Design: find out what fits before you buy

Design is a screening tool for the question every land deal turns on: how much of this parcel is actually usable? You pick one or more touching parcels, type in the setbacks that apply, and Land Owl draws the buildable envelope — the area far enough from every lot line — directly on the satellite imagery.

It also carves out what you cannot build on. Design checks the parcel live against FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer and the National Wetlands Inventory, and subtracts anything it finds from the buildable area rather than leaving you to eyeball it.

Then you place a building. Give it a width, a depth and a number of storeys and drag, rotate and resize it inside the envelope — or let Land Owl auto-place the largest footprint that fits. Footprint, gross floor area, lot coverage and FAR update as you move it.

Each of these is saved as a Site Plan, so you can come back to a parcel you were working on rather than starting over.

People who need a defensible first answer on a parcel before they spend money getting a real one. Design is a desktop screen, not a substitute for a surveyor or a civil engineer — it is what you do the week before you decide whether to pay for either.

• Land buyers checking whether a lot can take the house, shop or barn they have in mind
• Developers sizing a site quickly across a shortlist before committing to due diligence
• Builders and contractors sanity-checking a footprint against a client's setbacks
• Investors comparing two parcels where the acreage is similar but the usable area is not
• Anyone who has been surprised by how much of a lot a floodplain or a wetland takes out

Click a parcel on the map, then open Design from the Tools menu (or press S) and choose Site a Building. The panel walks through four numbered steps.

1. 1 · Parcel information

   The parcel you clicked becomes the site, with its address, APN, deeded acreage and zoning district carried across. Add a parcel to assemble touching lots into one site. Land Owl picks the front lot line from the nearest road, and tells you when it cannot find one so you can set it yourself.

2. 2 · Constraints

   Enter the setbacks — a simple front and all-other-edges pair, or a value per edge. Optionally add max FAR, max lot coverage and max storeys if you know the parcel's limits. Flood and wetland screening runs against FEMA and the NWI and can be subtracted from the buildable area, with an optional buffer from their edges.

3. 3 · Building inputs

   Set a width, a depth and a number of storeys, then place the building — or use Auto-place max footprint to have Land Owl grid-search the envelope for the largest one that fits. Drag it to move, use the stem handle to rotate, and drag a corner to resize. Add more than one building on the same site.

4. 4 · Outputs

   Site area, buildable area and % buildable, then footprint, gross floor area, lot coverage, FAR and storey count for what you have placed — each checked against the limits you entered, and a note telling you whether the building sits inside the buildable area.

It is a screening estimate, not a survey, and the product says so on the panel. Parcel lines come from county tax geometry rather than a surveyed plat, so treat the envelope as a first read and confirm the boundary before any design or purchase decision.

It does not know your zoning code. Setbacks, max FAR, max coverage and max storeys are values you type in — Land Owl checks the building against them, but it does not look them up, and it does not tell you whether what you have drawn would be approved. The zoning district is shown for reference only.

It screens flood and wetlands and nothing else. Soils, slope and hazardous sites are map layers you can switch on to look at, but they never reduce the buildable area. Nor does terrain: there is no grading, cut-and-fill or slope calculation anywhere in the tool, and buildings are flat footprints with a storey count, not 3D massing.

You can place buildings and nothing else — no roads, driveways, septic fields, wells, ponds, parking or lot splits. Footprints are rectangles. And a Site Plan lives in the browser you made it in: it is not saved to your account, cannot be exported to PDF or CAD, and cannot yet be shown to anyone you share the map with.