The three site flags that re-cut a deal after close — and how to find them before.
Most surprises are not surprises. They are the line items the seller did not advertise and the buyer did not ask about. Here are the three we see re-cut Florida deals after close, and the cheap diligence step that catches each one before.
The pattern is consistent enough to write down. Florida owners get surprised after close by the same three categories of site flag, year after year, deal after deal. The flags themselves are not exotic. The reason they survive into close is that the standard inspection scope does not test for them, and the seller has no incentive to surface them.
Flag 01 — Utility capacity at the source.
The marketing flyer says the property has water and sewer. The diligence checklist verifies that lines run to the parcel. What neither tests is whether the utility provider actually has capacity to serve the development intensity the buyer is underwriting. That answer lives at the utility, not at the parcel. We have seen owners discover, months after close, that their multifamily program will require a private lift station the seller never mentioned — adding both time to the schedule and real cost to the budget.
The cheap diligence step: call the utility before close. Not their customer-service line — their engineering desk. Ask whether they have current capacity for the proposed flow and load, and ask what the answer would be a year and a half out. Both answers matter.
Flag 02 — Easements and overlays that compress the buildable area.
The survey shows the parcel boundary. The buyer assumes the buildable area is roughly the parcel minus setbacks. The actual buildable area is sometimes far smaller, because a recorded easement, a conservation overlay, a wetland line, or a utility right-of-way crosses the lot in a way the marketing illustration omitted. The deal still closes — and then the owner discovers it during conceptual design, when their architect tells them the building program does not fit.
The cheap diligence step: overlay the recorded easements, the conservation lines, and the wetland delineation on the parcel before close. Sketch the buildable envelope. Confirm that the program actually fits. This is a one-day exercise that has prevented some of the worst surprises in our practice.
Flag 03 — A jurisdiction that has changed, where the comp set is still under the old rules.
Buyers underwrite using comparable approvals from the last few years. Those comp-set entitlements closed, so the buyer assumes the path that worked then will work now. Meanwhile the jurisdiction has updated its comprehensive plan, tightened its concurrency, or added a new overlay — and the comparable approvals would not be granted today. The seller knows this. The marketing materials, of course, do not mention it.
The cheap diligence step: read the current code amendments, not just the current code. Read the planning board's last several months of minutes. Most jurisdictions publish them. A few minutes of reading flags a jurisdiction that has shifted posture and prices it into the underwriting before it prices itself into the construction loan.
The pattern underneath
All three flags share a structure. The seller's incentive is to present the property as it appears on a clean checklist. The buyer's standard diligence is built to verify the checklist. The flag lives in the gap between the checklist and the operating reality of the parcel — and the only way to find it is to make a different phone call than the checklist asks for.
Owner-side diligence is the discipline of making those calls. It is not exotic. It is not expensive. It is one principal sitting down with a parcel and asking, for forty-five minutes, what is true about this property that the marketing materials are not testing for.
If you have a Florida property under contract and want a senior owner-side principal to make those three calls before you close, a project review is the right entry point.