeline that on rural acreage in many counties has run 60 to 90 days. So: spend the 1,400 to make the three lot story provable and go back to the builder, or reprice down to the retail single lot buyer and move it slow. It is the kind of decision people keep switching on, and the room's read is worth having.
