Where would you build?
Say what you have in mind. The engine sizes a footprint, tries every spot it fits outside the setbacks, the floodplain, the wetlands and the steep ground, and shows the three that matter: best overall, best view, cheapest to build on. Each comes with its level pad and its driveway from the road on the flattest line; the dollars are in the report.
The Land Report
The numbers, on paper. The ground ledger, the three sites and the spot you placed, the site work for site A line by line in dollars, and what would tighten every figure and who to call. Five pages, PDF, emailed within one business day.
- The cover — the lidar ground, the boundary, water, roads, the sites and driveways, the five facts that decide whether to keep reading.
- What we know about this ground — every fact with its label and its source.
- Where to build — A, B, C and your spot: slope, pad cut and fill, driveway length and grade, pad edge, and the site-work range for each.
- Site work, line by line — strip, cut, fill, haul, fine grade, drive, walls, erosion control, utilities, septic, with low and high, and what is excluded.
- What would tighten these numbers — the survey, the perc test, the borings, the utility locate; who to call first.
Hold it
The parcel, printed. The lidar ground with the relief raised so you can read it, the boundary as a rim you can feel, the roads as grooves, the driveway as a raised strip, and the site graded flat with a socket. The building is its own piece that snaps in, so a different size or a different spot is a new piece, not a new model.
Most lots are gentler than they feel; 2× reads best in the hand. 1× is true to scale.
What we know about this ground
Each fact carries a label: known read from a record, calculated from one-metre lidar, estimated from coarser data, assumed until you confirm it, unknown. The last line of each says what would tighten it.
What this is. The ground is USGS 3DEP elevation, one metre where lidar flights exist and coarser elsewhere; the label on the terrain fact says which. The boundary is the county's tax map, which is not a survey and can be off by feet. Floodplain lines are FEMA's, wetlands are the national inventory's photo-interpreted polygons, roads and buildings are OpenStreetMap's. The three sites are the engine's honest picks for the footprint you asked for; the pad balances cut and fill, the driveway is the flattest line from the road, and the cost is quantities times dated regional rates. Move the building yourself and the pad, the driveway and the cost follow; a spot that crosses a setback, the floodplain or a wetland still gets its numbers, with the conflict named. The report carries the dollars; the model is the land in your hand.