u/carsonwiley11

Hey all — I'm a financial land analyst at a national homebuilder (day job is underwriting land acquisitions: residual value, lot feasibility, entitlement risk, the whole thing). I also invest on the side, and something has been bugging me.

At work, we have institutional models for answering "what's the most we can pay for this dirt?" But when I look at what's available for individual land investors and small builders, it seems like everyone is either:

1. Using a spreadsheet they built themselves (or inherited from a course),
2. Using tools built for HOUSES (DealCheck etc.) and forcing land deals into them, or
3. Gut-feeling it off comps from Zillow/LandWatch.

So I'm genuinely curious about your process:

• When you're evaluating a parcel — flip, subdivide, or develop — how do you land on your max offer number?
• How do you account for the stuff that kills deals: rock, wetlands, flood zone, slope, rezoning risk, utility extension costs?
• Have you ever bought a parcel and gotten burned by a site condition you didn't price in? What was it?
• If a tool existed that ran builder-style residual land value analysis (enter your exit assumptions and costs, it backs into your max offer, with sensitivity sliders and a due diligence risk checklist that feeds real cost ranges into the numbers) — would that change anything for you, or is your spreadsheet fine?

Not selling anything — there's no product. I'm trying to figure out whether the gap I see from the institutional side is a real pain point for individual investors, or whether spreadsheets are genuinely good enough. Brutal honesty welcome.