All Forum Posts by: Bryant Brislin

@Thomas Sbahtu if when Google'ing, for some reason you can't find one-man show/small office surveying companies in your area, maybe try looking for civil engineers instead.  There are always random civil engineers out there and some of them do surveys as well, as I understand. At the least, they should be able to refer you to a surveyor for a more boutique project such as your's.

Construction is managing a lot of things going wrong, so it's just very risky.  You may want to see if you can find an existing home via creative financing. Look up Pace Morby and his groups, etc, they sometimes source homes that don't have as high of an entry fee as buying a home the normal way would.  Look for the folks in that group who focus on NJ.

I've been a land broker in southern California for the past fifteen years, selling land both to the big, national builders and also to boutique builders.  Prior to that, I was a subdivision title officer at Fidelity for seven years.  Happy to talk.

That's awesome!

@Sylvia Krivickova as far as resources, listen to the interviews Ray Zhang and Jack Bosch did on Steve Trang's podcast, Real Estate Disruptors, last year.  They break it down.

Are you talking about buying large pieces of land and subdividing into ranchettes and selling those off individually? If you could narrow the scope, please.

Site development costs can very submarket by submarket.  You'd have to engage a grading contractor who might be able to give you a ballpark estimate, but it would maybe have to be engineered with rough and precise grading plans to determine costs.  So you may have to engage a civil engineer. 

It might be different jurisdiction by jurisdiction, so probably just need to talk to the Planning Dept.

You might want to talk to Andrew Slocum.  He's a good resource for things like this. Is this county jurisdiction or city?

What might make it extra complicated is you'd probably have to coordinate a lot with whoever runs that rail service, or at least need their approval. You could definitely talk to someone in the planning dept and get their take on it. Sometimes you need to talk to a higher level staff member, as opposed to whoever it at the counter. Also, if you hope to attract a national fast food chain, most retail developers will get a committment from them, or at least some type of LOI, up front to make sure that the chains would even be willing to have a store at that location, and what specs they would want/need for the building and how much rent they could pay, etc.