A Chicago teardown and a Will County eight-lot plat are not the same loan with a different zip code. Inside the city you buy one PIN, fight the Department of Buildings, and pour a three-flat. Out here you buy acreage, sit through municipal hearings, pay land-cash and road fees, and hope a builder takes lots on a calendar you can carry.
This guide is for investors and small developers creating or buying four to twenty lots in Will, Kane, and McHenry Counties. It is not a Chicago infill essay. It is not a Naperville luxury spec page. Permit-fee math for a single house on an already-platted lot still lives on spec home construction loans Illinois. National sequence and bond mechanics live on the subdivision development guide and subdivision financing. The job here is the collar texture those pages cannot carry: which county you are in, who signs the plat, and which fees hit before a shovel.
Jaken Finance Group funds these files as business-purpose, non-owner-occupied capital. Qualified construction and bridge pricing is 8.99%–13.5% interest-only. Land-only leverage is typically 50%–65% of as-is value. Close targets 10–14 business days when the package matches the phase you are actually in. This is educational information, not legal or tax advice.
If you still do not know which facility you need, start at new construction loans for investors.
Three files we see on this corridor
Unplatted tract. One PIN. A sketch. Maybe a pre-application meeting. Collateral is dirt. Exit is a recorded plat or a sale of entitled land. This is a vacant land or entitlement bridge. It is not a house loan.
Small plat in process. Concept or preliminary is in. Staff has commented. Improvement plans are not signed. You still own one tract with a hearing calendar. We can fund land and, on a strong file, size a later horizontal facility. We will not treat Lot 6 as collateral.
Finished-lot takedown. The plat recorded. Streets are in, bonded, or accepted. A builder wants two, four, or eight lots. Now the loan looks like lot inventory or vertical construction. Takedown pace is the risk, not the DOB queue.
Pick the row that matches today. We can sequence the next row. We cannot pretend.
Why these three counties, not a Chicago clone
Chicago infill has no per-lot park or school land-cash and no county road impact fee. The pain is time, FAR, and RLTO if you hold. Will, Kane, and McHenry invert that. Plan review on a house is faster once the lot exists. The money shows up earlier, as donations, impact fees, and off-site conditions attached to the plat.
DuPage is the foil, not the subject. DuPage County eliminated its transportation impact fee in 2023 to attract development. Will County went the other way. A 2025 revision moved the single-family transportation impact fee from $5,193 to $9,374, folding in right-of-way and land-acquisition costs (Chronicle coverage of the Will County revision). Authority is the Illinois Road Improvement Impact Fee Law. On a single residence that fee is due at building permit. On a multi-unit project it can wait until occupancy if the ordinance allows. Either way it is real cash. A DuPage house skips that county road line. A Will house does not.
Kane and McHenry are not Will with a different name. Kane’s unincorporated process is a five-stage Plat Officer path with per-lot review fees. McHenry’s unincorporated path is sketch, preliminary, and final, with a two-year clock to record. Most of the lots you actually sell sit inside municipalities — Plainfield, Joliet, New Lenox, Shorewood, Oswego, Elgin, South Elgin, Huntley, Lake in the Hills. Those towns run their own subdivision ordinances. The county still shows up on road access, stormwater, and school donations.
Will County — annexation, municipal plat, road fee
Unincorporated Will County building permits run through Land Use. County highways and access permits run through the Division of Transportation. Most small investor plats that pencil are not staying unincorporated. They annex into a town that has sewer.
That annexation agreement is the real underwriting document. It sets density, park cash, school cash, road improvements, and sometimes a recapture for a trunk sewer you did not build. A pretty site plan without the annexation draft is a story. Read the agreement before you lock land price.
Plainfield, Joliet, and New Lenox do not share one plat calendar. Staff comment cycles still run two to four rounds on a first-time civil set. Each round is legal fees, engineer hours, and interest if you already closed. Budget a spare round even when the planner says this town is “easy.”
The $9,374 Will transportation impact fee is the clean line item. Municipal park and school cash-in-lieu is the messy one. It varies by bedroom count and by which district you sit in. Treat $8,000–$15,000 per detached home as a planning band until the town quotes the ordinance. Naperville’s land-cash math is documented on the Illinois spec page. Do not import Naperville’s 2007 land values onto a Joliet annexation. Pull the local schedule.
Off-site turn lanes and deceleration lanes kill more Will files than the published fee table. If the county engineer wants a left-turn lane on a two-lane section, that is a six-figure condition, not a rounding error. Ask in week one. Put the answer in the option.
