Ask your land team how many parcels they screened last quarter. Then ask how many parcels were actually available in the markets you care about.
The gap between those two numbers is your real land strategy, and nobody set it on purpose. It was set by how many deep screens your analysts can physically run in a quarter.
The gap between those two numbers is your real land strategy, and nobody set it on purpose. It was set by how many deep screens your analysts can physically run in a quarter.
Why the ceiling exists
More than 99% of land is off market. That means your pipeline isn't the market; it's the subset of the market that a broker chose to show you, minus whatever your team didn't have the hours to look at.
The hours run out fast because site search is slow and feasibility is slower. Each serious screen means hunting through GIS portals, zoning PDFs, flood maps, and county records one parcel at a time. Anything that needs a real yield read means sending the site out to an engineer, at a few thousand dollars a study and weeks on the calendar, and deals sometimes die in that wait. So teams ration screens. They look hard at a handful of sites and pass on the rest unexamined, including some deals that would have penciled.
The hours run out fast because site search is slow and feasibility is slower. Each serious screen means hunting through GIS portals, zoning PDFs, flood maps, and county records one parcel at a time. Anything that needs a real yield read means sending the site out to an engineer, at a few thousand dollars a study and weeks on the calendar, and deals sometimes die in that wait. So teams ration screens. They look hard at a handful of sites and pass on the rest unexamined, including some deals that would have penciled.
The cost of a late no
Here's the part that doesn't show up on any report. Take three deals that were always going to die. Kill them in the first week and your team loses a few days. Kill them in month two and you've lost weeks of analyst time, consultant invoices, and site visits, and the capacity those weeks represent, all spent proving a no.
Infrastructure risks, moratoriums, zoning conflicts, and soil issues tend to surface after the LOI, after time and soft costs are already sunk. The diligence wasn't wrong. The timing was. The same no, reached earlier, costs almost nothing.
That's the real shift behind the fast no: feasibility stops being the final checkpoint before you commit and becomes the first filter every parcel has to pass.
Rahul Patel, VP of Acquisitions and Investments at ResiBuilt, put the change simply: "Dirt helps us identify feasibility issues much earlier in the process, allowing us to pass faster on low-probability deals and meaningfully reduce pursuit costs."
Infrastructure risks, moratoriums, zoning conflicts, and soil issues tend to surface after the LOI, after time and soft costs are already sunk. The diligence wasn't wrong. The timing was. The same no, reached earlier, costs almost nothing.
That's the real shift behind the fast no: feasibility stops being the final checkpoint before you commit and becomes the first filter every parcel has to pass.
Rahul Patel, VP of Acquisitions and Investments at ResiBuilt, put the change simply: "Dirt helps us identify feasibility issues much earlier in the process, allowing us to pass faster on low-probability deals and meaningfully reduce pursuit costs."
The workflow at volume
Here is what screening looks like when the ceiling comes off.
Set your buy box once. Product type, acreage, density, access, utilities, the criteria your firm already uses. Dirt holds it and applies it to everything that follows.
Let site search fill the funnel. Dirt searches your markets for every parcel that fits, with 50+ filters, ranked by fit. One team searched all of Charlotte for vacant church-owned land matching their criteria and got 226 candidates, most of which no broker was ever going to send them.
Fast Screen the whole list. Every parcel gets an instant snapshot: 50 data points covering ownership, zoning, constraints, development standards, and estimated yield. This is the volume pass, built to separate parcels worth a closer look from the rest.
Run Deep Feasibility on the shortlist only. The parcels that survive get the full treatment: soil science, market data, fees, utilities, environmental and regulatory intelligence, 97 data points, with buy box scoring and risk flags. Put in a hundred sites, go to your next meeting, and come back to find the five worth your energy, with the red flags on the other ninety-five documented and sourced.
You pay for deep analysis only on parcels that earned it. The obvious no's cost you a fast screen, and the fast screen is the point.
Set your buy box once. Product type, acreage, density, access, utilities, the criteria your firm already uses. Dirt holds it and applies it to everything that follows.
Let site search fill the funnel. Dirt searches your markets for every parcel that fits, with 50+ filters, ranked by fit. One team searched all of Charlotte for vacant church-owned land matching their criteria and got 226 candidates, most of which no broker was ever going to send them.
Fast Screen the whole list. Every parcel gets an instant snapshot: 50 data points covering ownership, zoning, constraints, development standards, and estimated yield. This is the volume pass, built to separate parcels worth a closer look from the rest.
Run Deep Feasibility on the shortlist only. The parcels that survive get the full treatment: soil science, market data, fees, utilities, environmental and regulatory intelligence, 97 data points, with buy box scoring and risk flags. Put in a hundred sites, go to your next meeting, and come back to find the five worth your energy, with the red flags on the other ninety-five documented and sourced.
You pay for deep analysis only on parcels that earned it. The obvious no's cost you a fast screen, and the fast screen is the point.
What changes for the team
The team stays the same size; the deals it touches change. Review every deal that fits, not the few you had hours for. Your most experienced people spend their weeks winning deals instead of documenting why bad ones died, and when a site does pencil, you move on it with a defensible yield read in hand while competitors are still scheduling studies. And the firm can look at new markets sooner, because the local knowledge that normally takes years to accumulate arrives with the analysis: the zoning ordinance, the fee schedules, the rezoning history, what this board has approved and denied. Relationships still win deals, but evaluating an unfamiliar municipality no longer has to wait on them.
Deal volume stops being a function of headcount and consultant turnaround.
Deal volume stops being a function of headcount and consultant turnaround.
Priced to support your growth
Screening at volume only makes economic sense if access doesn't meter it. That's why the Dirt platform is free, with unlimited seats, unlimited MSAs, and unlimited parcels. You pay only for the work Dirt produces, at a fraction of the cost and time of third-party consultants. Nobody rations who gets a login, and exploring a new market costs nothing until Dirt does work there.
The simplest way to test any of this is on your own pipeline. Run the sites you're currently tracking through Dirt and count what falls out: the fatal flaws you hadn't hit yet, and the parcels you'd never seen at all.
Screen more sites, say no faster, win more deals.
The simplest way to test any of this is on your own pipeline. Run the sites you're currently tracking through Dirt and count what falls out: the fatal flaws you hadn't hit yet, and the parcels you'd never seen at all.
Screen more sites, say no faster, win more deals.
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