We've heard it over and over from developers and builders: most software in this industry gives everyone the same thing.
Pull up the same parcel in the same platform as your competitor and you'll see the same layers, the same readout, the same map. Meanwhile the things that actually make your firm good at this work, your buy box, the hard-won local knowledge sitting in spreadsheets and old email threads, live entirely outside the tool. You hunt through GIS portals, zoning PDFs, flood maps, and county records one parcel at a time, then stitch it all together yourself.
We built Dirt around a different starting point: your strategy. Here are the five differences that follow from it.
Pull up the same parcel in the same platform as your competitor and you'll see the same layers, the same readout, the same map. Meanwhile the things that actually make your firm good at this work, your buy box, the hard-won local knowledge sitting in spreadsheets and old email threads, live entirely outside the tool. You hunt through GIS portals, zoning PDFs, flood maps, and county records one parcel at a time, then stitch it all together yourself.
We built Dirt around a different starting point: your strategy. Here are the five differences that follow from it.
1. Built around your buy box, from criteria to IC memo
Before Dirt analyzes a single parcel for you, it learns how your firm works. Your buy box criteria. Your spreadsheets and deal history. Your IC memo and feasibility study templates. The ESAs, soil studies, and engineer emails that only exist inside your walls. All of it becomes a persistent knowledge base unique to your firm, and it sharpens with every deal your team runs.
What comes back out is shaped by that same context. Others give everyone the same output; Dirt evaluates each site against your buy box, surfaces the risks that matter to what you want to build, and flags where it fits or doesn't. Deliverables land in your formats, your IC memo, your feasibility study, with every data point traced to its source and every assumption editable. Dirt gives insights. You make the call.
John Bell, Development Partner at Catalyst, saw his firm's work product come out the other side and said it plainly: "That is several weeks' worth of work right there. It blows me away."
What comes back out is shaped by that same context. Others give everyone the same output; Dirt evaluates each site against your buy box, surfaces the risks that matter to what you want to build, and flags where it fits or doesn't. Deliverables land in your formats, your IC memo, your feasibility study, with every data point traced to its source and every assumption editable. Dirt gives insights. You make the call.
John Bell, Development Partner at Catalyst, saw his firm's work product come out the other side and said it plainly: "That is several weeks' worth of work right there. It blows me away."
2. The right sites find you
Finding land has always meant going out and hunting for it. With your buy box in Dirt, it works the other way around. Dirt searches your existing and new markets for parcels that match your criteria, with 50+ filters, ranked by fit. In one search a team pulled every vacant church-owned parcel across Charlotte that fit their criteria and got 226 candidates to work.
The same knowledge base that evaluates a site your broker sent you can expand the funnel of sites nobody has sent you yet.
The same knowledge base that evaluates a site your broker sent you can expand the funnel of sites nobody has sent you yet.
3. Depth on demand: two analyses for two different questions
A screening pass and an underwriting pass are different jobs, so Dirt runs them as different analyses.
Fast Screen answers "Is this parcel worth a closer look?" It returns an instant snapshot built from authoritative parcel records and Dirt's own GIS analysis, 50 data points covering ownership, zoning, environmental constraints, development standards, and an estimated yield. It's built for volume: run dozens or hundreds of parcels and build a shortlist.
Deep Feasibility answers "Should we do this deal, and how?" It includes everything in Fast Screen, then goes further: soil science down to water table and bedrock depth, plus AI field agents that research market conditions, impact and permit fees, utility providers, environmental risk, and the regulatory and political picture for each parcel, 97 data points in total. It also unlocks the full deliverables suite: buy box scoring, risk flags, deal summaries, zoning and research memos, and unlimited reports, chat, and concept plans.
Abraham Cook, who works in land acquisition at Dream Finders Homes, described what that depth changes: "getting Dirt's in-depth feasibility analysis in minutes is a big one - we're finding deal-killers that would have taken a few weeks of DD [due diligence] to understand."
Fast Screen answers "Is this parcel worth a closer look?" It returns an instant snapshot built from authoritative parcel records and Dirt's own GIS analysis, 50 data points covering ownership, zoning, environmental constraints, development standards, and an estimated yield. It's built for volume: run dozens or hundreds of parcels and build a shortlist.
Deep Feasibility answers "Should we do this deal, and how?" It includes everything in Fast Screen, then goes further: soil science down to water table and bedrock depth, plus AI field agents that research market conditions, impact and permit fees, utility providers, environmental risk, and the regulatory and political picture for each parcel, 97 data points in total. It also unlocks the full deliverables suite: buy box scoring, risk flags, deal summaries, zoning and research memos, and unlimited reports, chat, and concept plans.
Abraham Cook, who works in land acquisition at Dream Finders Homes, described what that depth changes: "getting Dirt's in-depth feasibility analysis in minutes is a big one - we're finding deal-killers that would have taken a few weeks of DD [due diligence] to understand."
4. Data is fetched live, at run time
Most platforms run on a database that was loaded before you ever logged in, built market by market and refreshed on a schedule. Dirt pulls data when you run the analysis, so every site is evaluated against the most current information available. A moratorium passed last month or an ordinance change from last week is in the analysis, because the agents went and read the current public record when you asked.
This is also why Dirt works nationwide from day one. Coverage comes from fetching what exists right now, wherever your deal is.
This is also why Dirt works nationwide from day one. Coverage comes from fetching what exists right now, wherever your deal is.
5. The platform is free. You pay for the work.
Most software in this category is priced by the seat or by the territory, so firms end up rationing who gets access and thinking twice before opening a new market.
Dirt is free to use, with unlimited seats, unlimited MSAs, and unlimited parcels. You pay only when Dirt produces work, at a fraction of the cost and time of third-party consultants. And because land development is a team sport, everyone gets in: the analyst, the entitlement manager, the civil engineer, the director of development, and the brokers and attorneys around them, all working from the same living record of each deal.
Dirt is free to use, with unlimited seats, unlimited MSAs, and unlimited parcels. You pay only when Dirt produces work, at a fraction of the cost and time of third-party consultants. And because land development is a team sport, everyone gets in: the analyst, the entitlement manager, the civil engineer, the director of development, and the brokers and attorneys around them, all working from the same living record of each deal.
What the five add up to
Together, these differences change one thing about how a land team operates. Run everything that might fit. Let Fast Screen kill the obvious no's. Go deep only where it matters. Walk into the LOI with defensible work product in your firm's own format.
Screen more sites, say no faster, win more deals.
Screen more sites, say no faster, win more deals.
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