You drive by that “For Sale” sign every day on your way to the clinic. You imagine your new animal hospital there. You picture stone and stucco; modern hill country design; bronze standing seam metal roof, and lots of windows for natural light. You imagine the cars parked out front, the busy waiting room, and the animals being treated under your care. You imagine freedom, vision, growth and accomplishment. Then you drive on, go about your day, and repeat the process the next day. And the next. So how do you go from that cycle of imagining to accomplishing that dream? 

Here it is… get ready… 

Step One: Don’t buy that piece of land! (at least not yet)

All commercial sites are not created equal. Three one-acre sites might seem to be basically the same to the untrained eye, but without some investigation the hidden characteristics of those sites cannot be known.  It doesn’t take much money or time to investigate what skeletons might be in the closet, but it may very well be the best money and time you will spend in the process of buying land and building a new facility. 

Experienced and successful developers will all agree: your civil engineer is your best friend when evaluating a piece of land for development. Many first timers think that laying out their site plan (the plan that shows the building location, parking, driveway, landscaping, etc) is the architect’s job. While the architect is very important to the process bringing vision and design to the site layout, building, and interior, the civil engineer brings the math and science to the process. 

Let’s go back to our discussion of three one-acre fictitious sites, and what a civil engineer might find to help you make a choice:

Site One – like all three sites it is a perfect rectangle. However, toward the back left corner there is a cluster of trees, and one of those trees has a large enough trunk diameter to qualify it as a heritage tree. It can not be cut down, and a building cannot be built within a certain distance from its canopy. This discovery reduces the potential building square footage that can be built on the lot by 30%. That is lost economic value in the land.

Site Two – this lot has a setback along the back property line due to a future planned neighborhood, moving the building line forward by 30 additional feet. Like Site One, the max building size has been reduced by 30%, again creating a substantial reduction in financial potential.

Sight Three – This lot is part of a master planned commercial subdivision and has the benefit of shared water detention. That means that a detention pond will not have to be built on the lot, as water will run to an existing pond off site. This increases the size available for buildable square footage, increasing the economic potential of the land.

All else being equal, it’s not hard to see which lot is preferable. These are only a few of the countless examples of the civil engineer’s job in assessing a site. With the right developer and civil engineer on your team, the money spent on this process will help you choose the very best site available, and will serve as invaluable insurance against making a very expensive purchase mistake.