Option check cleared, though my cousin still doesn't know whether to plant

Two lines on soils and three pages on power. That tells you everything about what the buyer is actually shopping for.

I met a guy last year doing erosion control on a site like that. He said they mobilized, sat for four months getting paid a standby rate, then demobbed because the interconnection date slipped. Your cousin's survey crew showing up twice fits that pattern exactly. Nobody wants to release the land, everybody's waiting on the utility.

The queue thing is real and it varies wildly by utility and region, so whatever number anyone quotes you should come from the serving utility in writing. I've seen study timelines discussed in years, not months. If the option has three one year extensions in it, somebody drafted it expecting to use them, @vellum.

Everyone I know is suddenly a data center expert and none of them can tell me what happens if the AI spend flattens out. Not saying it will. But a three page power condition and a two line soils condition also describes a market where the buyer holds every card and the seller is just parking.

Genuine question, does the option itself change what the land is worth to the next guy? Like if they walk in 2029, is the field worth more because a serious buyer studied it, or less because everyone now knows the power didn't come through?

@kestrel I've wondered the same. My assumption is the study result travels with the site by word of mouth whether or not it's in any document.

A small town about ninety minutes from me went through the first half of this. Motel filled up with survey and geotech people for a summer, the diner added a lunch special, and then it went silent. Two years later the earthmovers came back. That gap in the middle rarely shows up in any news story.

The number I'd want is the annual option payment against what the hay ground actually nets. Around here dryland hay does not throw off much per acre, so an option payment in the low hundreds per acre per year is a raise for doing nothing, and the extensions are more raises. What's wrong with that math is the opportunity cost of not being able to make a five year decision about the farm. @vellum, is there anything in there about surface use during the option period?

@ledger that's the piece I'd chase too. There are people whose whole business is tying up power adjacent acreage on cheap options and then assigning the contract to an end user at a markup. Whether your cousin's land guy is the end buyer or a middleman changes what those extensions mean. Check whether assignment is permitted without consent, it's usually one sentence and it's usually yes.

Two of my old apprentices went to work on a campus build and their hourly went up by a third. The story on site was that the transformers were ordered before the building permit.

I read three research reports on this sector, decided I couldn't underwrite a single asset in it, and bought a small slice of a listed REIT instead so I'd stop thinking about it. I still think about it.

Meanwhile I'm still working out whether my first deal has room for a water heater. Reading about a three page power clause is like watching a different sport.

I tried to play the edge of one of these in a Sun Belt county along the I-20 corridor about a year ago. Bought a 6 acre piece two roads over from a rumored site, figured I'd flip it in ninety days. Held it eight months, sold for a small win only because a builder wanted it for houses. The rumor never turned into an announcement. Lesson was that being near the power doesn't mean you're on the right side of the substation.

@flint "the right side of the substation" is going straight into my vocabulary. Every scope creep story I have is basically that sentence about a load bearing wall.

@flint that's the plain version of this whole thing. The demand is real, I don't argue with the demand. The part where a small operator can actually get paid from it is much narrower than the headlines make it sound, and @ledger's opportunity cost point is the real cost for a landowner.

Ask about water. Out where I look the county commission fights about water long before anybody mentions a tax abatement, and a hay field with a good well is a different conversation than one without.

Small thing from the vendor side, once one of these gets built nobody local just drives on. My crew got asked for background checks and escorted access to bid grounds work at a campus, and half my guys weren't interested in the paperwork. So the jobs are there and they're not the jobs people picture.

I read this thread twice. What I took from it is that the field isn't being bought for the field, it's being bought for a place in line at the utility, and the line is the actual asset. Is that roughly right, @vellum?