Glossary

Assemblage

The process of acquiring two or more adjacent parcels of land under common ownership or control in order to create a single larger site with greater development potential, and, in valuation contexts, the resulting increase in combined value.

Assemblage projects present distinctive legal risk because a developer must typically acquire every targeted parcel to unlock the assembled site's full development potential, giving each individual holdout owner outsized negotiating leverage (sometimes called the holdout problem) once other parcels have already been acquired or optioned and the developer's intentions become apparent. Developers manage this risk by using option agreements rather than outright purchases during the assembly phase, by employing separate acquisition entities or straw-buyer arrangements to avoid signaling the ultimate assemblage plan to remaining sellers, and by building contingencies into each parcel's purchase agreement tied to successful acquisition of the other target parcels. Plottage value — the incremental value created specifically by combining parcels beyond the sum of their individual values as separate sites — is a distinct appraisal concept from assemblage itself, describing the economic result rather than the acquisition process.