I built a land acquisition intelligence/sourcing platform that scores 1.5M parcels of land across the I-95 corridor for data center and industrial conversion potential.
All with Claude Code... in less than 36 hours.
This used to take their team weeks.
Here's how I did it.
1/ Ingested 1.5M parcels from NC OneMap's ArcGIS REST API with full polygon geometry, zoning, ownership, and tax records across 14 counties
2/ Pulled I-95 corridor geometry and 142 interchanges from OpenStreetMap's Overpass API
3/ Ingested 1,107 substations, 8,174 transmission lines, and 292 gas pipelines from HIFLD federal infrastructure data
4/ Ran PostGIS distance calculations on every parcel to I-85 centerline and nearest interchange using LATERAL KNN joins (100x faster than cross joins)
5/ Normalized hundreds of raw county zoning codes into six categories and scored farmland confidence 0-100 using tax programs, land use codes, and acreage heuristics
6/ Built a motivated seller detection engine: out-of-state owners, estates/trusts, tax delinquency, long hold periods, declining assessed values
7/ Calculated conversion readiness scores using reverse-join spatial queries against 20K industrial parcels (turned a multi-hour query into 15 seconds)
8/ Scraped 2,100 active listings from Redfin's public CSV endpoint with recursive bounding box subdivision to beat their 350-result cap
9/ Wired it all into a composite acquisition score (0-100) with configurable weights, a full-screen map explorer with vector tiles, and a document generation suite that produces institutional-grade investment memos, slide decks, and automated intelligence briefs
The whole thing runs on PostGIS, FastAPI, React, and MapLibre GL JS.
I did all of this with no paid mapping APIs and no paid data sources... at least not yet.
Every piece of spatial math runs inside the database, not Python.
That's how you process 1.5M parcels without melting your laptop.
And you still want to tell me bespoke software isn't the future?