Fusion-Data-Company Site Selection
Help the firm decide WHERE to develop. Screen submarkets/sites against the fundamentals a multifamily developer actually uses, then rank and document.
When to use
"Where should we look next?", "evaluate this site/submarket," "compare these three areas," "is [address/submarket] worth pursuing?"
Inputs to gather (ask briefly, default sensibly)
- Geography under consideration (metro, submarket, or specific parcel/address).
- Product type (garden, mid-rise, urban infill, mixed-use) and rough unit count.
- Any constraints (budget/basis target, timeline, partner requirements).
Screening framework (research each, cite sources + dates)
- Demand drivers — job growth, major employers/expansions, population & household growth, migration trends.
- Demographics — household incomes, renter share, age cohorts, growth.
- Rent & occupancy — current achievable rents, occupancy/vacancy, recent rent trend (pull comps via market-comp-analysis play).
- Supply pipeline — units under construction / planned in the submarket; deliveries vs. absorption. This is the #1 thing that kills multifamily deals.
- Basis & land — land pricing, total cost per unit/per SF feasibility, comparable land sales.
- Hard data on the site (if a specific parcel): zoning/entitlement status, parcel size, owner of record (use investor-sourcing play for owner lookup), flood/environmental flags, frontage/access, utilities.
- Yield-on-cost logic — does the achievable rent support a development yield with a healthy spread over the market exit cap rate?
- Risks — entitlement difficulty, NIMBY/political, infrastructure, concentration of competing deliveries.
Output
- Site / submarket one-pager using
underwriter-os/templates/site-one-pager.md, saved to the deal folder. - If comparing multiple: a ranked comparison table scoring each on the framework, with a clear recommended order and the reasoning.
- Always: bottom-line recommendation (pursue / pass / need more data) + the 2–3 factors that drove it.
Accuracy
- Cite every figure with source + date; label estimates.
- Owner/parcel research = a connected parcel source (
quarry-parcels), Yardisearch_by_owner, county records, web. - Flag where a professional check is needed (survey, environmental, legal entitlement opinion).