How Smart Investors Use Zoning, Due Diligence, and Subdivisions to Create Value

Bill DiConza (00:00)
your 10 % down and you go through the approval process which depending on how intense the application is if it’s got environmental or wetland issues or you may have to go to a menu of different boards of the municipality, county, state, town, village ⁓ before you can get your final approval and if you can get into that contract to purchase the property contingent upon getting all your approvals so that basically by the time you close

Michelle Tack (00:14)
Mm-hmm.

Bill DiConza (00:28)
and purchase the property, you’ve already got it subdivided. You’re ready to sell. ⁓ So, in the best of all worlds, you’ve almost pre-sold the lots before you get there. You’ve talked about them. So you’ll have a bunch of people lined up for four lots way before the time that you actually have to purchase it.

Michelle Tack (00:40)
Interesting.

Hey everybody, I’m Michelle Tack and I’m one of the podcast leaders for Investor Fuel. We’ve got an exciting program today and I wanted to introduce you to Bill DiConza That sounds like a good Italian name, Bill. I don’t know if that’s true or not, ⁓ but we’re thrilled to have you. You’ve been making some serious moves in terms of…

Bill DiConza (02:36)
Yes.

Michelle Tack (02:44)
being able to purchase property and be able to subdivide it. So it’s a really interesting subject to discuss and we’re super excited. Again, Bill, thank you so much. We’re glad you’re here. One of the things I think our listeners are really going to take away from how you’re approaching this ability to acquire property and subdivide it is your diligence about,

really looking at your area, being a subject matter expert in Long Island and sort of the South Hampton, North Hampton, in the Bridge Hampton area and being a subject matter expert there and networking, for example, with your real estate folks, your rotary folks. think that’s ⁓ something that is definitely a strength of yours. So let’s dive in. for people that may be not familiar

with your world. Give us a short version of what your main focus is these days.

Bill DiConza (03:47)
I have ⁓ always been involved in land use, ⁓ the land use business, all aspects of it. Even in my own home when we lived up in Oyster Bay Cove, I was chairman of my village zoning board for a decade or more. So I’ve always had a involvement with land use. And what we look for now is we look for oversized residential lots. ⁓

it’s a little more rural out here than it is closer to Manhattan. ⁓ You’ll see oversized lots. And do a search down at the village hall or the town hall, depending on what the municipality is, and see if the lot is able to be subdivided and if it makes sense to subdivide it, dollars and cents. And if it does, then we move forward. If it doesn’t, or if it’s gonna be too much of a long haul to get the subdivision approved,

Michelle Tack (04:15)
Mm-hmm.

Bill DiConza (04:40)
out of the municipality. If we’re gonna have a lot of opposition, then we move on to the next one.

Michelle Tack (04:46)
Understood. What markets are you operating in, Is it just the Hamptons area or help me understand?

Bill DiConza (05:40)
Sure. ⁓ It’s mostly in the Hamptons, but the market is so dry out here. The numbers are just crazy high because there’s such a lack of inventory ⁓ that it’s slowly creeping west and north. The North Fork of Long Island, the island basically splits. have the Hamptons on the South Fork and then the North Fork and then you have

the Long Island Sound in Connecticut. So the North Fork is a beautiful farm, agricultural areas, it’s become a very hot spot also for people who don’t want to pay the five to $10 million for a house in South Hampton. They’ll pay two or $3 million for a house over there and they won’t have all the traffic and all the noise and it’s a little more bucolic. So it’s going north and it’s also going west back towards the city. So you’ll hit these communities before you get to the Hamptons that are

Michelle Tack (06:07)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Bill DiConza (06:34)
It’s the same Atlantic Ocean. They’re a little more densely populated than the Hamptons are, but they offer an hour and 20 minutes to Manhattan, and you’re in a nice place to enjoy yourself.

Michelle Tack (06:38)
Yep, it is.

Well, what brings that up to me, Bill, is the methodology you’re using. seems to be very, I wouldn’t say automatic, but you clearly know from A to Z the steps that you need to ⁓ do and to do it in a fashion that’s repetitive. Can you talk a little bit about how you’ve been able to create that machine and make it run smoothly?

Bill DiConza (07:13)
Sure. ⁓ Having been again exposed to zoning boards and planning boards, I got to see it from both sides of the desk, presenting applications as well as representing the municipalities that receive the applications.

⁓ So if you see the property, you have an inkling that it might be able to be subdivided. Go to town hall, do your research. If it’s a two acre lot in a one acre zone, perhaps you can divide it in half and have your two single acres, your two one acre properties. And if you can, you enter into a contract. If you’re fortunate enough, you’ll have a seller who will agree to a contingent contract, whereas you put your money down.

Michelle Tack (07:49)
Mm-hmm.

