SiteFacts Reports

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.

Cut and fill is what happens when someone cuts into a hillside to make a flat pad, then pushes the leftover dirt downslo...
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.

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

A young couple bought a property in Redmond to build an ADU. The lot was commercially zoned.Most buyers would either wal...
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. 👇

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