Skip to content
PlotUProperty intelligence · AI · evidence

Site research · 7 min read

The site appraisal questions to answer before you spend a penny

Most wasted development spend happens in the first fortnight, on sites that a disciplined desk review would have parked.

Published

Every developer has a site that ate £8,000 of consultant fees before something obvious surfaced — an access constraint, a covenant, a policy designation, a drainage position that changed the whole cost base.

The fix is not more consultants earlier. It is a consistent desk-based triage that runs the same way every time, so the obvious things surface before the expensive things start.

Triage before due diligence

Triage answers one question: is this site worth spending money to investigate? It is deliberately cheap, fast and repeatable, and it is written down so a decision to proceed is a decision, not a drift.

  • Planning history and the pattern of decisions on and around the site
  • Designations and constraints that change the cost base rather than the timeline
  • Access, ownership and title questions that a solicitor will eventually price
  • Physical constraints visible from the public record and site photographs
  • The two assumptions the whole appraisal rests on — stated explicitly

Where AI fits in triage

AI does the reading and the structuring. It reads the planning history, extracts the constraint references, drafts the chronology, and produces a first-pass brief in a consistent format so two sites can be compared on the same terms.

What it does not do is decide. The go/no-go stays with you, and the professional questions get commissioned properly once the site clears triage.

Make the output comparable

The compounding benefit is not speed on one site — it is that every site produces the same shaped document. After a dozen, you have a pipeline you can actually rank, and a written record of why each site was parked.

Our free 30-minute AI Site Triage sets out fifteen questions in that format, which you can run manually before automating anything.

FAQ

Common questions

How is triage different from due diligence?
Triage is cheap desk research that decides whether to spend; due diligence is paid professional investigation that decides whether to buy. Running them in the wrong order is where budgets go.
Can AI do site due diligence?
No. Due diligence requires surveys, searches and professional opinions with liability attached. AI compresses the desk research that frames what to commission.
What should I record for each site?
The source documents, the date, the constraints found, the assumptions the appraisal depends on, and the decision with its reason. That record is what makes a parked site re-openable a year later.

Keep reading

Related notes

Discuss your workflowSee all services