This episode documents ongoing Louisiana subdivide development where a $100K contractor quote has expanded to $110K due to unforeseen terrain issues, rain delays, and on-site design adjustments. The three-parcel project targeting $450K+ total value has shifted from late May completion to mid-June due to weather and scope changes.
Key Takeaways:
- Flag Lot Driveway Pivot Saved $20K Repositioning the flag lot entrance to intersect the middle parcel via deeded easement avoided importing two truckloads of dirt at $8K cost.
- Daily Site Management Is Non-Negotiable Having a realtor physically present every 1-2 days caught design opportunities and prevented contractor overreach that could have cost thousands in corrections.
- Rain Season = Automatic Timeline Padding Louisiana humidity and frequent rain-outs delayed the project 1-2 weeks despite contractors working weekends—always account for 30%+ weather buffer.
- Natural Terrain Following Beats Straight Cuts Weaving driveways between trees instead of straight-line bulldozing added curb appeal and buyer value despite slightly higher initial clearing costs.
Listen to the full episode for honest insights on out-of-state development challenges and what separates successful value-add projects from disasters.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, vacant land funding partner. Just got off another excellent automate to accelerate AI coaching session with Callan and her team. And finally putting together this brand guardian, brand guardian, marketing copywriter for our business and filled in all the project knowledge. think this is going to be.
super, super helpful for us with less of my direct involvement needed for content production or at least double checking. And probably we’ll just make things more effective for posting as well. Sometimes I’ll notice posts that happen that I’m not always on top of. And I’m like, wait a second, this is really not right. I think there’s one like the other week, you know, it’s
sharing all of the risks of that absolute auction we’re doing in Tennessee. And one of the Instagram reels was saying how I just lost 90K on a land deal. And I’m like, wait a second, that is not right. That makes it look like there’s the potential to lose 90K, like an absolute worst case scenario. But that is a huge difference compared to actually losing 90K. Like that makes us look way, way, way worse than the situation is, which is already.
not the best situation, but you know, people just check out the headlines like, oh man, aren’t these guys supposed to be, you know, experts within the industry? So I had to take that down and try to figure out, okay, let’s make sure we’re never posting anything that’s inaccurate there. So there’s always going to be more guardrails to figure out. That’s always a risk of delegation, right? When you don’t have full control over everything, there’s, know, occasionally something slipped through the cracks and you got to fix.
fix embarrassing errors that, come out there. so yeah, starting to feel a lot better about that. And also like just, you know, learning from Callen’s team, additional prompting and the way that I’m handling it on the land Pricer side is already like the cutting edge formats that Callen’s team is doing that I’ve practiced a lot more. So I’m like, I’m even more reassured that we’re heading in the right direction with land Pricer to
really nail down the pricing analysis with LLM models, which still requires a ton more work and constant iteration to sort that out. If you just trust AI, it doesn’t necessarily help you get better results. We need our backend knowledge for what we actually want to be found in certain
images so that it’s not just, you know, giving us the wrong type of responses and we’re just mispricing things anyway. So you still need the inherent knowledge before you start prompting with AI. But also today, I just wanted to go over a few key updates regarding that Louisiana subdivide deal. Again, catching some of you guys up, new listeners. have, you know, near half million dollar value add three.
child parcel subdivide of roughly 10 acres each in central Louisiana. Beautiful piece of land. And currently we are in the actual development process. So we’re trying to just turnkey home sites, you beautiful driveways, everything ready for an end buyer outside of installing an actual
housing foundation, you know, they have electricity and water at the street. They would just have to do a septic. Um, but you know, a lot of this, you know, that one of the lots is a flag lot too. So, you know, I’m, even got lucky where the parish approved our development project like a month earlier. And so.
You know, we anticipated getting these parcels live on the market by end of May. Now that seems like best case scenario is probably going to be closer to another month. it’s cause the development cycles, do they just, they just take a long time. We even have a team that’s, you know, known for working fast. but you know, there was just a lot of trees that needed to be cleared out. You know, it’s rainy season and it’s Louisiana, right? Humid, wet.
They’ve had a number of rain outs where they just couldn’t do any work. And these guys are even working over weekends. Whenever there’s an opportunity to be out there, they are, you know, they’ve had to adjust some plans depending on how the terrain kind of, settles out as they’re clearing. That’s why it’s like, it’s such a huge risk within development, especially doing out of state development where you’re not managing the boots on the ground. People talk about this all the time. It’s like, okay, yeah, even if you
find some contractors, ton of cost overruns or timing can always be an issue. you know, very fortunately we have an outstanding realtor, one of the best, if not the best in the region. And he’s out there every day, every other day, checking in on progress, making sure that we are, um, you know, staying within our budgetary range because yeah, inevitably now there’s like another $10,000 or so that we’re
likely going to have to pay on top of the initial hundred thousand dollar quote, which was already cheaper than we expected. We were thinking close to like one twenty five total. So still going to be a bit cheaper. But on the flag lot, for instance, they kind of found out, hey, we might need more dirt to really solidify the kind of long term durability of.
the driveway, you know, deeper into the home site. And so, you know, they’re either going to have to hope there’s enough dirt that they pull out of the other two child parcels that they can just backfill some of those areas they need within the flag lot, or they’re going to have to bring in, you know, two truck fulls of dirt to get that piece done within the flag lot.
driveway clearing, which is going to cost eight grand by itself. So we’re still hopeful for the latter, where that won’t need to be done. But we probably won’t know until all the rest of the clearing is done, probably by like mid next week. We’re already half week behind. The whole project was supposed to be done at the of last week. But again, we’ve had a number of rain out days that we’ve had to account for.
