A feasibility study answers one question: does this site support this programme, and at what land price does it still work.
Most sites fail that test on an input nobody checked. The zoning permits less than the scheme assumes. The buildable footprint is smaller than the parcel. A cost line was carried from a different market. By the time a design fee has been spent, the answer was already available.
Titleman assembles the study from the site's own record, and shows which input each number came from.
What A Land Feasibility Study Has To Establish
A study that can be argued with has four parts, in order. Skipping the first makes the rest decorative.
- What the site is. Parcel identity and boundary, reconciled against the county or cadastral record, plus ownership and existing encumbrances where the record names them.
- What may be built. Zoning district, permitted uses, and the envelope the code allows — height, setbacks, coverage, floor area ratio, parking, and any overlay that changes them.
- What the programme costs and earns. Construction cost, professional fees, finance, contingency, and the revenue the completed scheme would produce at today's evidence.
- What the land is therefore worth. The residual: completed value less all costs and the required profit.
Each part constrains the next. A buildable area derived from the wrong parcel produces a residual that is precise and wrong.
Residual Land Value, And Why It Moves So Much
Residual land value is the standard instrument for pricing a development site, and it is unusually sensitive. It sits at the end of a subtraction, so every error upstream lands on it at full size.
A five per cent move in construction cost, or a small shift in the exit price, can move the residual by a multiple of that. This is a property of the arithmetic, not a defect of any particular model — but it means a study is only useful if the inputs are visible and each one can be challenged.
Titleman states the assumption behind each line rather than presenting a single figure. Where a number is an estimate rather than an observation, it is marked as one.
Testing More Than One Scheme On The Same Site
Sites rarely have one answer. A parcel that fails as apartments can work as small-format retail, or as a smaller scheme built sooner.
Comparing schemes is where feasibility earns its cost, and it is the part usually skipped because each variation means rebuilding a model. Titleman holds the site facts once and varies the programme against them, so the schemes differ by the thing you meant to change and not by an input that drifted between spreadsheets.
The comparison that tends to matter:
- Yield under each permitted use, at the envelope the code actually allows.
- The scheme's sensitivity to build cost and to exit price.
- What a phased or smaller scheme does to finance and to risk.
- Which assumption, if wrong, would reverse the decision.
That last one is the useful output. A study that names the assumption the answer depends on is more valuable than one that reports a single confident number.
Where The Inputs Come From
Feasibility work fails quietly when data is borrowed. A cost per square foot from another metro, a rent from a listing that never let, a comparable that is the subject property appearing under a different address — each is invisible in a finished model.
Titleman builds a property dossier first, then runs the programme against it. Public records, zoning text, and transaction evidence are named where they are used, so a reviewer can check the input rather than the conclusion.
Where evidence is thin — a market with few transactions, a use with no local precedent — the study says so instead of filling the gap with a plausible number.
What It Does Not Do
Feasibility software narrows the field. It does not grant permission.
- It does not replace a planning application, and a planning authority can refuse a scheme the code appears to allow.
- It does not replace geotechnical, environmental or engineering investigation, any of which can make a viable scheme unviable.
- It does not replace a formal valuation where a lender or a standard requires one.
- The decision, and the professional responsibility for it, stay with the team making the acquisition.
What it does is put the arithmetic and its sources in front of that team early enough to matter — before the design fee, not after it.