New Frontiers in Site Sourcing

New technologies are rapidly changing how homebuilders and developers are finding sites

While AI is impacting almost every part of real estate, few segments have seen as much change as quickly over the past year as site sourcing and acquisition. For most experienced real estate developers, the bottleneck isn’t raising capital, it’s finding good deals.

And a new set of tools are aiming to make that much easier.

Rather than the current process of tracking LoopNet, writing queries to find viable off-market sites, and sending mailers, land acquisition tools are pushing toward a world of natural language site sourcing and automated outreach. Imagine writing a prompt into a GPT-like interface: ‘Find me all sites of at least 10 acres within a 15-minute drive of an exit on I-85 in South Carolina that haven’t traded in the past 10 years’ and, within minutes, receiving a list complete with owner contact information.

Today’s letter will explore the companies and tools upending how real estate investors find sites and deals. Specifically, we’ll tackle:

• Technological trends in site selection;

• The site sourcing landscape, including Pillar, Acres, LandPortal, and PermitPortal;

• Envisioning the “new normal” for real estate development and the land market.