SiteFacts Reports

Name: SiteFacts Reports
Address: Terrebonne, OR, US
Telephone: +15413160371

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Terrebonne, OR
SiteFacts Reports

Serving the PNW!

🏡 Helping land buyers make smart decisions
📍 A Sand & Sage Solutions product by Don Healy
⚠️ Know before you buy—get the facts first!

💡 What We Do:
We provide expert site due diligence to help buyers avoid costly land mistakes.

06/05/2026

Cut and fill is what happens when someone cuts into a hillside to make a flat pad, then pushes the leftover dirt downslope to build on. When it is done right, with engineering and compaction testing, it holds. When it is not, that dirt is just sitting there, loosely packed, waiting to settle.

Before about 1980, nobody required compaction testing on residential fill. A lot of sloped lots in Oregon and Washington have old fill placed by a blade with zero testing. It looks like solid ground from the surface. It is not always.

On a Lane County property, a LiDAR analysis found a 1978 cut-and-fill bench that did not show up on satellite images or listing photos. The original mobile home sat on piers that flex with the ground. A new stick-built home with a poured concrete foundation does not flex. When old fill shifts unevenly under a foundation, the cracks start. A geotech study to find out how bad it is runs $3,000 to $8,000. And sometimes that study comes back with a worse answer than that. I have personally seen that answer come back.

Full case study in the first comment.

05/19/2026

A property inside City of Bend. Three and a half acres, existing home, existing septic, room to build. It looked like an easy ADU.

It wasn't.

The existing septic couldn't support an additional unit. City sewer was more than a quarter mile away. A licensed professional was brought in specifically to find a workaround. His conclusion: there wasn't one.

The ADU was abandoned.

This isn't a universal City of Bend rule. But the pattern it represents is everywhere. ADUs get stopped by things that don't show up in a zoning search: sewer distance, septic capacity, sizing limits, solar setbacks, parking requirements, access standards, distance rules between the ADU and the main home. Most buyers go straight to a builder. Builders start at the build phase, not the feasibility phase. The infrastructure questions don't get asked until it's too late to walk away.

Check before you commit. That question has a real answer before you own the property.

Full details at the link in the first comment.

Comment ADU or DM us if you have a specific property you are evaluating.

05/12/2026

A young couple bought a property in Redmond to build an ADU. The lot was commercially zoned.

Most buyers would either walk away from that or spend weeks trying to figure out what it means for a residential project.

Before calling a builder, they ordered a SiteFacts report.

That report found an abandoned permit file from a prior investor. Someone had tried to build a duplex on this lot, never finished, and left behind a paper trail sitting in a records office.

What that file contained:

Power undergrounding requirement: documented and confirmed.
Sewer lateral: confirmed and sized before a single plan was drawn.
Parking: already permitted and completed by the prior owner.

Then we drove to the property and physically located the property pins. The yard looked bigger than it was. The ADU concept still fits, but now they know the real dimensions before paying an architect.

The property also had a grandfathered residential use from before the commercial zoning took effect. That means they held residential construction rights AND the commercial zone's zero setback rules at the same time. That combination does not show up on the county's zoning card.

They walked into their builder meeting knowing exactly what they could build.

Full story in the comments.

04/29/2026

📣 New from Sand & Sage Solutions: Permitting Services.

If you've ever tried to pull a permit yourself, you know. The applications. The setback diagrams. The file naming conventions. The corrections. The waiting.

We handle all of it. You send us your building plans, and we handle the application, documentation, submittal, and every conversation with the jurisdiction along the way. Don't have a site plan yet? We draft those in AutoCAD as an add-on service.

Whether you're building a new home with an on-your-lot builder, putting up a shed, or running new electrical, if it needs a permit, this is for you.

Comment PERMITS or DM us, we'll send pricing and walk you through how it works. 👇

10/17/2025

I’ve been both humbled and amazed at how many people can relate to the hidden challenges properties hold.

