A land-development feasibility agent, calibrated against closed deals
A regional developer was screening land acquisitions on instinct and a spreadsheet. The agent handles the first pass. It mines public county GIS for parcel geometry and ownership, models subdivision feasibility, and identifies which utility is legally obligated to serve each parcel. The off-market target lists come from criteria no listing service exposes: large acreage, deeded decades ago, owner's mailing address in another city, near-zero improvement value.
Then we backtested it, and the model was wrong. Run against two completed subdivisions and thirty-three closed lot sales, the first version overstated road take by up to 1.9×, per-lot development cost by 3.35×, and absorption pace by 1.44×. Uncorrected, it would have killed good deals and approved bad ones with equal confidence.
None of that surfaces from a demo. It surfaced because the model was made to predict outcomes that had already happened, where being wrong was checkable.
How it's built
- Ingest from public GIS services with pagination and schema discovery
- Off-market targeting as a parameterized spatial and attribute query
- Geometric plat simulation rather than naive contiguity
- Pricing and absorption curves regression-fitted to closed transactions
- Backtest harness reporting model-versus-actual error per component