A free study feels like a gift. Often it is an advertisement, and the most expensive answer it can give you is a yes you cannot actually use. Here is how that happens in San Jose and the South Bay, and what to check before you spend a dollar on plans.
Almost every company in California that offers to tell you what your lot can do also sells the thing they end up recommending. The architect wants the design fee. The builder wants the build. The modular company wants to set a unit in your yard. When the study costs nothing, it is usually marketing, and the recommendation tends to point back to that company's own invoice. The answer to "should I build" is rarely no, because no does not sell a project.
The honest picture is quieter than the sales pitch. Across California, only 266 SB-9 projects were permitted statewide through the end of 2023, against roughly 6.1 million eligible parcels (CA YIMBY, 2024). In San Jose's first year under SB-9, there were 13 lot-split applications, 2 approved, and 0 building applications (Terner Center, 2023). A separate Terner Center analysis found that only about 5 percent of California single-family parcels are financially feasible for this kind of development (2021).
Everyone talks about SB-9. Almost nobody can actually build it. A free study built to say yes will not be the one to tell you that.
Once you act on an optimistic free study, the real money starts. You pay an architect and an engineer for plans. You start chasing utilities, which run on their own clock and not yours, so a finished unit can sit unable to get a meter while a construction loan keeps charging interest. You carry the property month after month in taxes, insurance, and debt. Holding cost alone can quietly consume 10 to 20 percent of a project's total budget, and it lands long after the free study has been filed away. The study was free. The path it pointed you down was not.
ClearPath has nothing to build and nothing to install. We are paid to tell you the truth about your specific parcel, including the truths a vendor avoids. Sometimes the best move is to build. Sometimes it is to wait. Sometimes it is to sell the land already entitled and let a buyer take on the construction and the carry, which can be the quietly smart exit because an approved, plan-ready parcel is often worth materially more than a raw one. The point is to match the move to your goal and your numbers, not to a contractor's order book.
A feasibility answer is only useful when the person giving it has no stake in the outcome. That independence is the whole product. It is also why we lead with a free read that is honest about what your lot cannot do, not just what it can.
A free ClearPath Read covers both sides, what your land could become and what would sink it, before you spend a dollar on plans.
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