Dallas, Texas has 294,122 sites, and 12% are vacant. That’s 35,643 vacant sites. Moreover, 17% of the vacant sites allow for the construction of at least 100 units. That’s 6,299 vacant sites with massive multifamily development. I can see why Dallas has so much development interest and why many customers
When we started digitizing zoning ordinances four years ago, the strategy was to start with the US's largest and most powerful metropolis. Our COO, Jeffrey Millett, created an algorithm to determine the top 100 cities with the most development capacity. Why is digitizing zoning ordinances so hard? We soon realized
The difference between data science and software engineering is often misunderstood, sometimes by engineers. A few years back, many engineers transitioned to data science when the AI craze was at an all-time high. Excited by the potential machine learning (ML), they eagerly loaded unexplored CSVs onto off-the-shelve ML models. After
Lincoln Park, Chicago, has a higher density than Bridgeport, which we studied last week. Properties with the highest density yield between 40 and 50 units. In this study, we found six properties that allowed more than 40 units and currently have less than 5,000 SF. These properties have at least
Bridgeport is a low-density Chicago neighborhood, most sites yield between 5 and 15 units. We have to assemble adjacent parcels to develop a multifamily project of 30+ units. Assemblages are composed of properties that have good criteria for development. How to analyze properties for assemblages? Assemblages require adjacent sites with
Assemblages are growing in popularity due to the lack of land for new development. The key is to find a set of adjacent properties that all have high development multiples. Then negotiate these properties with their respective owners. It is preferable to find assemblage opportunities with the same owner. Depending
Chicago has 604,319 properties under the Chicago Zoning Map. Today we looked into which ones have development potential using the development multiple calculations. For example, we’d like to filter sites where the total buildable area is ten times the existing building area. We narrowed it down to three sets. The
Yesterday we got the news that commercial real estate data giant, Lightbox, acquired the zoning data company PZR. Along with the acquisition, Lightbox now has more than 223,000 digitized property zoning reports. This acquisition is a great validator of all the work we’ve been doing for the past five years.
You are not alone. The Chicago zoning map is currently the most analyzed among all metropolitan cities. We looked into it, and it makes sense; Chicago is amidst a dozen mega development projects. The size of these developments has a significant impact on the surrounding properties. Everyone is looking to
The easiest way to find development opportunities for multifamily is to canvass the city based on units allowed. Deepblocks has built a city-wide search in which every parcel already has all its zoning rules baked in; that way, they are searchable. Searching by units allowed is most straightforward in cities
Total buildable area is the ultimate zoning value because it can be used to compare all parcels across a city. Total buildable area normalizes parcels and allows us to compare how much we can build, apples to apples. At the city scale, this metric gives us an instant snapshot of
A development multiple tells us how much development potential there is on any given property. It is an abstraction of how much room is available for development. At scale, development multiples tell us how much a city region can grow. We divide the total buildable area by the existing building