My passion is helping people make good decisions with clear, black and white data that saves time, money, and stress before a single shovel hits the ground.

Next week I’m launching something new called Below The Surface — a short, story-driven newsletter about the real problems we uncover during due diligence and how to spot them before they turn into expensive surprises.

If that sounds like your kind of read, drop a 🏠 or comment “I’m in” and I’ll DM you the subscribe link.

The first issue comes out Wednesday morning, and I can’t wait to share the first story.

10/15/2025

Every lot has a secret.

Scotts Mills, Oregon.
Owner already removed a 1970s manufactured home.
Looked clean. Power. Water. Sewer. Ready to build.
Then we ran a SiteFacts report.

Let’s break down what we found.

Discovery #1
The demo that never finished
Expected: Demo permit was issued and closed.
Found: Final inspection never happened. Permit expired. New building permit would stall until the demo is reissued and the capped water and sewer stubs are re-exposed and inspected.
Cost impact: Weeks of delay if caught after submittal.

Discovery #2
Power math said 400 amps
Expected: Reuse existing service from the old home.
Found: House plus shop required 400A service after load calcs.
Cost impact: $2,000 panel upgrade.

Discovery #3
Two inches short, twenty grand long
Expected: Keep the existing 2" conduit.
Found: Utility requires 3" for standard 200A, and this project needed 400A. Transformer on a pole across the street meant replacing the service lateral all the way to the transformer.
Cost impact Option A: Trench the street. Traffic control plan. Engineered trench repair. City Council approval with a 2-month minimum wait. Costs pushing ~$20,000.

Discovery #4
The bore you can’t book
Expected: Just bore under the road.
Found: Boring contractors were six months out and not eager for a short residential bore.
Cost impact Option B: $20,000+ and a half-year wait.

Total Damage
Chosen path: Set a new pole on the property side, run an overhead line to it, then trench new conduit to that pole.
$17,000 for the utility solution + $2,000 panel = $19,000.
Still a six-week wait for the power company crew.

Plot Twist
The long-ago demo permit was never finaled. Crossing a public street for power isn’t a quick dig. It’s policy, agendas, and clock time.

Good News
We caught everything before a build contract.
No blown contingency. No finger-pointing.
A clear plan and budget up front.

The Lesson
Do due diligence early. On former manufactured home sites, verify service size, conduit diameter, transformer location, and permit finals before you promise a start date. Pull the thread on every single question.

Closing Question
What would worry you most about building on land: surprise costs, long delays, or being told you can’t build?

10/07/2025

That "perfect" piece of land? Check again.

Here's the thing about buying land: it's never the obvious stuff that gets you. It's always that next layer of information hiding beneath the surface.

This week we looked at a property in Oregon that seemed ideal. Flat terrain, no wetlands, no floodplains. Everything checked out at first glance.

Then we dug deeper.

First we found moderate landslide susceptibility. Not great, but manageable.

Then moderate liquefaction potential in the soils. Okay, we can work with that.

Then mildly expansive soils showed up. Now things are stacking up.

Then we hit the zoning code.

Turns out this county has a Geotechnical Hazard Overlay that triggers when ANY of these factors exist. This "simple" rural parcel suddenly needed:

Geotechnical soils report
- Engineered drainage and erosion control plan
- Stormwater plan
- Grading permit with inspections
- Geologic Hazard Technical Committee review
- Over-excavation and engineered fill import

The cost? $20,000-$40,000 and several weeks of delays before even starting construction.

This wasn't some complicated urban property. This was flat farmland that looked perfect on paper.

Most people buying land don't know to look for this stuff. Even experienced builders get caught because they don't have time to dig through every layer of county codes and soil reports.

Everyone's walking through a minefield blindfolded, hoping they don't step on the one that blows up their budget and timeline.

The boring information? That's the expensive information.

