This episode explains LandPricer’s nuanced road access determination using both street overlay and satellite imagery in parallel to distinguish between direct named-street frontage versus legal-and-physical access through private driveways or easements, flagging when aerial analysis suggests access exists but legal confirmation through title and deed review remains necessary before purchase.
Key Takeaways:
- Dual Image Analysis Catches Access That Single Method Misses Street overlays sometimes fail to show private roads visible in satellite photography, while satellite imagery occasionally misses formal streets shown in overlays—parallel analysis ensures neither is missed.
- Physical Access Assumption Differs From Legal Access Confirmation Aerial imagery reliably determines physical pathways to named streets, but legal access rights require title research beyond what any mapping analysis can definitively prove.
- Road Access Arguably Trumps All Other Due Diligence Factors Without legal access, property value collapses regardless of other characteristics, making this the most critical determination in land underwriting across all use cases.
Listen to the full episode to understand the complete road access assessment methodology behind LandPricer’s AI.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to get serious today. I wanted to start a new series here. I don’t know if it’s going to be every day here, but I wanted to give more of a, kind of behind the scenes note on how we’re building out the land price or software. you know, specifically the image analysis portion, actually I’ll probably go over some of the other parts too, as I’m
speaking aloud here. But you know, we have to think very carefully on, you know, what goes into the actual diligence and backend prompting that we’re going to be doing within the software. So for those who aren’t familiar, you know, I’m trying to build out a, you know, the most reliable land pricing tool in the industry, something that I would utilize in my own business.
anything that exists currently. Personally, I don’t find them to be as reliable. Some features are very solid, but for us, we won’t settle for anything less than something that’s really built off of our own system, just because I think it’s the most nuanced approach to reviewing land deals. And so…
you know, the software is going to be based off of how we underwrite land deals, at least what can be done online. And a lot of that has to do with image analysis. I mean, you pretty much can’t be a land investor unless you have some type of mapping tool. So a core part of the product is just being able to analyze certain aerial images. But, know,
The key thing is that when we initially built out the product, it was relying on manual user input, which was just far too slow. And so we transitioned as much of that as we could over to an LLM model, image analysis model that has super extensive prompts that have been tested at Nausium by myself to ensure that we’re getting 95 plus percent accuracy rates.
with the various tests that we have run so far. And so we have, you know, 30 plus-ish questions. Some will probably be added over time. But this initial batch, you know, because every single prompt costs money, we have to ensure that we’re only asking things that really, really matter when it comes to assessing land deals based in…
on our experience. And so the first kind of batch that we look at is related to road access and everything. Yeah, that’s just standard, right, for diligence. And I know some of those tools, especially that are associated with downloading data to find various land deals will have a mark on whether a property has is landlocked or not. And I’m not
exactly positive on how that is done. But my understanding is that they might be pulling some type of satellite imagery or street level imagery to see if there is a named street that can access the property. But to me, that usually doesn’t tell the whole story because not all direct access is created equal.
So we, you know, a lot of these features that we have built within our image analysis can be done by some of these other tools. It’s just, I don’t think the level of nuance is appropriate enough for how we analyze and price properties. So that that’s really the goal here. Nuance rules the game, especially in, you know, difficult macro and where, you know, small issues can really kill your potential profitability and leave you in a nasty situation.
I’ve experienced that firsthand. So that is why we approach these things in this way. So the road access piece, you know, first we want to ask the question, OK, does the property have direct access to a named street? So that’s going to be the best type of road access, right? And what is that level of frontage?
it’s not always able to be determined at least, you know, via images alone on, you know, okay, what is relevant to that specific county, you know, what’s the level of or the amount of road frontage needed in order to install a driveway, for instance. But, you know, at least determining that there is a portion or some part of the boundary of the subject property that
directly touches a named street, that is the first question we are trying to answer. However, as we all know, or anybody who’s been in land industry for even a small period of time, is that even if a property doesn’t have direct road access, the chance that it might have legal and physical access
to a named road is also a critical feature to determine. So this is where it can get a bit more nuanced to where, you know, property is not necessarily landlocked, but it’s generally not going to be as valuable if it’s off of a named street that’s usually going to be a county or city maintained road.
