Screening Question Teardown — "What Is Your Available Industrial Site?"

Cluster Context and City Fit

Every industrial project triggers the property question, which is why it sorts differently than the other screens. A power screen eliminates cities that don't have the megawatts. A rail screen eliminates cities without a spur. Every city has land, so the property screen sorts on documentation instead.

The documentation gap looks different depending on which kind of city is answering.

Take a 60,000-person legacy industrial city with a shuttered auto-parts plant on 45 acres, municipal water and sewer to the fence line, and a Phase I environmental from 2019. The building and the utilities are already there. What's unresolved is condition: what that 2019 report actually covered, and whether the structure meets the mechanical and structural specifications of the prospect the city is chasing.

An agricultural corridor city of 35,000 with 120 acres of flat cropland at a highway interchange, single ownership, no environmental history, has the opposite gap. Clean site, almost no documentation on it. Nobody has mapped the stormwater detention footprint, the utility corridor, or the setbacks. The owner's willingness to sell has never been reduced to a written instrument with a price.

A 110,000-person growing city with a 70-acre greenfield in an industrial park with partial infrastructure can face all four gaps at once. The parcel was annexed and zoned. It was never characterized to the level a site selector's comparison table requires.

All three archetypes get this question, and all three tend to answer it the same way. The rubric below describes the full standard for large-footprint manufacturing RFIs. A 15,000-square-foot precision machining prospect won't require Virginia-caliber site characterization, but the evaluator still needs the same fields filled.

The Question

Phrasing varies. Some RFIs specify minimum acreage or square footage, some specify zoning, ceiling height, or utility access at the parcel. What's being asked underneath is whether you have a site the evaluator can score against the project's physical requirements right now, on documented evidence.

The Typical Answer

This sounds complete. It names a size, a zoning classification, a location, utility proximity, and owner disposition. Everything in it is true, and the director who has walked the site a hundred times knows it.

Why It Fails

The site selector is building a comparison table, typically eight to fifteen properties across multiple states, where every row carries the same fields so the client can rank them. The fields are developable yield in acres and buildable square feet, documented site control with price, current environmental status with scope and date, and utility service confirmed at the parcel boundary.

"80 acres" is gross acreage, not developable yield. "Willing to sell" describes the owner's disposition without documenting control or price. "All utilities available" means proximity to infrastructure, not confirmed capacity at the parcel boundary. The aerial photo confirms the land exists. It does not confirm the land is buildable, purchasable, clean, or served.

So the evaluator can't place the site in the table. It gets set aside for incompleteness rather than rejected on merit, which is a distinction with no practical difference to the city. The 2026 Site Selectors Guild Pulse Check found utility and infrastructure capacity is the leading elimination factor, cited by 61% of respondents. Property screens work the same way structurally: a row with empty fields cannot be ranked against rows with full ones, and nobody calls to say so.

The Passing Answer

The property question bundles four separate claims. Each is evaluated independently and each requires its own document.

1. Gross Size vs. Developable Yield

What the evaluator needs is contiguous developable acreage and estimated buildable square footage, calculated after removing wetlands, floodplain, stream buffers, slopes above buildable grade, utility easements, road rights-of-way, stormwater management area, and required setbacks.

No standard formula converts gross to net. Virginia's Business Ready Sites Program, VBRSP, requires a licensed site-development professional to report total acreage, buildout potential in square feet, and yield in square feet per acre, supported by a development-constraints map and a schematic buildout. Its sample characterization report shows a 266.3-acre property yielding an estimated 2,550,000 square feet, roughly 9,600 square feet per acre, after mapping topographic, environmental, coverage, infrastructure, and access constraints. The full characterization guidelines carry a December 2025 vintage. SiteOhio, the JobsOhio certification program, tracks total acres, total developable acres, and maximum contiguous developable acres as three distinct database fields.

These are program-specific standards, not universal thresholds. They are useful because they show what "documented" means to the person building the table.

The artifact is a dated constraints map and schematic buildout prepared by a civil engineer or land-development professional. The map identifies each excluded or reserved area by category. The buildout shows at least one plausible industrial configuration and the square footage it produces. Both carry the professional's seal and a date.

2. Enforceable Control

An owner who is willing to sell and an owner who is contractually bound are two different answers, and the field wants the second.