Have you ever been surprised by hidden costs on a land purchase? What did you find?

09/26/2025

STEPS vs STEPS

Here’s a painful (and kind of funny) story about miscommunication.

Slope is one of the biggest headaches when it comes to building. It also happens to be the hardest thing to explain to customers.

A few years back, we were building an ADU. Foundation in, backfilled, slabs poured—it looked great. The customer was on a tight budget, and in the contract it said: “no steps.”

Our superintendent worked hard to set the elevation just right so we wouldn’t need foundation steps. He even reviewed it with the customer. Everything looked perfect.

Then I showed up on site. The customer was upset. Scratch that—she was furious.

She looked me dead in the eye and said: “I told you guys, no steps!!”

I was baffled. “Ma’am, we made sure there weren’t any steps in your home.”

Then she pointed… at the single 7 ½-inch concrete stair from the garage slab to the entry door.

My stomach dropped. “Oh… that step.”

Lesson learned. Now, in every conversation, I always make one thing crystal clear:

👉 Foundation steps are NOT the same as stair steps.

09/23/2025

🏠 Every Lot Has a Secret 🔍

We just completed a property report on what seemed like the "perfect" infill lot in Idaho - flat, residential zoning, no flood issues. The buyers were ready to build their dream retirement home!

But when we checked historical Google Earth imagery, we discovered a home was on this lot just 15 years ago. 😮

This discovery raises important questions:

Backfilled basement or foundation?
Old septic system location?
Hidden well or water lines?
Proper demo permits completed?
Existing power infrastructure?

Each of these can add unexpected costs and delays to a new build.

The next steps:

✅ Geotech soils survey
✅ County office permit research
✅ Site visit with power company

We're seeing this more often as builders get creative with available lots. What looks "ready to build" on the surface can have a complex history underground.

💡 Bottom line: A little due diligence upfront can save massive headaches (and money!) later.

09/19/2025

This week’s due diligence review revealed a growing trend.

Builders are getting blindsided by erosion control on projects that never used to trigger it.

And the costs are stacking up fast.

We’ve been doing due diligence in Lane County, Oregon, for years. Rural single-family homes were always straightforward. Erosion control was never a major consideration.

But this week, during a SiteFacts review, we found something different. Lane County recently passed Mercury TMDL regulations.

The result? In large portions of the county, even rural residential projects now require basic erosion control measures like silt fences, stabilized construction entrances, and routine inspections.

And this isn’t just an Oregon story. Across the country, erosion control is creeping into places where builders never expected it.

Here’s where I see it catching people off guard:

- Subdivisions where your individual lot is under an acre, but the overall development triggers requirements
- Cities that are pushing compliance down to single-lot homes
- Rural counties that never had rules adopting stormwater standards
- Projects near streams, wetlands, or floodplains facing extra scrutiny

The reality is simple. What used to be free now comes with a price tag.

Wattles, fencing, soil stabilization, inspections. It adds up.

Red flags to watch for:

- FEMA flood zones
- Properties near streams, rivers, or seasonal waterways
- Wetland areas
- Jurisdictions with stormwater systems
- Steeper slopes or tricky drainage

What smart builders are doing:

- Checking erosion requirements as part of the first site review
- Building relationships with suppliers and inspectors before they are needed
- Budgeting compliance costs up front instead of reacting later
- Timing construction carefully to minimize risk

Here’s the lesson I keep coming back to. Even if you know a market well, you can’t assume the rules will be the same this year as they were last year.

The builders who adapt quickly will protect their margins. The ones who get caught by surprise will be dealing with blown budgets and delayed projects.

Are you seeing erosion control show up in markets where it never used to?

What’s been your experience?

Follow for weekly SiteFacts insights on due diligence, regulations, and market intelligence.

Address

Terrebonne, OR

Telephone

+15413160371

Website

https://sitefactsreport.com/example-report-download/, https://sitefactsreport.com/

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