to actually get to the property and maybe you just have like a dirt path or who knows whether it’s even cleared up to even access the property, we don’t know. But still understanding whether there is truly legal and physical access usually can be determined via aerial imagery as well. so, in parallel that we are looking at an aerial image to determine, okay, is there a named street that touches the property? Okay, great. But in the case that it doesn’t,
Is there What appears to be? physical and legal access to that property and So we’ll use two different approaches in order to figure that out one is checking, you know via a street overlay Which you know usually just going to show you kind of that beige background and then you know, wherever the various streets are According to
The satellite imagery or whatever, you know Google or whatever map provider has decided to map out that will tell you whether there are You know side streets that aren’t necessarily named But give a pretty strong indication that yes, there is another pathway To actually access the subject property and so you might have an offshoot, you know white line or whatever
that indicates a side street or private driveway in order to get to a property and then we can still have a higher level of conviction that yes, this property does seem to be able to connect to the named street. Do we know for sure whether that is true legal access? No, we don’t.
So we’re always going to include that caveat. Hey, if something isn’t directly touching a named street, yeah, we still want to figure out is there, you know, D to D is meant to get to the property regardless of what the map may show. So, you know, it’s always important to, again, include that level of nuance in our determination of whether a property has street access or not. So.
Yeah, there’s only so far you can get with aerial imagery. That’s why we are always collecting information on the back end for what are additional checklist items that you’re going to have to check off of the aerial review. At the same time, we can’t always rely on the street overlay to indicate accurately that there is a legal or physical access off of a named street.
So we also look at the satellite imagery, meaning the actual satellite photography, ideally high resolution, and see if there is any path or roadway, private or otherwise, that accesses the property off of the named street. Because sometimes,
we can detect that there are those private roads or easements to get to the subject property, even if it’s not showing up on the street overlay. So we’ll assess that in parallel. And so long as one of the images is answering a yes, that there is a confirmed pathway or street to get to the named street, then we can reasonably assume that yes, there is a, you know.
legal and physical access. Legal, again, we have to, we can assume physical access for the most part, but legal is still an open question until you dive in deeper, you know, through title and various other deed checks that you would do anyway prior to purchasing a property. So we’ll flag that accordingly. So that will be our initial approach to
handle a more nuanced review of how to assess street access to a property because street access is arguably, it’s hard to say, okay, what is the most important due diligence factor to check on for land? But it’s hard to argue against street access because yeah, if there’s just no legal access, legal being more important than
than physical. Like, what can you really do with the property, whether it’s rec or residential, obviously, commercial, it doesn’t matter. There’s no real recourse to have really any associated value with the land unless you’re buying it speculatively, which we don’t do as land investors generally, and anticipating some future development or just maybe get lucky and can create illegal access.
which is entirely possible if you, you some people do that very successfully, but you know, you just have to be prepared for getting denied in that fashion, in which case you would still want to buy much, much, much below possible market value. If you were to get legal access because the chance that it doesn’t work out, you still want to have an exit pathway that is a high risk scenario. So usually you wouldn’t want to purchase that unless you have.
some type of indication you can get legal access from whatever relevant neighbor is in the vicinity. So that is one of the first topics that we go over there. So just to share a bit of background on what we’re trying to determine and our approach to that. Obviously, the image analysis is handled by the A.I. side. So we have, again, very, very sophisticated prompts that
determine this accurately, but at least this gives you an idea on what is going on behind the scenes and why it matters. So with that in mind, SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs, Land Daily Diligence Facebook group for zero cost review of your land deals, and LandProdsor.ai, which obviously just talked about during this entire podcast.
Looking forward to delivering that product to you all here shortly. Hopefully this is getting you excited to at least give it a shot. Looking forward to chatting with you next time. that, subscribe and share. Take care. Bye.
