How a Broker Found Large Affordable Housing Sites Across 34 Counties
VP, Pacific Northwest brokerage group that sources land for affordable housing developers · Nationwide · September 7, 2026
What they knew
A boutique commercial real estate firm in the Pacific Northwest handles land acquisitions, investment sales, and tenant representation for developers and investors. Its VP sources land for a client a few miles away: a national developer of 4 percent LIHTC communities that wants to be in submarkets from Phoenix to Columbus. His job is to say whether a market is realistic on the land and pricing there, then find the parcels and the sellers. The routine was a mapping export with the QCT layer on top and zoning pulled by hand, city by city.
What they asked
Show me all the land four acres or above within a QCT or DDA that is zoned multifamily or has a path to rezone, vacant or with a small building on a big lot, and tell me who owns it.
What MAIA did
Drew the eligible map
HUD's qualified census tracts and difficult development areas were joined to every parcel in each county, so every vacant parcel inside them became the universe, 3,800 in the broker's home county alone.
Cut to land you could build on
Zoning marked the parcels in verified or conditional multifamily districts, acreage and adjacency found the assemblages, and building footprints dropped the lots with significant structures already on them.
Resolved the owner and the seller
Assessor records and corporate filings named the owner behind each parcel, dropped the school districts and public agencies that would never sell, and attached a phone and email for the broker's call.
What came back
- 3,800 vacant parcels to one 7.8-acre assemblage in the broker's home county: every vacant parcel inside a QCT or DDA, cut to 133 in multifamily districts, 19 at the acreage floor, and the two-parcel site worth the call
- 14 parcels his two years of hand prospecting had missed, surfaced in the first sessions in a Southwest submarket he knew cold
- 34 counties across the Southwest, the Midwest, and the mountain states, run from one saved search after ten Southwest submarkets proved it out
What they did next
Each list ends in the VP's own calls, and what reaches the developer is the handful of parcels worth a site visit, QCT status, zoning, and contact already attached. Ten Southwest submarkets proved the search out, and it now covers 34 counties from Boise to Columbus without being rebuilt once. The gap he wants closed next is rezone potential, the half of the pipeline no export could see, read from each city's own future land use overlay.
I prospected the same county by hand for two years, and MAIA found parcels I'd never seen.
