How developers decide whether a vacant lot is worth buying — before they spend a dollar
By John Delia Jr. — Licensed Michigan Builder
A vacant lot can fail four different ways.
You can buy it and find out you don’t really own what you thought you bought. You can own it and find out you can’t legally build what you planned. You can clear both and find out the ground itself won’t cooperate — or costs a fortune to make buildable. Or you can solve all three and still lose money.
This is a framework for finding those four failures before they find you. I know all four firsthand — because I’ve hit them.
How I learned this the hard way
My first two lots looked perfect. Established suburban neighborhoods, solid comps, good after-repair values — the kind of numbers that make a deal look safe on paper. Both flat, both easy-looking infill sites. I got my plans approved, paid my permitting, ran my water and sewer laterals, and started excavation on two houses at once.
Then, on one of them, my excavator hit buried commercial concrete fill — deep, well past the undisturbed soil I needed to bear my stem wall. It wasn’t on any plan. Nobody warned me. And with two builds running at once, I couldn’t just push through it. I had to stop, regroup, and solve a problem I never saw coming in the middle of an active site.
I learned it the only way I knew then: in the field, the expensive way. That one mistake cost me far more than the investigation ever would have. There was no single place that laid this out beforehand — and I think that’s exactly why so many people who want to build never start. Not because they can’t, but because there’s so much you don’t know you don’t know.
So when I set my sights on Detroit — studied the market, earned my Michigan builder’s license for infill — I made myself a promise: don’t repeat those mistakes. Come in armed with better knowledge, not just more nerve. This is the resource I wish I’d had.
Cheap lots are often expensive lots. The costliest problems aren’t in the house — they’re in the dirt, and you can’t see them from the curb. In Detroit those risks are sharper, because a huge share of vacant lots already had a house on them. The house is gone. What it left behind isn’t always.
But this isn’t a guide about fear, and it’s not a list of reasons to avoid Detroit. The biggest lesson I’ve learned: almost every problem is solvable — with the right knowledge going in and the right professionals around you when something goes wrong. Developers buy imperfect lots all the time. They just buy them at the right price, with the risks known up front. The goal isn’t a perfect lot. It’s to know exactly what you’re buying before your money is committed.
How this works: the four layers
I call it The Four-Layer Lot Standard — every lot gets evaluated through the same four questions, in the same order, as layers of risk you peel back one at a time.
- Ownership Risk — Can I own it?
- Buildability Risk — Can I build on it?
- Physical Risk — Can the ground support it?
- Financial Risk — Should I buy it?
Notice the order builds toward a decision. By Layer 4 you’re not gathering facts anymore — you’re answering the only question that ever mattered: should I buy this lot?
Here’s the whole philosophy in one picture — the order is the entire difference:
The beginner: Buy the lot → ask the questions → discover the problems. The developer: Ask the questions → discover the problems → then decide whether to buy.
Same three steps. The developer just runs them before the money is committed instead of after.
The cost-to-check ladder
Here’s the single most useful habit in this entire framework, and the thing no one told me early on. You can spend $0, $500, or $5,000 investigating a lot. The skill is knowing what to check first.
A new investor researches a parcel in whatever order panic strikes — and pays for a survey or a soil boring on a lot that was never going to clear title anyway. Professionals run the checks in order of cost, cheapest first:
- The $0 desk checks — ownership, zoning, taxes, utilities in the street — come first.
- The few-hundred-dollar checks — title search, survey, cameraing a lateral — come only after a lot survives the free ones.
- The thousand-dollar checks — soil borings, environmental work — come only after that.
Every layer runs on that ladder for one reason: kill bad deals while they’re still cheap to kill. Every dollar you don’t spend on a lot that was never going to work is a dollar that goes toward one that will.
One lot, all the way through
To keep this concrete, we’ll follow a single lot through all four layers:
Vacant lot · 48214 · asking $7,500 · ~30 feet wide · structure demolished in 2018.
