This episode dissects wetlands detection failures on the same Washington property, where standard Land ID overlays showed minimal wetlands impact but a 20-year-old buildability report revealed Category 2 wetlands covering most of the property with mandatory 110-foot buffers. The discrepancy between modern mapping tools and historical delineation reports demonstrates why surface-level analysis fails on questionable properties with unexplained development gaps in premium areas.
Key Takeaways:
- Cross-Reference Multiple Wetlands Data Sources Land ID overlays aren’t definitive—verify questionable properties against USGS federal overlays and historical delineation reports to catch wetlands that modern tools miss.
- 110-Foot Wetlands Buffers Destroyed This Deal The buffer regulations relegated the only buildable area to the far south of a narrow north-south parcel, requiring crossing the entire wetlands zone to reach it from the only available access point.
- Development Gaps in Premium Areas Signal Hidden Problems When surrounding $800K-900K homes exist but a five-acre parcel remains undeveloped for decades, assume significant issues exist regardless of what initial mapping tools suggest.
Listen to the full episode for the complete wetlands analysis that saved this $70K mistake.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, vacant land funding partner. So today I want to cover another micro lesson associated with that five acre property in Washington state that we were really keen on for a few weeks there and got really deep in our due diligence process, spent hours on it. Even was getting it all set up to close and then ultimately canceled.
contract today after figuring out it was super hairy. So the previous episode I talked about, hey, signs about property history and sellers looking to sell you a lemon. What to look out for there. So I shared some examples there. And for this one, I wanted to go over a terrain issue that was noted. And so in this case,
again, to set the scene in case you didn’t listen to the previous episode, you know, this was five acres of vacant land flat in a premium area just north of Seattle, surrounded by really nice homes and wondering, okay, why is this thing not being built on? Why has it not, sold and been developed, when it would be seemingly a prime, premium candidate.
And when we were looking at this one in land ID initially, I was looking at the soil maps and like, okay, nothing is really striking here. Other people are building on the type of soil that the property encompasses. But there was a little bit of wetlands just to the north of the property. Actually not. I think it was like brushing the edges of the northern boundary of the property. But we anticipated entering from.
south, so was kind of a narrow north to south parcel. Our expectation was that there was access from the south, so were like, okay, the northern side probably doesn’t matter as much anyway. And either way, the wetlands didn’t seem to be a huge impact in the surrounding area. There people who were kind of building in the vicinity, and the soil map did not seem to be very discouraging from that perspective.
However, we did uncover some previous building due diligence reports for this property. So the client working with us on this deal, I he’s very resourceful and investor. I hope to work with him again in the future here, dug up all of these documents that the seller was supposed to send over to us, but he never did. mean, now it’s kind of obvious in retrospect because it was not to his advantage to do so.
since there was so much hair associated with it, but, we dug up these documents after we’ve done a whole bunch of DD on this deal and, you know, we was starting the title process on it. And it turned out that there was a previous buildability report that was done close to 20 years ago. And I think this was actually done prior to whoever had purchased the property for almost a quarter million dollars, by the way, we had it on our contract.
70K. In, yeah, so around 2005, they had this buildability report and it indicated category two wetlands that covered most of the middle of the property and by county or city regulations, whatever was the actual authority in the space.
indicated, okay, 110 foot buffer is needed for wetlands. I think I’ve talked about this before in other pods, but oftentimes when there’s wetlands around, depending on the area, you’re actually going to need a buffer. And some counties and cities are going to be more conservative than others to determine where you can actually build. And in this case, it was 110 feet. I actually consider that pretty liberal. I’ve seen plenty that are like, you
150, 300 foot plus to need a buffer for wetlands. And essentially, even with you not seeing the parcel in your mind, it was a narrow, north-south oriented parcel. Just imagine like a letter L that was appearing on the screen and
The only buildable area was to the very south part of the parcel That was going to be outside of that buffer range realistically for You know the wetlands that had been discovered on the property Which made it Much more difficult to try to work with that one because it turns out that you could only enter the property from the north
We thought there was access to the South, but that’s for another podcast. So, um, you had to cross the entire property through the wetlands to even get to your buildable region. And this is just a key thing. I, I used to do this more prior to relying on land IDs overlays. Because generally they’re, they’re going to be quite accurate. Um, but you know, it’s not always is.
we can look at what wetlands show up there and then whatever the soil maps is showing. And usually it’s a pretty good indication, especially when there’s not much drain changes, relatively flat, doesn’t look like water is really gonna pool much anywhere. But clearly in the past when they actually did a wetlands salineation report, they found, there’s actually wetlands in this area. And again, this was done 20 years ago, but you could reasonably assume that…
things hadn’t changed or at the very least, if you wanted to build on it again, you’d probably have to get another wetlands delineation report and gamble that it’s gonna come back more positive than it did in 2005. So I would generally go by the historical example. You know, almost we just had a ton of DD time and we had plenty of marching to work with for considering this parcel further. And…
In that case, sometimes I think a going rule then, just given our experience with this property is that, if there are any possible wetlands impacts and it’s a more questionable area of like, okay, well, there’s a lot of development around here. Why hasn’t this one been developed? Even though the soil map looks okay, the wetlands overlays don’t seem to be that impactful. Go ahead and check other wetlands overlays.
I’m forgetting the exact, URL, but it’s whatever the, you know, federal U S geological survey. want to say you can just Google it perplexity. you’ll be able to figure it out, but they have a few different overlays of wetlands data around the U S. And so I used to use that a lot more often.
prior to land ID, but this is now another lesson where it’s like, it’s probably worth double checking across different sources to like, okay, do any of these sources for wetlands for possibly impacted property indicate that there are wetlands on the property? Because if I would have checked that geological survey website, it would have shown what that delineation report indicated of there being wetlands.
on the property even though land ID wasn’t showing up that way. So that would have been a bigger trigger of like, ooh, there’s less potential for this property than I thought. So that is another lesson for, yeah, land is a risky game here. You can’t ever be too certain with purchasing properties before you buy because if you get stuck with a lemon, you are in big trouble, especially in a market like this.
So I’m feeling pretty good that you know, we spent a lot of time a little bit of resources here It’s better than laying out 70 plus grand for something. I was just gonna be stressing me out like crazy and probably losing my own So with all of that in mind serious land capital for any of your funding needs land daily diligence Facebook group for zero pulse review land deals and land price shot AI with the most simple and accurate way to price lands scribe and share
Looking forward to talking to you next time. Take care. Bye.
