Georgia Developers Back Push For Permit-to-plat Shot Clocks

Georgia residential land developers succeeded this year at convincing lawmakers that the permitting timeline needed to be faster and more predictable to dent the state’s growing housing imbalances.

Fresh off that win, they are now plotting their next legislative move. The Georgia Residential Land Development Council is targeting final plat approval — aiming to shorten timelines, lower expenses and reduce wait-time financial risks to bend housing cost curves toward more affordable levels.

In contrast with Florida and Texas, Georgia had done little to address housing supply and affordability. Permitting reform was the first significant legislation to pass.

“The elephant in the room we are not tackling is zoning and land use,” Jay Knight, a GRLDC co-founder, told HousingWire TBD. “It’s a conversation that needs to be had, but it’s going to be a really long battle … and it becomes a philosophical argument. So far, we’ve been able to confine our arguments to math and logic.”

Defining the math

Knight uses his own company, Templar Development, as an example. After putting in roads, curbs and other infrastructure, the company’s monthly interest expense runs at a rate of $70,000, after submitting its plat in April.

Delays in the approval process add to that monthly baseline cost, and push the end price higher. The National Association of Home Builders has documented how rising regulatory costs increase home prices, making housing less affordable.

In a study released this month, the association found regulatory costs have risen 40% in five years. Regulations at all government levels added an average of $131,734 to a new single-family home’s cost. That represented 26.4% of the $499,500 average sales price of a home in January.

“This study illustrates how excessive regulation is deepening the nation’s housing affordability crisis and making it harder for builders to deliver the affordable, attainable housing that our nation sorely needs,” said Bill Owens, NAHB chairman and Ohio home builder, in a statement.

The GRLDC’s Knight cited studies showing that for every $1,000 increase in cost, 4,100 Georgians are priced out of buying a home.

Building “shot clocks”

The rising cost of permitting drew more attention during the COVID-19 pandemic as home prices and construction costs skyrocketed. Only a handful of states have addressed the permitting side of the equation: Texas, Florida, California, North Carolina and Washington. With the exception of North Carolina, the others also passed zoning reforms that preempt local government authority, allowing density increases and residential uses “by right” in commercial zones.

Most permit shot clocks address the front end of the process. That is where Knight and his organization started. Knight said the permitting process in Georgia dropped from about a year to 10 weeks.

“That’s very consequential,” he said.

His group is now working the back end with final plat review. One challenge: planning officials restart the existing 30-day statutory review clock, and that can repeat nearly without end.

Knight said the proposal calls for 45 days to complete a review. A resubmittal review would drop to 20 days. A third submittal would drop further to 14 days.

All subsequent reviews must work from the initial comments – no new comments allowed, Knight said. Those first comments must also be limited to local codes.

“We were getting turned down for font sizes, page numbering and all kinds of stuff,” Knight said.

The GRLDC points to a model in Texas for putting hard deadlines on final plat review and approval.

Texas stepped up

The Lone Star State set one of the country’s strictest deadlines for residential plat approvals — and built automatic approval into the law as the penalty for missing it.

Its legislature acted in 2019 and gave municipalities 30 calendar days to approve, conditionally approve, or deny a residential plat. Miss the deadline, and the plat is automatically deemed approved under state law.

The legislature sharpened the law in 2023. Cities can no longer pad application requirements with studies or documents not explicitly authorized by state statute. The 30-day clock starts only when a complete application is filed — but cities cannot require applicants to waive that deadline under any circumstances.

Once a city issues a denial or conditional approval, the developer responds in writing. The city then has just 15 days to act on the resubmittal. Fail to meet that window, and the plat is deemed approved again.

If a city still refuses to issue approval after missing either deadline, developers have a legal remedy. They can obtain a certificate of no action, which carries the same legal force as a formal approval. Courts have upheld actions to compel uncooperative officials to produce that certificate.

Texas lawmakers took the permit-to-plat shot-clock rules even further in 2025.

Developers can now hire licensed third-party professionals to review plats when a city stalls. That option gives applicants a parallel track entirely outside the municipal review process.

The cost of waiting

Research suggests hard deadlines deliver results beyond the permit office. A 2026 study by Princeton economist Evan Soltas and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber found developers pay a 50% premium for land with pre-approved permits in Los Angeles, one of the most expensive housing markets in the country.

Researchers found that L.A.’s permitting timelines are roughly twice as long as those in Fort Worth.

The researchers estimated that reducing approval timelines to Texas-level speeds could cut development costs equivalent to 21% of construction costs. Texas is far from immune to affordability pressures. Home prices there have climbed sharply since the pandemic.

But its streamlined approval process has kept it among the more accessible large-state markets in the country, and its shot-clock framework is now the model that Georgia developers want to replicate.