It’s representative of what many Detroit builders actually encounter: narrow, previously developed, inexpensive, and deceptively simple. It looks like a deal. By the end, you’ll see how a $0 afternoon tells you whether it’s a buildable opportunity or a $7,500 lawn.
Layer 1 — Ownership Risk · Can I own it?
In Detroit, the dirt can be clean and the paper can still be a mess.
A lot can be flat, clear, and on a good block — and still carry an ownership problem that quietly decides whether you ever get to build, and on what timeline. Most people assume the real risk in raw land is physical. That comes later. The first risk, and the one that kills the most deals, is whether you can actually own this lot clean and free — and you can answer almost all of it from a desk, for nearly nothing.
Why it comes first: a soil investigation can run $2,000+. A survey is several hundred. Engineering climbs into the thousands. Ownership is the cheapest layer to check — most of it is free. So professionals start here.
Before anything, know who you’re buying from, because it changes the whole picture. Detroit infill comes to market two ways: from a private or absentee owner, or from the Detroit Land Bank Authority (DLBA). Those are two different conversations.
Clean title — and the DLBA promise
Some DLBA lots come with a promise attached: build within a certain period, or risk losing the property. In legal terms that’s a build covenant backed by a reverter clause — the deed requires you to construct within a set window, and if you don’t perform, the property can return to the Land Bank. This isn’t a reason to avoid Land Bank lots. It’s a reason to read the deed before you close, because that promise puts a clock on your project the day you take title.
The other DLBA trap is quieter: many Land Bank parcels are sold as side lots — meant to be combined with the property next door, not built on by themselves. A great price on a side lot isn’t a deal if you legally can’t put a house on it.
On the private side, a standard title search tells you who owns the parcel and what’s attached — liens, back taxes, easements, deed restrictions.
Method. $0: pull the parcel on the City of Detroit Parcel Viewer — ownership, parcel ID, Land Bank status, buildable-lot vs. side-lot. $0: on a DLBA lot, read the disposition agreement and deed for the covenant, window, and reverter. ~$300–600: on a private lot, your attorney or title company runs the title search once you’re under contract.
Tax & foreclosure history
Detroit has a long tax-foreclosure history, and the chain of how a parcel reached its current owner can matter. Back taxes have to clear before a clean sale; a messy foreclosure chain can cloud title. This is where a deceptively cheap lot sometimes explains itself — for free, in about an hour.
It’s also the one place a demolition cost can surface, and only on the private-owner track. If the city demolished a structure on a privately held lot, that cost can ride on the parcel as a special assessment. On a DLBA lot, the Land Bank’s quiet-title process clears it.
Method. $0: pull tax and assessment history through Wayne County (a separate jurisdiction from the City, which handles zoning and permits). $0: on a private demolished lot, look specifically for a demolition special assessment.
Easements — and why five feet matters on a narrow lot
An easement is someone else’s right to use part of your land. On a big suburban parcel, an easement along one edge is often a shrug. On a 30-foot-wide Detroit infill lot, it can change everything. Take five feet off one side for a utility easement, and the footprint that fit your house a minute ago no longer fits.
Recorded easements show up in the title work. The dangerous ones are unrecorded — overhead lines crossing the parcel, or public lines running through it that were never recorded but can still force you to re-route at your own expense.
Method. $0: walk the lot and look up for overhead lines. $0: pull city utility maps for public lines. (Layer 3): send the title work to your surveyor to plot every recorded easement against your buildable footprint.
⚠️ Layer 1 deal-killers — all avoidable from a desk: – Paying $7,500 for a “lot” that’s legally a side lot you can’t build on. – Your planned house sitting directly over a utility easement, and the footprint no longer fitting. – A DLBA lot with a build deadline your financing and permitting can’t meet — and watching it revert. – A previously demolished private lot with a five-figure demo assessment now yours to pay. – A clouded foreclosure chain that stalls closing or kills title insurance.
