I poked Alex about this, and he didn’t have links to specific properties on hand, but he did rattle off some common reasons candidate campuses haven’t worked out:
Too far away from anything else.
Related: lack of Uber / UberEats availability.
Reasons to think building more will be very difficult. E.g., the land is in a conservation easement, or it’s zoned farmland. (Causing something to no longer be zoned as farmland will generally be impossible or very difficult.)
The buildings don’t have enough square footage for us to start researching there in the next few months.
We’re not excited enough about the city and/or area.
The land is too small. We’ve found some really badass buildings, but on a tiny lot surrounded by neighbors, so no space/privacy.
A thing that’s an important bonus is if the property is already split into multiple lots. If it’s not split into lots, that’s another huge preliminary part of the process that has to be done before we develop the property (and it might turn out to be impossible).
Usually you can have one building (and maybe one secondary building) per lot. If you have 50 acres that’s designated as a single enormous lot, then you’re likely to have to split it before building on it, which adds an additional bureaucratic nightmare to the process.
I’m curious for examples of properties that were ruled out and why.
I poked Alex about this, and he didn’t have links to specific properties on hand, but he did rattle off some common reasons candidate campuses haven’t worked out:
Too far away from anything else.
Related: lack of Uber / UberEats availability.
Reasons to think building more will be very difficult. E.g., the land is in a conservation easement, or it’s zoned farmland. (Causing something to no longer be zoned as farmland will generally be impossible or very difficult.)
The buildings don’t have enough square footage for us to start researching there in the next few months.
We’re not excited enough about the city and/or area.
The land is too small. We’ve found some really badass buildings, but on a tiny lot surrounded by neighbors, so no space/privacy.
A thing that’s an important bonus is if the property is already split into multiple lots. If it’s not split into lots, that’s another huge preliminary part of the process that has to be done before we develop the property (and it might turn out to be impossible).
Usually you can have one building (and maybe one secondary building) per lot. If you have 50 acres that’s designated as a single enormous lot, then you’re likely to have to split it before building on it, which adds an additional bureaucratic nightmare to the process.