Planning Your Site for a Successful Commercial Project

Congrates!, you have secured a piece of land and are planning to go to the next step in your commercial developemnt project, there are many steps to take in order to ensure a profitable and appealing site layout. Such a site plan needs to check multiple boxes which we will be discussing in this article.

1- Finding the buildable area for yor site: your site may be a large tract but not all of it may be buildable. This could be for different reasons such as floodways and floodplains, pipeline easements, presence of wetlands, and building lines/setbacks from the streets and from neighboring properties. In addition to that, there are parking requirements that limit the site from being fully developed (unless an expensive solution like building a garage under the building is feasable). An important piece of information that will help you find this information out is your survey. Sometimes they could be hard ti understand or read but they are worth investign time and really understanding the site constraints.

2- Acessibility to the site: simply said, where to place your driveways leading to your site. This could be a simple answer but may involve big complications as it could mean working with an additional permitting jurisdiction if your lot is on a corner. For example, your lot may have one side on a City of Houston street and the other on a TxDOT one. Each permitting agency has different requirements on what they would like to see on the plans and navigating these requirments is a complex and long process. Sometimes the addition of a dedicated left turn to your site could be a great enhancement to the site accessibility, however that also has certain requirements such as a traffic study that would need to be done. Also, car turning movement should be analyzed to optimize the turning radii of the corners on the site to make navigating the site as easy as possible.

3- Landscaping: depending on the jurasdiction of where the site is, some cities require a minimum landscaping area. Planning an area for landscaping that works with the site without hindering usability of that area is vital to a successful site plan.

4- Fire lane requirements: depending on the site, there could be a need to provide a fire truck access and turnaround. If not planned for early on in the project, this requirement could cause significant changes to the site to make it comply with the regulations.

5- Parking accessibility: Having a paking area that is easy to access by pedestrian as well as traffic is very important in terms of the user experience for the customers visiting the site. Providing sidewalks, ADA ramps, and striped walkways greatly enhance the experience and provide a safe access to and from the buildings.

6- Drainage requirments: one of the easily missed points is drainage requirments. You may have the best site plan but with the detention and mitigation requirements, that plan may not work as intended. This is where a group effort is needed between the Civil Engineer and the Architect to figure out the requirements and discuss with the client the options such as doing a detention pond vs walled pond vs underground detention.

The above are some of the most important points to take into account when planning a site and operate a successful business. At ARCO 3D and with our combined experince of over 30 years, we will help you get off the ground successfully and guide you through the hoops of site planning and layouts. We provide our clients with all possible options for their site and help them with a decision matrix of the pros and cons of each layout. This helps our clients discuss that with the stakeholders and make decisions faster. Reach out to us for a site assessment/ feasiblity if you are not sure whether to buy a piece of land or not.