The example lot, through Layer 1. First question, a $0 check: who’s selling? If it’s the Land Bank, title is likely clean from the quiet-title process — now read the deed for the covenant and reverter, and confirm it’s a buildable lot, not a side lot. The $7,500 isn’t the number that matters; the performance window is. If it’s a private owner, the 2018 demolition is the flag — pull Wayne County history for a demo assessment, back taxes, or a messy foreclosure chain. Either way, Layer 1 cost a few hours and, at most, a few hundred dollars, and it either cleared the lot or killed it cheaply.
Layer 2 — Buildability Risk · Can I build on it?
Here’s a fact that surprises most first-time Detroit builders: the typical Detroit infill lot is about 30 feet wide, and a single-family home needs a 50-foot-wide lot to be fully conforming.
Which means the most important question in Detroit often isn’t “How much does the lot cost?” It’s “Can this lot legally hold a house at all?” Most expensive mistakes in Detroit land don’t come from overpaying. They come from buying something that was never buildable in the first place.
Developers call this entitlement risk. Like Layer 1, you can answer almost all of it from a desk — the zoning district, the dimensional table, and a verification letter.
Can this lot even hold a house?
Before setbacks, before design, there’s a threshold most beginners never check: the lot has to be big enough and wide enough to qualify in the first place. In Detroit’s residential districts, a single-family dwelling needs a minimum lot of roughly 5,000 square feet and 50 feet of width; a two-family dwelling needs more.
Now the problem. A classic 30 × 100 Detroit lot is 3,000 square feet — under both minimums. On its own, by right, you cannot build a single-family house on it. That cheap lot isn’t mispriced. It’s priced low because, alone, it isn’t buildable for what you’re picturing.
So the first thing I actually do when a lot is narrow: check whether the lot next door is available. You have three ways through, and you need to know which applies before you buy:
- Combine it with the lot next door — two 30-foot lots make a 60-foot parcel that clears the minimum. (This is why Land Bank side lots exist, and why so many Detroit builds are two-lot assemblies.)
- Non-conforming lot of record — a lot platted before a cutoff date may have standing under the ordinance’s lot-of-record provisions even when undersized.
- Variance — petition the Board of Zoning Appeals. It might succeed. But “might” is the operative word, and a by-right project just became a maybe.
Method. $0: pull the parcel’s zoning district on the Detroit Parcel Viewer / BSEED. $0: measure it against the minimum lot width and area for your use. $0: if it’s short, check whether the adjacent lot is available and whether it was platted before the lot-of-record cutoff. This is the single highest-value $0 check there is — the difference between a buildable lot and a lawn.
The buildable envelope: why square footage isn’t the number
Layer 1 showed how an easement eats your footprint from the title side. Here’s how zoning eats it from the legal side — and the two stack. On a conforming single-family lot, the setbacks carve out what you can actually build: a front and rear yard leave you a band of buildable depth; the side yards leave you a band of buildable width; a height limit of 35 feet gives you two stories comfortably; and a lot-coverage cap limits the footprint, accessory structures included.
The number that matters isn’t the lot’s square footage — it’s what fits inside that box after the law takes its cut. This is why successful infill is designed around the lot rather than forcing a suburban floor plan onto an urban parcel. (It’s one reason I designed my infill home around this exact envelope — but that’s the end of this guide, not here.)
Method. $0: run the setback math on the parcel’s real dimensions. $0: confirm your footprint fits the coverage cap and height. A small fee: request a Zoning Verification Letter from BSEED — written confirmation of district and permitted use, the document lenders and partners want. Note: the official zoning map on file is the legal document; the online portal can lag enacted changes, so confirm with BSEED rather than the map alone.
A note on the numbers in this article. Zoning ordinances change, and dimensional standards vary by district and parcel. Treat every figure here as a starting point, not gospel — always verify the current requirements for your specific lot directly with the City of Detroit before you rely on them.
By-right vs. maybe
This is one of the most important concepts here, and it applies far beyond Detroit. A by-right project means the zoning already allows what you’re proposing. No rezoning. No variance. No public hearing.