Um, and then also on one of the child parcels, you know, the realtor being out there again, very fortunate that these guys, they are, they really have a good eye for, okay, what would a end buyer really look for? Like, how do we really design these home sites appropriately? Like, Hey, let’s carve out a bit more space here. It’s just going to be a bit more beautiful. And, you know, you have to go back to the contractor and it’s like, okay, we can do this. It’s going to take another day or two potentially to work on it. It’s going to cost another two or three grand.
to work on it and so then we had to get approval from me for that. And I’m like, okay, if it’s nominal, it’s gonna make it more appealing for a buyer, fine. Let’s approve that. But this is just to give you an example of how these possible cost overruns can happen or if you don’t have an active site manager, how quickly things can just get off the rails or you’re not.
quite making the right choices when you’re not seeing the actual project being done because it’s one thing as I’m learning to envision what we want to do on a piece of raw land. once you actually get down to clearing things out, the terrain starts to shape itself. like, okay, we actually need to adjust some of these plans a bit more or we had to spend a little bit more money on getting the surveyor to come back out.
and lay down additional stakes because it was just unclear where the property boundaries were. So, you know, that delayed things a little bit as well. So it’s just been a little bit of back and forth here and there during this process. All told, we’re still expecting to be right at that initial budget that was quoted, but we still don’t know the timeline until the rest of the clearing is done to, you know,
You know, I wanted like, can we get like a ballpark estimate? Is this going to take, know, two, three, two or three weeks to lay down all the gravel and so forth to complete the value add here? But I guess, you know, on the developer side, or I mean, the contractor side, they’re like, Hey, we have, you know, like the wheel measurements, you know, that we’ll use for surveys or whatever. Like we can get exact measurements. I know precisely how much.
is needed once everything is cleared and then we can get that final hard price on it. But, you know, very likely it will be what we initially quoted. So, you we’re holding to the word for that. The realtor working with us has been very good about staying on top of this and ensuring there’s no funny business.
from from that side too. And he’s taking a huge gamble on us, right? Because we haven’t listed these properties, you know, their brokerage, they can’t officially sign a listing agreement until, you know, we’re ready to go sell. I mean, I guess we could we have the ownership, but he hasn’t asked for it. But, you know, he’s done so much work is out there all day and like, you know, hasn’t gotten paid a dime for it yet either. And we haven’t even signed an official listing agreement. But, you know, it’s
handshake from that. mean, not like we would ever reconsider, but it’s also nice to have.
Yeah, somebody who’s going out of their way and trusting an out-of-state operator and owner as well too. So that’s something I wanted to throw in and mention where trust has to go both ways sometimes like that. And also for the flag lot, interestingly, just the way the land worked out once they were actually starting to clear.
They’re like, OK, this is going to cost way more if we just. You know, have the entrance to the to the driveway following the precise entrance area to the flag lot. So to be more cost effective, we actually need to intersect a bit over the middle child parcel for the flag lots entrance. And so now we’re going to have to build in a.
deeded easement to the flag lot to account for this. You know, it really doesn’t affect the middle child parcel. It’s still going to be very private, but, you know, effectively we’re going have to, you know, still add in a different easement that wasn’t initially the plan, but we thought, hey, this is going to save us maybe like 20 grand or something from not having to drag in more dirt by just, you know, adjusting where the driveway is going. So.
Moral of the story through all of this is that, you know, some things are just messier in the background than you might imagine. Like I thought that the parish approval process was going to be the hairiest part of, potentially hairiest part of this entire project. the development side, it’s, you know, near daily check-ins and just unexpected things are just coming up, which is quickly showing me like, okay, yeah, there’s.
Well, once you actually like move in dirt around, it’s just, you know, usually not going to be your ideal case scenario from from what you initially expected. But I did see some pictures that, you know, confirm progress. And I really like their approach to it. It’s just, you know, really beautiful setups. It’s I’m the broker keeps telling me, hey, that this is some of the best land in the area. And, you know, even though I haven’t seen it personally, like just.
seeing the photos and the way they’re designing the driveways to more and their goal was to more naturally follow the, terrain in terms of like weaving between trees naturally there instead of just doing, you know, straight cut through to the back, wherever the, home site was going to be. just, follows the terrain nicer and it just, has a more beautiful.
kind of aura to it and just, you know, kind of like, you a certain serene feeling of, you know, just going through some, I don’t know, some really beautiful woods. So I know I’m kind of losing my words there, but it’s, you just have to take my word for it. It’s like, okay, I really see the curb appeal and potential appeal for a buyer. And I think this is going to add so much more value compared if we just try to sell the.
the raw land here. We’re really doing a lot of work on this property. So I’m feeling even more favorable about that and nice to kind of see it come into fruition here. But, you know, this has definitely been a crash course with real development here. I know it’s, know, child part, you know, a few child parcels on some larger acreage. But, you know, it’s been kind of trial by fire, a lot of money involved here and
you giving us a taste of what it’s like to actually be a developer, let alone out of state developer to really having to trust a lot of other parties involved. So I will let you all know how this continues to go so far. So good. Yeah, we’ll see when things actually hit the market here. But we are moving along as
fast as we can and hopefully this helps with your own journey in land. If you’re looking for any funding, SeriousLand.Capital, zero cost review of your land deals at Land Daily Diligence Facebook group. We’ve got a ton more member requests lately. It’s been another spike of membership. Excited to see that. And LandPricer.ai, which I just mentioned earlier in this podcast. Subscribe and share.
Again, Unconference, there’s less than 10 spots available August 7th through 9th, use my last name, Duff, for $200 off your ticket. Landonconference.com, hope to see you there. Take care, bye.