Virginia's VBRSP tier structure draws the line explicitly. Tier 1 accepts a private owner who is "agreeable to marketing" and permits assessment access. Tier 2 requires an option or documentation committing the owner to a competitive price with assessment and marketing access. For accelerated-characterization funding, Virginia requires an executed option, MOU, or performance agreement defining maximum price per acre, intended industrial use, and site access.

SiteOhio accepts ownership, an option agreement, or a willing-owner letter, but the letter must state a determined sale price per acre and mineral-rights terms. California's Business Ready Sites Program asks for clear title and an asking sale or lease price "if available," with no option or owner-agreement requirement.

A verbal report that the owner is willing to sell sits below the lowest documented tier in every program that publishes one. The passing answer names the control instrument, deed, executed option, MOU, or willing-owner letter, names the parties, states the price or price range, and gives the term if the instrument expires.

Price belongs in this field. Virginia, Ohio, California, and archived RFI responses all treat it as standard. For raw land: price per acre, sale terms, mineral-rights status. For existing buildings: asking sale price or lease rate per square foot, lease structure, operating expenses, and term.

As covered in the counterparties piece (Issue #2), the landowner controls this data, not the EDO. The work is to secure a signed site data sheet — confirmed acreage, current condition, asking price or lease range, control status, and authorization for the EDO to submit the site — before the RFI arrives.

3. Current Environmental Condition

"Phase I complete" is a status label. The passing answer gives the report date, the standard (ASTM E1527-21), the scope, the findings, and whether the report satisfies current All Appropriate Inquiries requirements. AAI is the federal standard a purchaser uses to establish liability protection under CERCLA, and it is the frame the prospect's counsel will apply to your report.

The designation means a current AAI-compliant Phase I now has to weigh evidence of PFOA and PFOS releases inside the same framework it applies to other CERCLA hazardous substances. EPA's May 2026 brownfield FAQ states this for brownfield-grant eligibility. Phase I is still a records review and site reconnaissance, not sampling.

Two shelf-life rules apply, and they don't align. Virginia's VBRSP Tier 3 accepts a Phase I completed within the previous five years. Acquisition-current federal AAI generally requires the inquiry within one year. A report can satisfy a state readiness tier while being too old, or too narrow in scope, for a purchaser's liability determination.

4. Building Condition (Existing Structures)

For a building, environmental condition and physical condition are separate documents from separate professionals. A property-condition report, produced by a licensed structural or mechanical engineer, covers structural capacity, floor-slab thickness and flatness, clear height, column spacing, crane capacity, fire suppression, and electrical service at the building.

Deliver it as a table. Every element quantified, not described in narrative. Clear height does most of the work at initial screening, and the requirement moves sharply by use: a distribution tenant, a general manufacturing operation, and a heavy-fabrication shop running overhead cranes need materially different numbers. Slab load capacity, column spacing, and service voltage vary the same way by prospect specification. What the evaluator needs is the measured figure to match against the project's spec, not "high ceilings."

Send this alongside the Phase I. A clean environmental report on a building whose clear height, slab capacity, or electrical service misses the prospect's specification does not move the property up the table.

The Tier-3 Translation

Two structural advantages on this dimension are real and usually undocumented: entitlement speed and direct access to the people who hold the site data.

If your planning commission can clear an industrial conditional use permit in 45 days while a competing metro takes 120, that is a screening advantage the moment you can cite it with recent precedent. Pull the last three industrial CUP approvals from council minutes. Document elapsed days from application to approval for each. Put the planning director's direct line in the response.

Landowner access works the same way. In a city of 75,000 the ED director knows the owner, and that relationship can produce a signed site data sheet with price, access authorization, and control terms inside a week. A metro EDO working through a REIT's asset management team may need months for the same page. The advantage only survives screening if the document already exists when the RFI arrives.

Who Else Needs This

Your civil engineer or land-development consultant produces the constraints map and schematic buildout. Send Virginia's sample characterization report as a format reference and ask for a comparable product on your priority sites.

Your environmental consultant confirms whether existing Phase I reports address PFOA/PFOS release indicators under the current CERCLA designation. Ask for a written scope-gap memo.

Your structural or mechanical engineer produces the tabular property-condition report for any building you intend to market. Quantified elements, not narrative.

Your landowner signs the site data sheet: confirmed acreage, asking price, control status, submission authorization. Do this before you need it.