Go/No-Go: Screen a Project Before Spending on Advisors

The best developers don’t lose money on the projects they complete. They lose it on the projects they should have dropped long ago — the site that looked so promising on an aerial photo but could never carry the utilisation the maths assumed. By the time that realisation arrives, an architect has usually sketched, an engineer has assessed, and a lawyer has worked through the easements. The money is spent, and the answer is no.

A structured go/no-go reverses the order. Instead of putting advisors on every opportunity, you screen many sites quickly and cheaply in parallel, discard the ones that can’t carry a project, and spend the advisory budget on the few cases that genuinely have a project in them. It isn’t a feasibility study, and it isn’t due diligence — it’s the filter before both. The point isn’t to say yes. It’s to say no fast enough that it costs nothing.

What a go/no-go is — and what it isn’t

A go/no-go screening answers a single question: is there even a project here worth investigating further? It should take hours, not weeks, and rely solely on publicly available data — before you’ve spoken to the municipality, hired an advisor or met the seller.

That also defines what it isn’t. It doesn’t settle the final land price — that’s the job of the residual method later. It doesn’t document risk exhaustively; that belongs in a proper site due diligence checklist. And it doesn’t replace an architect or engineer, but it does save you the 80–100 hours in the early phase you’d otherwise spend on cases that end as a no anyway.

Rule of thumb: a go/no-go should be able to disqualify a site faster than it can qualify it. If the screening takes longer than a meeting with an advisor, it’s too heavy.

The four knock-out criteria

Most of the value in a screening lies in the knock-outs — the conditions that make a project impossible or unprofitable, regardless of what the other numbers show. Find them first. A single red flag here is enough for a no-go.

1. Planning status and building rights

What may be built, and how much? Look up the zoning and planning status in Plandata.dk (the national planning data register). Does the property lie in an urban zone, rural zone or summer-cottage area? Is there a local plan in force, and what does it set for use, plot ratio, number of storeys and height? A local plan takes precedence, and if it designates the site for something other than your project, the starting point is a no — unless there is a realistic prospect of a dispensation under section 19 of the Planning Act, which can never be assumed.

If there’s no local plan, you fall back on the municipal plan framework and the indicative plot ratios: typically around 30 for detached housing, 40 for dense low-rise and 60 for multi-storey housing. Be aware too that the municipality can impose a section 14 prohibition and require a new local plan if your project challenges the existing planning — that can cost years. How to read the framework in practice is covered in our guide to reading a local plan.

2. Registered burdens

Title, easements and encumbrances appear in tingbogen (the Land Registry). A quick lookup reveals the burdens that can topple a project: covenants on building, road and access rights, sightline easements, utility lines with building lines, or rights of pre-emption. A single easement reserving a building-free zone across precisely the part of the site you intended to build on can halve the realisable building rights. At screening level you’re not hunting for every detail — you’re looking for the one burden that is a knock-out.

3. Physical and environmental constraints

Can the site actually be built on as assumed? Check for soil contamination, protected habitats, conservation orders, ancient-monument protection lines, lake and watercourse protection and low-lying areas via the public environmental registers. Contamination on a site to be converted to housing can trigger clean-up requirements that alone decide whether the project holds together. A full investigation is rarely necessary at this stage — but an obvious red flag must be caught before it gets expensive.

4. The rough maths

Finally: does the economics even carry? Here you don’t run a feasibility study, but an order of magnitude. Estimate the exit value from what the market pays for comparable property in the area today, subtract a rough construction budget and your required return, and see what’s left for the land. If you can’t come anywhere near the seller’s price expectation, the case is a no-go — no matter how good the plan is. We go through the full model step by step in the article on construction feasibility: residual land value, build budget and profitability.

Scoring over gut feel

The knock-out criteria sort out the impossible. But most cases aren’t disqualified — they land in a grey zone where the planning status is unclear, the easements ambiguous and the economics marginal. Here the temptation is to fall back on gut feel. Don’t.

Instead, give each screening a simple score across the same fixed parameters — planning certainty, burden risk, physical constraints and financial margin. The scale needn’t be sophisticated; three levels (green/amber/red) per parameter is plenty. The point isn’t precision, but comparability: once you’ve screened ten sites against the same scheme, you can rank them objectively and see which two or three deserve advisory spend. That’s how you qualify several development projects in parallel without drowning in them.

An honest score also forces the marginal cases into the light. A site that’s green on planning and physics but deep red on economics isn’t a “maybe” — it’s a no, until the price expectation moves.

Put the screening into a system

The value of a go/no-go grows with the number of times you use it. A one-off assessment is just gut feel with extra steps. A fixed scheme you run every single opportunity through becomes a pipeline — and it’s the pipeline that makes the difference between chasing the one case you fell in love with and choosing the best three out of thirty.

So keep the screening light enough that saying no costs nothing. Document the decision briefly — not for the auditor’s sake, but so you can later see why you dropped a site, if it resurfaces at a different price. And separate the two phases with discipline: screening is free and fast, due diligence and feasibility cost money and are thorough. Blend them, and you end up doing expensive work on cases that should never have made it further.

For commercial property to be converted to housing, the same four criteria apply — but the weighting shifts, because the existing structure and contamination history loom larger. We look more closely at that variant in feasibility on a commercial-to-residential conversion.

From screening to decision

The discipline of a go/no-go is free. What’s expensive is gathering the data the screening rests on — planning status from Plandata.dk, burdens from tingbogen (the Land Registry), building data from BBR (the Buildings and Dwellings Register), cadastral boundaries, contamination mapping and a picture of what the market actually pays in the area right now. Clicking through the individual registers for every site is precisely the friction that leads many to skip the screening and go straight to gut feel.

That’s the friction Arcili Hub removes. From a single cadastral parcel it gathers the public registers and transaction data behind the four criteria, so you can run a go/no-go in minutes instead of hours — and rank many sites against the same scheme before you decide which deserve advisory spend. The full pricing still belongs in the residual method — what can the land really cost; the screening merely decides whether you should be running the numbers at all.

Want to see what a structured screening looks like on your own cases? Book a walkthrough.