A variance might succeed. A rezoning might succeed. But “might” is a dangerous word when you’re carrying land, paying taxes, and trying to close construction financing. Every month of “maybe” is a month of carry cost with no certainty at the end of it. That’s why by-right lots command a premium — they’re faster, more financeable, and far less likely to die in a hearing room. “Is this by-right?” is one of the most valuable questions you can ask.
⚠️ Layer 2 deal-killers: – Paying for a 30-foot lot you legally can’t build a single-family house on without combining or a variance. – Designing a home that exceeds the coverage cap or height — and finding out at permit review. – Assuming a lot is by-right when it needs a variance, turning a clean timeline into a months-long maybe. – A buildable envelope too narrow for the house you planned, after setbacks take their cut. – Counting on a lot combination that falls through because the neighbor won’t sell.
The example lot, through Layer 2. Now the price explains itself. At ~30 feet and ~3,000 square feet, our lot is under both minimums. By right, on its own, you can’t build a house here. So the $0 question becomes: what’s next door? If the adjacent lot is available — often a Land Bank side lot — combining gives you 60 feet, clears the minimum, and turns a dead lot into a buildable one. If not, you’re left with a variance or a lot-of-record argument, and the timeline just changed. A $0 measurement told us that before we spent a dollar on a survey.
Layer 3 — Physical Risk · Can the ground support it?
You can own the lot. The law can let you build on it. And it can still cost you $30,000 you didn’t plan for — because of what’s under the dirt.
A lot can look flat, clear, and perfect and still be sitting on a buried foundation, fill soil, a capped utility line, or a grade that doesn’t drain. Hold onto one thing: every problem in this layer is solvable. The question is whether you discover it before or after you buy — because that’s what determines the price you should pay.
Utilities: is service even there?
This is the single biggest five-figure surprise in Detroit infill, so it’s the first thing to check. You’ll connect to water and sewer (DWSD) and gas and electric (DTE). The deceptively cheap lot is the one on a stretch of street where the city never extended utilities, or where they were abandoned. Extending a main, tapping it, and paying connection and street-repair fees can run well into five figures — and it lands on you.
If a house once stood on the lot — and on a demolished-home lot, one did — there’s likely a water line and sewer lateral already run to the parcel. Good news, if they’re intact. A capped or collapsed lateral you assumed was good is a bill you didn’t budget.
Method. $0: pull DWSD and DTE maps to confirm water, sewer, and gas are in the street. $0: look for a water meter base in the sidewalk. $0: call MISS DIG 811 to mark existing lines. ~$300: on a demolished-home lot, camera the sewer lateral to confirm it’s intact.
That utility check is why this layer comes third: Layers 1 and 2 were almost entirely $0 desk checks. Here, checking finally costs money — so you run every free check first, and pay for the expensive ones only on a lot that’s cleared everything cheaper.
| Check | Cost |
|---|---|
| DWSD / DTE utility maps | $0 |
| MISS DIG 811 locate | $0 |
| Walk the lot | $0 |
| Dirt-testing map | $0 |
| Camera the sewer lateral | ~$300 |
| Basic survey | $300–500 |
| Soil boring (each) | $300–450 |
| Phase I environmental | $2,000–4,000 |
You never order the $450 boring before the $0 utility map. That’s the whole discipline.
What’s buried: demolition backfill & old foundations
This is the most Detroit-specific risk in the layer, and the one most new investors never see coming. When a house is demolished, the basement and footings aren’t always fully removed — sometimes the hole is just backfilled over the old foundation, debris and all. You buy a flat, innocent-looking lot, start excavating, and hit a buried basement wall, a slab, or fill packed with brick and concrete. The cost shows up two ways: removing what’s buried, and rebuilding the ground you took it from. On a demolished-home lot, this isn’t a remote risk — it’s the default thing to rule out.
