“EDIT - a lot of the work is a credit to the design shop, they did a good job. It is their knowledge of the local customs that greatly smoothed the process. I may have steered the ship but I didn’t do any heavy lifting on plan prep. Despite this I have a lot of pre construction service embedded in the job, so much that I could hardly afford to pay a professional person to do it. Starting projects always reminds me how much work it is to build one single home, I’m impressed by teams that can do dozens of builds per year”.
This is not a post to describe how smart I am, though I have learned a few things from 25 successful custom infill projects (while suffering a fair bit of trauma along the way). How was I able to get a released development permit in under a month (for a full 2700 sq ft house and detached garage), followed by a comprehensive building permit in around three weeks? Horror stories abound in the industry regarding the DP side, where permits get tied up in purgatory for years. We deployed a few tactics for sure, and what we did worked. That in itself is quite impressive to me. Often even when you (as the applicant) do the right thing, you can end up eating a hammer. This time we breezed through to approval without having to incur cost for changes and delay. Time value of the delay hits home big time, I have huge overhead costs on my land inventory which runs into an opportunity cost on trapped dollars, that hurts when, self employed, you don’t take home a biweekly paycheque when projects go over time. Other fringe benefits abound with this project, first we didnt have to pay an offsite levy, generally that is $5k on my typical project, nor do we get hit with asphalt degradation which can be another $3-5k. The additive value of the stamped permits also have increased its value from raw land, to a turn key development site, in exchange for around $16k in design, DP and BP fees, warranty and filing cost. All of this is starting to feel really good, because my $400k empty lot is in a coveted area, extremely appealing, and fully in my control as the builder.
Here are the tactics used to accelerate the permits and avoid vast pain at the development stage:
contextual route - the discretionary permit path simply adds more review time at the city. we made the conscious decision to stick into the box set out by the contextual approach. that meant all setbacks, heights and coverages hit the mark, boxes are ticked by the planner and we move on.
permitted use - the submission of a project in the ‘permitted category’ facilitates a pathway to ‘yes’ that needs less advertising to the general public, a major time saver on this one. No need to advertise approval because the permitted use is ‘not appealable’. Another benefit of the plan from the outset, it didnt get appealed. Often a neighbour will not like the project you are planning and file an appeal. That is tough issue because you must hire a lawyer, wait for a hearing, and so on, that cost is very large and potentially deadly to the project.
no errors of substance on the DP submission - avoiding using up the planners time on issuance of a lengthy bylaw check and detailed team review where many issues come up that are our fault. A common issue is calculating the site coverage, somehow the math is different depending on who does it. No relaxations means no haggling over bylaw interpretation either.
Next up was the building permit stage. This is simply an easier process, if you have the right files (all of them and there are many), you get approved. The right engineer helps smooth over any hurdles and engaging the consultants early (once your DP is nearing readiness), you can actually shave weeks off the overall process. that means sequential work is happening on the BP while the DP is in pre approval. You can commission the technical files once you have certainty that the project will be a ‘go’. I was able to reduce the time from DP approved, to BP ready to file (I narrowed that gap massively). More specifically;
relationships - be on a first name basis and have the cell number of the key 3-4 parties you need to hire to get the BP assembled. All of these consultant types delivered my needed files in reasonable time. Will detail below what those are.
structural drawing package (roof and truss) - this is the bottlekneck of the industry. The staff at the lumber yard are inundated with work, and they can’t get to your drawings fast enough to turn them around. This has been a challenge now for years, and recently become acutely problematic. I don’t get it, the one truly white collar job in a blue collar business and it is the slowest? This is work that can only be done with proprietary software by the dealer, no shortcuts (we looked into it). Here is where we leveraged some relationships to have ours done with haste. Thanks Wade.
Energy model, hydronic, engineer - sure the hydronic drawing is a quick one, and the energy model is software driven using the inputs we recycled from the last job and can be done in a week. Repetition helps here by having standard furnaces, water tanks, HRV to draw from. The engineering, I would say, is sort of boilerplate (if the project is not unique or diverging from normal practices). You get lateral stability drawing, footing detail, pad sizing, rebar drawings, and a tall wall wood spec in short order from the engineer (if you have a contextual like building, I’m afraid boutique architect will not help here, but the right draftsman will).
reaction time - the BP plans examiner called me to iron out some details and notify me that I was missing a page or two. That helped and lot and I immediately prioritized the gaps. My turn around time on the details missed was over a week. I could have had the BP in less than two weeks had I been ‘perfect’ on my submitsion
ownership of the vista system account - the city created the online submission system, and the builder must maintain access and know how to use it to submit files, link all the sub contractor licences to the file, and fund the BP. As the builder, I have taken on this task rather than delegate it to someone else, because #4.
This was the best process I have encountered, the fastest, and most scaleable of all my builds to date. There is some compromise and tough decisions made at the beginning, but the avoided brain damage is simply priceless. To be able to go from raw land to owning a permit in two months gives me the sense of control that I crave over any project. The quick permit ‘de-risks’ the build, saves me a full season, and allows me to schedule the upcoming project with confidence that I already ordered the windows and am working on the appliances, before we put a shovel in the ground. Good news for sure.
