Deciding on land has never been easier.
Understanding it hasn't changed.
Listings, satellite views, drone footage, a hundred design ideas before lunch.
How the water moves when it rains. What the sun does in December, not just June.
You can fall for a piece of land in an afternoon and start planning it that night.
The things that decide whether a plan works are the slowest to reveal themselves.
What the land won't tell you on its own
SOLAR
How light moves across your land through the year — sun paths, daylight, the angles that change everything you plant or build.
TOPOGRAPHY
Good design starts with knowing exactly what you're working with. Elevation, slope, aspect, hillshade, and contour maps.
HYDROLOGY
Water finds its own way. Map catchments and stream order to see how it moves across your land, and beyond your boundary.
CLIMATE
The forces you can't feel on a visit: temperature, precipitation, wind, humidity, soil, air quality. Thirty years of it — the extremes, not just the averages.
You
Please provide a site assessment.
Ada — Golden Gate Park
Strong westerlies through spring and summer, with winter gusts recorded as high as 95.5 mph — a windbreak on the western edge would protect tender plantings and cut heat loss in the cold months. Winter carries 59% of the year's rain, so a 1,000 ft² roof could harvest around 12,800 gallons to hold for the dry summer.
…and the full read on topography, solar, climate, and soil.
Before you decide
The tool I wish I'd had.
Permalogica came out of a real land search. Hundreds of plots, read by hand, long before the tool existed.
Honest about what the data can and can't show.
Permalogica shows you the resolution for your land before you pay, discounts the price when it's low, and never lets you buy blind.
A few things it isn't
A replacement for walking the land.
The opposite, really. Nothing replaces walking it yourself. It tells you what to look for, so the time you spend on the land is worth more.
Data you couldn't dig up yourself.
Most of it's out there — if you know where to look and how to run GIS software. The work is pulling it together and making it make sense for your land.
A substitute for professional help.
It won't handle your legal due diligence, your soil tests, or your final design. It gives you the intelligence to make better decisions.