Thoughts on land development, entitlement, and the coordination problems that slow every project down, written by people who've actually run submittals.
Design, GIS, permitting, construction, and project management tools all get called land development software. Here's what each one is for, and where the gaps between them slow projects down.
Generic project management tools weren't built for entitlement. Here's what land development project management software actually needs to handle, and why we built BaseLD around three parties instead of one.
Projects rarely stall from one big problem. They stall from small coordination delays that quietly compound until nobody can say where the time went.
Jurisdictions aren't slow to adopt new review software because of red tape. It's usually because the software wasn't built for how a public agency actually works.
The same project can look fine to an engineer and worrying to a developer, because they're tracking different things entirely.
"On schedule" means something different to an engineer, a developer, and a jurisdiction. That mismatch is where a lot of timelines quietly fall apart.
A milestone is a date on a schedule. A status is how things actually stand today. Treating them as the same thing hides the information people actually need.
Most project software is built for one company tracking its own work. Land development involves three, and that mismatch is a big reason the industry still runs on email.
Entitlement is the process of getting a piece of land legally cleared to build on. Here's what it actually involves, and why it takes so long.
Every project touches a dozen stakeholders, and almost none of them share a system. Here's why that's the real bottleneck, not the engineering itself.
BaseLD is now in beta for civil engineering firms, developers, and jurisdictions.