🏚️ The house that never fully left. Most buyers assume a demolished house is gone. In Detroit it often isn’t — not entirely. The walls and roof left; the basement and footings may still be down there under backfill. You can stand on a perfectly flat lot with half a foundation three feet beneath your boots.
Method. $0: walk the lot for settling, exposed concrete, debris, a depression where a basement was. Sub-surface: use a locating service to find buried foundations and utilities before committing to an excavation plan. This is part of what the soil borings look for — fill versus native soil.
Soil: will it hold the building, and is it clean?
Two plain questions. Will it hold? You want native, well-compacted soil. Fill — common on demolished-home lots — may have to be dug out and replaced, or force deeper, costlier foundations. Is it clean? Was there ever anything on this site, or right next to it, that wasn’t residential? A former gas station, a shop, an industrial neighbor. If yes, the lot may warrant a Phase I environmental assessment — research only — and only if that flags something does sampling follow.
Method. $0: review the Detroit dirt-testing map for context. $0: ask the one question — any non-residential history on or beside the lot? $300–450/boring: test for fill, groundwater, bearing. $2,000–4,000: Phase I, only when the history warrants it.
Grade: where does the water go?
You want a flat lot — the whole parcel usable, the cheapest sitework. Detroit adds a wrinkle: grade mismatch between neighboring lots. The lot looks flat until you notice the neighbor sits two feet higher — now every heavy rain has a destination, and it’s your yard. Your finished floor elevation has to work against the street and the lots on either side. Get it wrong and you’re buying fill, regrading, or retaining you never budgeted — and possibly a drainage dispute next door.
Method. $0: eyeball the site in person and on street view for slope or a grade mismatch. $300–500: a basic survey establishes true dimensions and grade; a topographic survey ($1,000+) is worth it on a challenging lot. Plan check: confirm a workable finished floor elevation before closing.
⚠️ Layer 3 deal-killers (the $20k–$50k surprises): – Utilities never extended to the lot’s stretch of street. – A buried foundation or basement hit mid-excavation. – Fill soil or poor compaction forcing engineered fill or deeper foundations. – Contaminated soil on a lot with non-residential history. – A grade mismatch that turns the neighbor’s runoff into your problem. – A capped or collapsed sewer lateral you assumed was good.
The example lot, through Layer 3. The 2018 demolition cuts both ways, and we find out for almost nothing. The good: a house stood here, so there’s likely a lateral already run — first moves are all $0, then ~$300 to camera it. The bad: a 2018 demolition is exactly when the old basement may still be down there under backfill, so we walk it, check the dirt map, and order a couple of borings if it’s still advancing. None of it is necessarily a dealbreaker — a capped lateral, some fill, a buried footing all have prices. The point of Layer 3 is to learn those prices before you buy, so they show up in your offer instead of your overruns.
Layer 4 — Financial Risk · Should I buy it?
Every layer before this was about eliminating risk. Layer 4 is where the lot has to justify itself. A lot can clear title, clear zoning, and clear geotechnical review and still be a bad deal. Here’s the truth the first three layers have been building toward:
A lot isn’t good or bad. It’s priced right or priced wrong.
The four numbers that matter
You don’t need a developer’s underwriting model. You need four numbers:
- What you pay for the lot.
- What it costs to make it buildable.
- What it costs to build.
- What the finished home is worth.
The amateur stares at number 1. The developer works backward from number 4. Start at the finished home’s realistic value. Subtract what it costs to make the lot buildable, what it costs to build, your carrying and selling costs, and the profit you require. Whatever’s left is the most you can pay for the lot — your ceiling. (Developers call it the residual land value.) The asking price isn’t the answer. It’s an opening bid.
The accuracy of this entire decision lives in two numbers: what the finished home will actually sell for on that block, and what it actually costs to build. Get those wrong and every other layer’s diligence is wasted. That’s the seam where a developer who knows the comps and a builder who knows the costs turn a framework into a decision.
