How to buy a house with three lots and develop the other two

[Grant Merrill]

Found a house in my local area. It turned out, after during a bit more research, that the title actually includes three lots. From what I can tell the house is built of one lot and the other two are open land. This looks like a great opportunity to me, but I'm unsure on how to capitalize on it. I need some guidance on what the next steps should be.

[David Sisson]

Go down to your town hall and start talking to the various departments. Planning, zoning, engineering, building dept, tax assessor, etc. Tell them what you want to do. They'll help you figure out what you have, and what you can do. Possible:

1) It's actually 3 lots, all of them are buildable.

2) They've all been combined into one lot. You can split them to multiple buildable lots

3) They've all been combined, because you need that much space for a single buildable lot. You can't split them.

4) Or some other scenario.

Do your research first.  Don't buy until you have a good idea of what you are getting. Possible that some of the property is wetland, or the minimum lot size in your area is very large. 

I'm currently trying to split a property that I own. It was originally 4 lots, but all of them 2250 SF. There's NO way that anyone could build on a 2250 sf lot, but 4500 is *maybe* feasible. My 4 lots were merged to 1 lot at some point, so I have to go through a big process to do the split.