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Land & Development
In the foothills, the parcel that looks best on a map is often the one that cannot be built.
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TL;DR
Land and development services covers commercial land acquisition and disposition, site assembly, and the diligence that determines whether a parcel is genuinely developable: zoning and permitted use, sewer availability and capacity, water and power service, topography, access permissions, and recorded easements or restrictions.
The point
Gross acreage is a marketing number.
North Georgia land is sold by the acre and developed by the buildable square foot, and in the foothills those two numbers can be very far apart. Slope, rock, stream buffers, floodplain and wetlands take acreage out of play before anyone draws a building.
Then there is infrastructure. A beautiful commercial corner with no sewer and a treatment plant that has no capacity to allocate is not a commercial corner. It is a septic-limited site with a use list far shorter than the zoning map suggests.
None of this is exotic. It is simply the order the questions have to be asked in, and it is the order most land deals get wrong, because price and location are the easy questions and utilities are the hard ones.
Diligence order
What we check, in the order that kills deals.
Permitted use and zoning
What the district allows by right versus by special use permit or variance. A rezoning is a political process with a timeline and no guaranteed outcome, never a line item in a schedule.
Sewer, or the absence of it
Much of North Georgia outside the municipalities is on septic. Whether public sewer reaches the parcel, and whether the treatment plant has capacity to allocate, determines density more decisively than zoning.
Water and power service
Line size and pressure at the property, and the service the utility will actually bring. Upgrades are frequently the largest unbudgeted cost on a North Georgia site.
Topography and buildable area
In the foothills, gross acreage and usable acreage diverge sharply. Slope, rock, floodplain, stream buffers and wetlands reduce the developable footprint before a site plan exists.
Access and traffic
Curb-cut permission, sight distance, turn-lane requirements and whether the access point is controlled by the county or the state DOT.
Title, easements and restrictions
Utility easements, access easements, prior plat restrictions and covenants that survive a sale and quietly govern what can be built.
Questions
What people ask about this.
Can you get a property rezoned?
No broker can promise a rezoning. It is a discretionary political process before a planning commission and an elected body. What we can do is assess how plausible the request is given the district, the comprehensive plan and the jurisdiction’s recent decisions, and structure the contract so your money is not at risk while it is pending.
How do I find out whether sewer is available?
Availability and capacity are two separate questions and both come from the utility provider in writing. A line running past the property does not mean the plant can allocate capacity to your project. Get the answer documented before the due diligence period ends.
Does Braselton's four-county footprint really matter?
Considerably. Zoning ordinances, permitting processes, impact fees and utility providers differ by jurisdiction, so two parcels a short distance apart can face different requirements. Establishing which county and which municipality govern a site is the first question there, not a detail.
Do you work on build-to-suit?
Yes, usually as the site-search and diligence side, working alongside your architect, civil engineer and general contractor. We find and vet the site; they design and build on it.
Our residential division
Residential land and homesites
Homesites, acreage for a personal residence and mountain lots are handled by the residential division.
Gold Peach Commercial
Ask the hard questions first.
Utilities, topography and permitted use before price. It is a shorter conversation and a much cheaper one.