De-Risking the Land

In the early days of HUTS, I thought we were in the home design business. We’d help people design smart, beautiful homes in rural places. Easy enough.

Then came the land.

One of our earliest clients asked me to check out a parcel he’d bought in the northern Catskills. He’d only visited it once, but was excited to get started. I showed up expecting to talk about floor plans and build partners. Instead, I spent most of the walk ankle-deep in swamp water. Twenty-plus soggy acres later and we reached the back of the lot—which turned out to be a sheer cliff. He looked at me and said, “So, when can we break ground?” I said, “On what?”

Another client had bought a pristine piece of lakefront forest with the dream of building a small, nature-focused microresort. As we walked the land, we saw a bald eagle soar overhead. Majestic.

Then another.

Then more.

Then we heard the squeaks of eaglets and spotted huge nests in the tree tops. It was breathtaking—but also federally-protected. What he’d bought was a sanctuary, not a future build site.

After enough of these site walks, it was clear: we weren’t just designing homes. We were in the property development business. And in rural settings, that starts with land.

How We Started De-Risking Rural Land

At first, we didn’t have a playbook. We just knew we needed to stop wasting time on parcels that couldn’t support what our clients wanted to build or would set us up for years of headaches. So, we started creating the tools and services we wished already existed.

• We launched Land.nyc as a subscription-based listing service that offered a curated list of viable parcels, each with a vision on how we would develop it. Most listing platforms are terrible at presenting land in a useful way, so we set out to change that. We sunsetted that paid service, but…
• Then, we created The Land Report, a free newsletter that presents a collection of development opportunities each week. We include our vision for each parcel, pricing estimates for all phases and potential challenges with the project.
• We began offering Land Evaluations to help clients understand what a parcel could realistically support—before they got emotionally or financially invested. We introduced Bespoke Land Sourcing for clients who hadn’t yet bought property, tailoring the search to zoning, topography, infrastructure, and project goals—not just aesthetics.

Each of these offerings was built to help answer three critical questions:

1. Can you identify the best parcels for ground-up development? (Because traditional real estate tools don’t make this easy.)

2. Can you build what you want on them? (Zoning, access, and environmental constraints aren’t always obvious.)

3. Can you understand the level of difficulty involved? (Because “buildable” and “straightforward” are not the same thing.)

Professional property developers commit serious time and capital to answering these questions. They have teams, lawyers, engineers, and models to underwrite every deal. Our goal is to democratize those insights—so individuals and small-scale developers can pursue rural housing projects with the same level of clarity and confidence.

Home design is what we’re known for, but the real work starts with the land.