Price the risk you found
This is where Layers 1–3 cash out. Every solvable problem becomes a number you subtract:
- A capped or missing utility lateral → subtract the fix.
- A buried foundation or fill soil → subtract excavation and engineered fill.
- A sub-50-foot lot that needs the parcel next door → add the cost of the second lot.
- A demolition assessment on the title → subtract the payoff.
- A grade mismatch → subtract the fill or retaining.
A lot advertised at $7,500 might really be a $7,500 lot plus $25,000 of solvable problems — a $32,500 lot wearing a $7,500 price tag. That doesn’t make it bad. It makes it mispriced, and now you know to walk or negotiate until the price absorbs what you found.
Why taxes matter more than people think
Here’s the concept most first-time builders miss: when you build a new home, the tax bill gets reassessed on the finished home’s value — not the vacant lot you bought. At Detroit’s millage, that reassessed bill can be large. And it doesn’t land on you. It lands on your buyer, inside their monthly payment.
Developers don’t sell houses. They sell monthly payments. The buyer cares whether the payment fits their budget. That’s why the NEZ abatement matters — not because it’s clever, but because it changes the payment. An abatement might cut the finished home’s tax by roughly $3,000 a year — about $250 a month off your buyer’s payment. That’s the difference between a buyer who qualifies and one who walks.
One hard rule, because the timing is unforgiving: you must file the NEZ application before you pull a building permit. Miss it and the lever is gone for good — which is why this belongs in your land decision, not your closing paperwork. (Full mechanics below.)
The clock: carry costs
Land isn’t free to hold. Every month you own a lot before it sells, you pay taxes, financing interest, and insurance — carry costs that quietly eat margin. This is where Layer 2’s “by-right vs. maybe” comes back as a dollar figure: a by-right lot carries for a few months; a lot stuck in a variance hearing carries for many more. Same land, more clock, less profit.
⚠️ Layer 4 deal-killers: – Paying the asking price without working backward from finished value. – Modeling on the vacant-lot tax bill instead of the reassessed finished-home bill. – Missing the NEZ before-permits window and handing your buyer an unaffordable payment. – Ignoring carry costs and letting a slow timeline erase your margin. – Buying a “cheap” lot whose solvable problems cost more than the discount. – Assuming a finished value the comps won’t support.
The whole framework, full circle. Our example lot survived Layer 1 (clean title), Layer 2 (sub-50-foot, but combinable by right), and Layer 3 (intact lateral, budgeted to rule out a buried foundation). Now Layer 4 decides whether it deserves our money. Run the four numbers. Price in the second lot and the sitework. Protect the exit by confirming NEZ and filing before permits. Then make the call: if the all-in number sits at or below our ceiling, it’s a deal. If it’s above, we negotiate it down — or we walk. And walking is a win. That’s the entire purpose of due diligence — not to prove every lot works, but to identify the few that do. The goal isn’t finding perfect lots. It’s replacing uncertainty with information.
Putting it all together
You started looking at a vacant lot the way most people do — as a price. You’re ending able to look at the same lot the way a developer does — as a series of questions, asked in the right order, that tell you whether that price is a deal or a trap. That shift is the whole point. It’s the difference between gambling on dirt and making a decision.
The Four Layers of Detroit Lot Evaluation 1. Can I own it? · Ownership Risk 2. Can I build on it? · Buildability Risk 3. Can the ground support it? · Physical Risk 4. Should I buy it? · Financial Risk
Ask them in that order, run the cheapest checks first, and you eliminate most of the mistakes that cost new builders their time and their money.
When I started, I didn’t have this page. I learned every line of it in the field, the expensive way — including the day my excavator found someone else’s concrete buried below where my foundation needed to sit. A map isn’t the same as someone who’s walked the ground. This framework will keep you from the avoidable mistakes. What it can’t replace is the judgment that comes from having solved these problems before.
