As any developer knows, it is challenging enough to find and efficiently evaluate suitable parcels of land in areas that you are familiar with. These challenges are compounded when expanding into a new region where you don’t know the territory very well.

Cornerstone Homes is a residential development company based primarily in Richmond (VA). In 2002, the company decided to expand into the rapidly growing region of North Carolina known as the Research Triangle (the triangular metropolitan area that includes the cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill).

For Cornerstone, the situation was made even more difficult due to the fact that the land in and around the research triangle was being purchased rapidly, making it more difficult to evaluate whether a parcel of land was already slated for development, or was even zoned in a way that would allow for residential development.

Custis Coleman, Site Acquisition Manager for Cornerstone, decided to investigate whether there might be any software systems that could help them be more efficient and effective in researching and evaluating prospective sites.

“Prior to using mPower, our process was pretty typical of most developers,” said Coleman. “We’d drive by a prospective site that looked like it might be a great fit for our next project, then manually research the parcel, either by going to the Register of Deeds or looking it up on the county web site, only to find out it was either owned by a local research institute, the building value was out of our price range, or some other condition existed that disqualified it. I decided to try to find a better way”.

While attending the 2006 International Builder’s Show in Orlando (FL), Coleman got a brief overview of the mPower Land Acquisition System on the trade show floor. Intrigued, he requested a follow-up demonstration after the show and purchased the system a few weeks later.  

Coleman asked Seth Asbill, Site Acquisition Administrator for Cornerstone, to manage the implementation and utilization of the mPower system.

Switching From Reactive to Proactive
With a few hours of online web training from mPower, Asbill had the new system up and running within a couple days.

“Since the mapping software and data layers are loaded on a hosted server, we didn’t have to bother with supporting and managing the software in house, making it easy to get it up and running quickly,” said  Asbill.

Cornerstone quickly confirmed the system was a quantum leap from the typical county parcel web site. The software gave them much greater power to proactively search for ideal acquisition candidates using multiple criteria (acreage, building value, zoning, land value, surrounding features).

Using the software’s easy to use sorts, queries and buffering tools, Asbill was able to filter through exponentially more data in a fraction of the normal time, identifying many more highly qualified prospective sites.

“In the time that it would normally take me to find eight prospective sites using the tools typically available,” relates Asbill, “I was able to find over 170 different parcels that were of interest by utilizing mPower’s Land Acquisition Software.”

The partnership between Cornerstone and the software developer, mPower Technologies, is also producing tangible results for future releases of the software.

"Cornerstone has contributed some good input on how we can further enhance the product for developers,” states Scott Hameister, mPower’s Director of Product Development. “These new features will be in the next version of the software, which we plan to release in the next few months.”

Results
By using the software’s ability to both filter out disqualified parcels and zero in on parcels that meet their decision criteria, Cornerstone personnel are able to spend their time focusing on a much higher quality mix of prospective sites. Furthermore, the tool automates the process even further by allowing the user to easily merge data into standard software tools like Word or Excel.

“After identifying the prospective sites, I can click a few buttons and the software automatically merges the owner information into our land owner prospect letter, making it very easy to recruit a larger number of prospective sellers. Within a few days, I’ve gotten phone calls from a few owners,” says Asbill.

Ultimately, the real payoff is the contribution the new tools and processes are making when it comes to making better informed strategic decisions, beating competitors to the best land and facilitating the company’s strategic growth.

“Having many more developable tracts of land to evaluate and pursue greatly increases our probability of making a successful acquisition,” attests Coleman. SLDT