Power Is the New Land Constraint, and Housing Is Standing in the Same Line
Site selectors now rank electricity above land and labor, and this week's grid emergency shows why that shift will reach residential land values, lot timelines, and the towns that win new employers.
What the data showed
CRE Daily reported today that power access has overtaken land, labor, and incentives as the top factor in where capital intensive projects get built. In a survey of 72 members of the Site Selectors Guild, first reported by Bisnow, 79% ranked power as a top influence this year, while labor and geopolitics each drew 50%. More than half said a weak power supply alone is enough to cross a location off the list. Two years ago, workforce availability was the clear leader. CRE Daily also cited Goldman Sachs Research projecting that electricity demand from these projects will more than double, from 31 GW in 2025 to 66 GW in 2027, led by data centers.
The grid is already feeling it. Realtor.com reported that an October heat spell pushed PJM, which serves more than 67 million people across 13 states and Washington, DC, into emergency operations, with the operator forecast to come within roughly 900 MW of its reserve margin on Wednesday. According to a Realtor.com analysis of Aterio data, Virginia alone held about 13,300 MW of large data center capacity by mid 2026, roughly a fifth of the national total.
Power is now an entitlement
Here is how I read it on the ground. For years we have said the real bottleneck in housing is land and entitlement, not demand. Power is now part of the entitlement. A site with zoning but no capacity is not a site, it is an option on a utility's calendar. CRE Daily's best example makes the point: a $1B rare earth plant in Cherokee County, South Carolina needed 70 MW within two years and found 1 MW available until a state senator pushed the utility to commit more.
Residential land is not exempt. Subdivisions, apartments, and especially all electric communities draw on the same substations, transformers, and interconnection staff that data centers and factories are bidding for. When CRE Daily notes that developers increasingly secure power before entitlements, I expect that habit to spread to large residential tracts. Land with a documented will serve letter is going to trade at a premium to land with a hopeful one.
Where we see opportunity
The upside is employer anchored development. When a plant or campus does land, the housing need arrives on a predictable schedule, and the land around a powered industrial site gets repriced. CRE Daily's Texas newsletter reported that Taylor approved a 664 acre technology campus that could scale to 1 GW, with first power targeted for mid 2028. That kind of timeline gives workforce housing developers a window to tie up land before the jobs show up.
On the LandBriefing watchlist, this sharpens how we think about catalyst markets. Elkton, Virginia, our Crystal Ball pick, sits in the state at the center of this week's grid story, and its Merck campus is the kind of power secured anchor that site selectors now prize. Syracuse and Columbus carry big fab catalysts, and their slipping timelines are a reminder that announced jobs depend on power and equipment arriving on time.
Where it breaks down
The risks are real. Housing loses most head to head fights for grid capacity, because a single campus pays more and moves faster than a few hundred homes. Residential power costs can rise as utilities fund new generation and transmission, which eats into the affordability we already see eroding across the Southern Squeeze. Community resistance is growing too: CRE Daily cited Data Center Watch counting at least 45 projects worth about $68B blocked or delayed from April to June. That backlash rarely stays neatly confined to data centers once a county starts saying no.
What we are watching next
I am watching how long utilities quote for new residential service in fast growing counties, whether more jurisdictions make developers fund substation upgrades as a condition of approval, and whether states start certifying powered sites the way Greater New Orleans Inc. is doing. Data over emotion: the land that wins the next cycle may be the land that already has a line to it.
Power, land, and housing are now one planning problem, and that is the kind of whole picture work we do across our companies. You can see how Kaufman & Company approaches it on our platform site.
Explore Kaufman & Company →- Power Access Overtakes Land and Labor in US Site Selection, CRE Daily, October 15, 2026
- Texas Job Growth Triples the Nation's as Mortgage Rates Top 7%, CRE Daily, October 14, 2026
- 67 Million Americans Are Under a Power Grid Emergency: What This Means for Homeowners, Realtor.com, October 14, 2026