And here’s why the dirt gets four layers of scrutiny before a single wall goes up: most people think construction creates risk. I think construction reveals the risk that wasn’t discovered during due diligence. A build rarely surprises you with a problem the ground didn’t already contain — the four layers are how you find those problems while they’re still on paper, not on an invoice.
Have a Detroit lot you’re considering?
Send me the address. I’ll spend ten minutes on it and tell you three things: which layer worries me most, whether I’d keep investigating or walk away, and the first three checks I’d run before you spend a dollar.
— John Delia Jr., Licensed Michigan Builder · johndeliajr.com
Appendix — SEV & NEZ: the full mechanics
Why the finished home’s tax bill is a land decision. In Michigan, a property’s State Equalized Value (SEV) is half its market value. While someone owns a property, Proposal A caps how fast the taxable value can climb — but two things break that cap: a sale, and new construction. When you build on a vacant lot, the assessor reassesses: the value jumps from “empty dirt” to roughly half the finished home’s market value, taxed at Detroit’s full millage. On a recovering block, that bill can be brutal relative to what a buyer expects — and it lands on your end buyer, inside their monthly payment.
How NEZ changes the math. NEZ applies to the structure, not the land — the land always taxes at the regular rate, so you’ll see two tax bills. For a new build, the NEZ tax on the structure is roughly half the statewide average homestead rate — and because that average already sits well below Detroit’s local millage, you’re getting a reduction on top of a reduction. The abatement runs 6 to 15 years (the local unit sets the term), then phases back toward full taxation in the final years. In plain terms: NEZ can cut the finished home’s structure tax by more than half for over a decade. That’s not a rebate you collect — it’s the difference between a home that’s affordable to your buyer and one that isn’t.
The deadline that makes this due diligence, not paperwork. You must file the NEZ application with the local clerk before you pull any building permit. Miss it, and there’s no retroactive fix. The abatement also requires State Tax Commission approval and takes effect once the home is substantially complete and occupied — so the sequence is: confirm NEZ eligibility → file before permits → build → certificate issues. (The State must receive a complete application by October 31 to issue for the following tax year.)
Method. Confirm the lot sits in an established NEZ district before you buy. File the certificate application with the City before drawing any permits. Pull the parcel’s actual millage and run the SEV math yourself — don’t take a round number for it.
Appendix — Go / No-Go worksheet
Print it and take it to the parcel.
**Lot address: __________ Date: ______ · Asking: $______ · Width × depth: ___ × ___ · Zoning: ___**
Layer 1 — Ownership (mostly $0)
- ☐ Ownership / Land Bank status confirmed (Parcel Viewer)
- ☐ Title & liens reviewed
- ☐ DBLA build covenant / reverter read (if Land Bank)
- ☐ Taxes & foreclosure history verified (Wayne County)
- ☐ Easements reviewed — recorded and overhead
- ☐ Confirmed buildable lot, not a side lot
Layer 2 — Buildability (mostly $0)
- ☐ Zoning district confirmed (BSEED)
- ☐ Lot width & area meet minimum — or combine / variance path identified
- ☐ Setbacks & buildable envelope calculated
- ☐ Coverage & height checked
- ☐ By-right confirmed — or variance/rezone plan in place
Layer 3 — Physical (free checks first)
- ☐ Utilities confirmed in the street (DWSD · DTE)
- ☐ Water meter base / lateral located (MISS DIG 811)
- ☐ Sewer lateral cameraed (demolished-home lots)
- ☐ Buried foundation / demolition backfill ruled out
- ☐ Soil reviewed — fill, compaction, contamination
- ☐ Grade reviewed vs. street & neighbors
Layer 4 — Financial
- ☐ Finished value validated with real comps
- ☐ Cost to make buildable priced in
- ☐ Build cost estimated
- ☐ Residual land value calculated vs. asking price
- ☐ Tax impact reviewed — NEZ confirmed & filed before permits
- ☐ Carry costs included
Final decision: ☐ GO ☐ NO-GO ☐ INVESTIGATE FURTHER
Kill bad deals while they’re still cheap to kill.