Bill DiConza (07:55)
your 10 % down and you go through the approval process which depending on how intense the application is if it’s got environmental or wetland issues or you may have to go to a menu of different boards of the municipality, county, state, town, village ⁓ before you can get your final approval and if you can get into that contract to purchase the property contingent upon getting all your approvals so that basically by the time you close

Michelle Tack (08:09)
Mm-hmm.

Bill DiConza (08:24)
and purchase the property, you’ve already got it subdivided. You’re ready to sell. ⁓ So, in the best of all worlds, you’ve almost pre-sold the lots before you get there. You’ve talked about them. So you’ll have a bunch of people lined up for four lots way before the time that you actually have to purchase it.

Michelle Tack (08:36)
Interesting.

makes sense. Not every operator, mean, all operators at some point run into maybe a deal that went sideways or they had to pivot fast. Do you mind sharing any of the moments you may have had in your illustrious career, maybe something like that happened or you had to pull out and how you dealt with it?

Bill DiConza (09:02)
We’ve never had anything like that. No, I’m just kidding. But for the most part, you try to be aware of all the pitfalls. mean, anybody can go out there, take a map, put lines on it. Each block equals what the regs say it has to equal. You divide it and you’re done.

Michelle Tack (09:04)
You’re amazing!

Right.

Bill DiConza (09:22)
⁓ The pitfalls, if you can build those contingencies into the contract, you’re safe. You start doing holes and you realize that the test holes you do for your septic system out here, a lot of the areas don’t have sewage, so you’re putting it in the ground and under the front lawn someplace. And if the soil isn’t the type of soil that will easily absorb what you need it to absorb and you can’t put the cesspool in,

Michelle Tack (09:31)
Mm-hmm.

Bill DiConza (09:52)
⁓ You either have to abandon the project or you have to get very expensive and dig out all the soil and bring in rateable soil that you can then put your cesspools in. Technology has come a long way. ⁓ On Long Island, we get our drinking water from the water below us.

Michelle Tack (09:53)
Mm-hmm.

Bill DiConza (10:10)
⁓ When you go over to the city, they get it from upstate aquifers that come down into the city. But here, you flush or what you put on your lawns, we have a lot of beautiful golf courses. That’s Shinnecock over my shoulder there. Yeah, yeah, they’re having the open there in like two months. ⁓ What you put on the soil goes into the drinking water.

Michelle Tack (10:14)
Yes.

I didn’t know that was that. cool. Nice.

Bill DiConza (10:33)
So you’ve got a very high standards for the nitrogen and things like that that you have to meet.

Michelle Tack (10:39)
Mm-hmm.

Bill DiConza (10:40)
not only in the towns and the villages, but you have an overlay of the state and the county health departments. So there are a lot of players in an application and there’s a lot of areas where you can get thrown off course. There’s no question about it. But having done it for 30 plus years, I of know most of the things that can go wrong and try to put contingencies in around them.

Michelle Tack (11:37)
It sounds like you probably learned the hard way, right? Like probably something like that happened with the water, right? At one point and that you had to… How did you… What did you do at that point? Like, I mean, early in your career, how did you pivot from that? Did you have to pull out or did you… Were you able to fix it? ⁓

Bill DiConza (11:40)
Yeah, well, yeah. Absolutely.

I blame it on my partner.

I’d say the two areas that popped to mind, we were able to come up with a little less density for the development and a little more money for the sanitation system. And we were able to work. They still were money makers, but not as big a payday as we had anticipated going in.

Michelle Tack (12:08)
Okay, so you’re able to.

That’s great. That’s, I mean, this is the type of things that people that may want to get into this business or may even want to invest with you, I don’t know, you know, want to know, right? I mean, you you learned over 30 years, it separates really, you know, the folks who sort of dabble in real estate from the ones who stay in the game long-term, right? I mean, I remember someone saying to me a while back, said anybody that’s been in sales and I’ve been in sales more than 25 years, you know,

You have to be good at it because it’s your whole career, right? You wouldn’t be doing it unless you’re a masochist, ⁓ Let me ask you, what are you focused on solving or scaling next? What is your next big venture? think you sort of alluded to, maybe it’s going out to, know, Norfolk or not, but what’s a big next thing for you?

Bill DiConza (12:48)
Yeah.

We’re always looking for different projects, different properties that come on the market or if they’re not on the market, we’ll go door knocking and get it on the market. ⁓

Michelle Tack (13:15)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bill DiConza (13:17)
because the land is there. And as I said earlier, one of the things that we learned early on was they’re not making any more of it. But if you do the subdivisions, you actually can create more developable land than is currently just sitting out there. ⁓ I’m looking a little further west outside the Hamptons for something ⁓ more affordable.

