Five Acres to Final Plat
Every community starts the same way: a raw parcel and a set of open questions. Here's how a site typically moves from survey to city approval — this example walks a 5-acre parcel, but the same process scales from a handful of lots up to 20+ acres. The figures below are illustrative; a real land plan is sized to your parcel.
Boundary & Topo Survey
We start with a full boundary and topographic survey of the parcel — trees, easements, floodplain, existing utility stubs — before a single unit is drawn.
How Many Homes?
With the survey in hand, we test unit yield against setbacks and parking ratios to answer the first real question: how many homes can this parcel support without feeling crowded?
Amenity: Pool & Pavilion, or Courts?
Amenity space competes directly with unit count, so it's decided early. A pool and pavilion reads as a family gathering space; tennis or pickleball courts serve an active-lifestyle buyer. Both can't always fit — we model the trade-off.
Driveway Strategy
Driveway length quietly shapes the whole plan. Full 18' driveways give each unit private guest parking but consume more paved area and push the buildable envelope back. Minimal 5'–8' aprons return that space to yard and street presence, leaning on shared or street parking instead.
Detention & Civil Engineering
Every municipality requires stormwater detention to be sized and sited before a plan can be approved — it's factored in alongside unit count and amenities, not bolted on afterward. For larger sites and any community with shared driveways, we bring a licensed civil engineer onto the team at this stage to carry drainage, grading, and utility design through to final approval.
Early Concepts to Final Land Plan
Several massing and layout concepts are tested side by side against the decisions above, before one direction is refined into the final land plan — unit count, road layout, amenity siting, detention, and easements all locked in.
Plat Submittal & City Approval
The final land plan is sent to the plat company for technical review and drafting of the final submittal, then filed with the City for entitlement approval — the last gate before the community moves toward construction.
Modern
Transitional
Contemporary
Heritage
Urban