Run the free checks before the paid ones
The expensive parts of due diligence — survey, Phase I environmental, perc test — are worth paying for only on a parcel that has already survived the cheap checks. Almost everything in the first group below is answerable from public data on day one, and roughly one in four land deals turns up a material problem somewhere in it. Spending $4,000 on an environmental assessment for a parcel with no legal access is a common and avoidable mistake.
1. Title and legal description
Order a title commitment early. You are reading it for three things: who actually owns it, what's recorded against it (liens, easements, mineral reservations, restrictive covenants), and whether the legal description closes. Older Texas metes-and-bounds descriptions sometimes don't — the called distances fail to return to the point of beginning, which means the deeded boundary is ambiguous until a surveyor resolves it.
Texas specific: mineral rights are frequently severed from the surface. If the minerals were sold off decades ago, the mineral owner generally holds the dominant estate and a reasonable right to use the surface to get to them. A parcel can be beautiful, buildable, and still subject to someone else's right to put a pad site on it.
2. Legal access
Confirm a recorded, appurtenant right to reach the parcel from a public road. Frontage on a county road is the simple case. Everything else — a shared driveway, a gate across a neighbor's pasture, an easement described in a 1962 deed that references a fence that no longer exists — needs to be read in the recorded documents, not taken on description. Landlocked parcels do exist and they trade at a steep discount for good reason; Texas has no automatic statutory right of way for a landlocked owner.
3. Flood zones
Pull the FEMA flood zone for the parcel, not the neighborhood. Zone AE and Zone A are Special Flood Hazard Areas: a lender will require flood insurance on an improved structure, and your buildable footprint shrinks. Zone X is outside the 100-year floodplain. The catch is that flood boundaries follow drainage, so one parcel can span two zones, and large parts of rural Texas have no detailed DFIRM mapping at all — "unmapped" is not "safe," it just means FEMA hasn't studied it and you should be reading terrain and slope instead.
4. Pipelines and easements
Texas has more pipeline mileage than any other state, and a pipeline easement across a parcel permanently limits what you can build over it. Check for transmission lines and pipeline rights-of-way crossing or abutting the land, and note the commodity: a high-pressure natural gas or hazardous liquid line carries a wider consultation zone than a low-pressure distribution line. The easement document controls — some permit fencing and crossing, others don't.
5. Water: wells, groundwater district, and surface rights
If there's no public water, your options are a well or hauled water. Look at existing well records nearby for depth and yield, and find out which groundwater conservation district the parcel sits in, because spacing and production rules vary by district and some require a permit before you drill. Surface water is a separate question entirely — a creek on the property does not give you a right to impound or divert it without a water right.
6. Soil and septic suitability
With no sewer, the parcel needs to support an on-site septic facility, and that is a soil question. NRCS soil survey data gives you the likely answer for free; a percolation test gives you the official one. Tight clay soils and shallow depth-to-bedrock are the usual disqualifiers, and they are extremely common in parts of Central Texas. A parcel that can't take a conventional septic system isn't necessarily unbuildable, but an engineered aerobic system is a real and recurring cost.
7. Slope and terrain
Slope drives the cost of everything you build. Under about 5% is easy; 5–15% means real site work; above 15% you are paying for cut and fill, retaining, and longer utility runs, and some of the parcel is effectively not usable. Terrain also decides where water goes during a storm, which is the part of flood risk that FEMA mapping misses on unmapped rural land.
8. Zoning, ETJ, and deed restrictions
Most unincorporated Texas land has no zoning — which people hear as "I can do anything" and that is not right. Three other things still bind you: county subdivision and septic rules, a city's extraterritorial jurisdiction if the parcel sits within it, and private deed restrictions, which in Texas are often the strictest constraint on the land and do not appear on any zoning map. Get written confirmation of current zoning and any pending change from the planning office rather than relying on a portal screenshot.
9. Agricultural valuation rollback
This one is specific to Texas and it surprises buyers constantly. Land under 1-d-1 open-space agricultural valuation is taxed on its productive value, not market value, which is why the tax bill on 200 acres can look implausibly low. Change the use — subdivide it, develop it, stop the agricultural operation — and the appraisal district can assess rollback taxes for the preceding years plus interest. Before you underwrite the current tax bill as your future tax bill, confirm whether an exemption is in place and what rollback would cost.
10. Environmental and habitat
A Phase I ESA is standard for commercial acquisitions and prudent on any land with industrial, agricultural-chemical, or fuel-storage history. Separately, check designated critical habitat: a listed species' designated habitat on the parcel can constrain development and trigger federal consultation, and it is not something a seller is likely to volunteer.
What this looks like as a single pass
Items 3 through 10 are all answerable from public geospatial data, which is what TerraIQs automates — one parcel ID returns flood zones, pipeline proximity, contamination distance, well records, soil and septic suitability, slope, zoning, infrastructure, habitat and road access in a single report, with the source layer and retrieval date on every claim. That gets you through the desk phase in minutes instead of days, so the survey and title work you pay for is spent on a parcel worth surveying.
What it does not replace: title work, a boundary survey, a perc test, or a lawyer. A report tells you where to look and what to ask; it is an information product, not professional advice.
Frequently asked
Plan on 30 to 90 days between contract and closing for raw land. The long poles are the survey (2–6 weeks depending on county surveyor backlog) and any Phase I environmental assessment (2–4 weeks). Desk-based checks — flood, pipelines, zoning, soil — can be done in an afternoon and should be done first, because they're the ones that stop you spending money on the rest.
A full professional workup on a rural Texas parcel typically runs $2,500–$15,000: survey $1,500–$5,000, Phase I ESA $2,000–$4,000, percolation test $500–$1,500, title work $500–$2,000. Desk research across public data costs nothing but time, which is why it belongs first in the sequence.
Legal access. A parcel can touch a road without having a recorded right to use it, and 'we've always driven in that way' is not an easement. The second most missed is agricultural valuation rollback — changing the use of ag-exempt land can trigger back taxes plus interest.
Check a specific parcel
TerraIQs runs the public-data half of this checklist on any Texas parcel — 14.3M parcels across all 254 counties — and returns one report with the source layer and retrieval date on every section. First report is free.