Michelle Tack (13:24)
Mm-hmm.

Bill DiConza (13:39)
not affordable affordable housing as you think of it, but more affordable than the housing is maybe two or $3 million versus 10 or $20 million. And there’s opportunities there also. There’s some beautiful waterfront properties. There’s some very nice neighborhoods and school districts. ⁓ And on the North Forks, some of the farmland that hasn’t been… ⁓

Michelle Tack (13:58)
Nice.

Bill DiConza (14:05)
deemed agricultural forever, the town comes in and buys the development rights for a lot of these properties. So they have to remain agricultural. When you buy houses out here, they charge a 2 % extra tax to the purchaser. And that goes into a fund. And with that fund, they purchase a lot of the real estate and take it off the market so that it will always be open space or it will always be agriculture and it won’t get developed. ⁓

Michelle Tack (14:31)
and trust her.

Bill DiConza (14:34)
I was talking with the judges the other day and we were talking about the high price of housing and all these taxes come on because they’re going to put a new tax on that allows ⁓ the municipality to subsidize affordable housing. So you have this first tax that allows you to take all the land off the market and now you don’t have any place to build it. You don’t have any place to build affordable housing. So now they’re going to change another tax to

Michelle Tack (14:55)
Mm-hmm.

It’s a problem.

Bill DiConza (15:02)
take that money to make the land affordable so you can buy the other land. sometimes people think that raising taxes answers problems, but it really doesn’t.

Michelle Tack (15:12)
Yeah,

understood. ⁓ Let me ask you a question in terms of maybe for those people that are listening that are early in their journey, right? Or they’re looking to level up. they maybe benefit from hearing ⁓ how you built relationships locally to grow your network. I know you and I had talked a little bit about the Rotary Club before we got on to the

podcast, but can you talk a little bit about that?

Bill DiConza (16:23)
Sure. ⁓ The locality is very important and being in touch with the real estate brokers, there’s plethora of them out there walking down Main Street here in West Hampton, there’s probably about 10 of them, five on one side of street and five on the other. And just…

They keep your social relationships as well as your business relationships and keep everybody keeps in everybody’s face in a nice way so that they know they think of you when all of a sudden Mr. Jones wants to sell his huge piece of property, they’ll pick up the phone and give you a buzz so that you’re early on in the process to get to Mr. Jones and you sit down and you tell him what you think can happen with this property. ⁓

Michelle Tack (16:50)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Bill DiConza (17:09)
But it’s a relationship thing. It’s a relationship thing as well as, as I had mentioned, I get in the car and I drive around all the time. With Google Earth, it’s very easy to see what’s going on behind those hedges. Is that a huge piece of property or is it a pond? That’s important too. And when I see the oversized parcels,

Michelle Tack (17:16)
Yeah. Easy. That’s good.

Bill DiConza (17:31)
I then do my due diligence. go to town hall or village hall, find out the zoning, see if there are any covenants and restrictions. If this property had been part of a subdivision a decade ago where they said no more subdividing of the property. You you got to look into all of that stuff.

Michelle Tack (17:35)
Right.

Absolutely. It sounds, also what I’ve gained from getting to know you a little bit and what you’re speaking about today is that it’s consistent behavior though, right? It’s consistently, it’s not, you can’t come in and just dabble and go, here I am, glad to know you. And then you don’t talk to that person for nine months. And it looks then very self-serving when you see a land, a piece of land up and they’re like, Bill who? Right? I mean, it seems that would be it.

Bill DiConza (17:54)
it’s a

Right, right.

Now the relationships are important.

Michelle Tack (18:14)
Well, look, you’ve been incredible. Thank you very much. Before we go, I want to make sure that people have an opportunity to contact you. So would you mind giving both your email address and your cell phone or whatever phone you use for your business? And then we’ll wrap up.

Bill DiConza (18:33)
Sure, the email is my name, William DiConza ⁓

W-I-L-L-I-A-M-D-I-C-O-N-Z-A at gmail.com. ⁓ Our company is Island Land Consulting Services. And we work with a bunch of the ⁓ surveyors and real estate folk and whomever else we have to bring in on applications to do the presentation, architects. It’s it’s local. It’s all very local. No matter where you are, whether you’re here or on the North Fork or further up island, you try to keep a

Michelle Tack (18:44)
Mm-hmm.

local.

Bill DiConza (19:06)
Welcome.

Michelle Tack (19:07)
and your cell phone number is?

Bill DiConza (19:09)
516-376-2013. ⁓

Michelle Tack (19:13)
Bill, thank you very much for the folks attending the podcast. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Bill who are out there building real businesses. So keep on checking in for our podcast. Thanks again, Bill.

Bill DiConza (19:26)
Thank you.