Kane County — five stages, then the recorder
Kane County Subdivision Administration sits in Facilities, Development and Environmental Resources. In unincorporated Kane, any division of a parcel into two or more parts is a subdivision. The Plat Officer runs the file.
Major plats move through five stages. Pre-application conference. Concept plan. Preliminary plan. Improvement plans. Final plat. Concept is a $500 submittal fee. Preliminary, improvement, and final each assess $250 per lot under the published subdivision fee table. An eight-lot major plat is $500 plus $6,000 in those county review fees before you count civil, hearings, or bonds. That is not the horizontal budget. That is the ticket to keep talking.
A Plat Officer can classify a small cut as a minor subdivision. Minor files may combine concept and preliminary. That is the usual path for a four-lot split on an existing road with no new street. If you need a new public street, you are probably not minor. Do not self-certify the classification. Ask the Plat Officer in writing.
Preliminary plan approval in Kane is valid two years. If improvement plans are not in by then, staff reviews whether the layout still conforms. The committee can revoke or extend. Your option should match that clock. A 90-day close on a concept plan is how sponsors forfeit earnest money.
The Kane County Clerk must certify the plat for unpaid taxes before recording. That check takes about two to three days. The clerk fee is $2.00, plus $0.10 per lot above twenty lots. Unpaid taxes stop the signature. Title work that ignores current taxes is a delay machine.
Kane Division of Transportation still reviews access, right-of-way, and drainage related to county roads. A concept plan that ignores KDOT is a redraw. Send the access question with the first civil sketch.
McHenry County — sketch, two-year record, school certificate
Unincorporated McHenry uses a three-step review: sketch plan, preliminary plat, final plat. Submittal rules sit in the county code. The Unified Development Ordinance is the rule book for zoning and subdivision together.
Preliminary approval is not a lot. After the Planning, Environment, and Development Committee approves the preliminary plat, you have two years to record a final plat. Miss it and the preliminary is void. You start again. Phased finals are allowed. The first phase still has to record inside that two-year window. Put the recordation deadline on the same calendar as your interest reserve.
McHenry County Recorder plat requirements are picky on purpose. Surveyor monuments. Certificates. If the plat is in county jurisdiction, a school-developer donation certificate belongs on the final plat, countersigned by the Regional Superintendent of Schools. If you sit within one and a half miles of a municipality, you may owe that town’s school donation instead. Either way, the certificate is a recording condition. It is not a closing-week surprise.
Huntley and Lake in the Hills are the municipal version of the same idea. Faster building permits after the lot exists. School and park cash still attach. Conservation design and wetland buffers steal lots on the McHenry fringe. Walk the site with a wetlands professional before you bid twelve lots on a wet back forty.
Finished lots versus creating lots
Buying a recorded lot in a living subdivision is a spec or ground-up file. Creating the lots is a development file. Mixing the two in one “construction” ask is how packages sit for a month.
On a takedown, we want the recorded plat, the improvement status, the lot-release rules, and the builder’s vertical budget. If the developer still holds the performance bond and will not release Lot 4 until two more houses close, you do not control Lot 4. Read horizontal costs and bonding before you write a purchase contract that assumes release.
On a create-the-lots file, we want zoning confirmation, the hearing calendar, staff comments, a civil estimate, and a takedown or self-build plan. Entitlement and platting diligence is the national checklist. This corridor adds annexation agreements, Will road fees, Kane stage fees, and McHenry’s two-year record clock.
Builder letters matter. A production builder who will take two lots per quarter at a stated price is an exit. A broker saying “builders will come” is not. If you intend to build the houses yourself, say so. Then the later facility is spec or build-to-rent, not a lot-sale story.
Contrast with Chicago infill
A northwest-side teardown three-flat is one DOB vertical. Land might be $180,000. Vertical might be $520,000. Stabilized value might clear $950,000. RLTO applies if you hold inside the city. There is no Will road fee. There is no Kane Plat Officer. Winter concrete is the calendar risk. That file belongs on new construction loans Chicago and the teardown economics article.
A Will eight-lot plat can spend $90,000-plus on hearings and civil before a street is graded. It can spend $75,000 on county road impact at house permit. It can spend another $90,000 on park and school cash. None of that pours a foundation. If you model the collar tract like a Bridgeport infill, you will be out of cash at the second staff comment letter.
Many sponsors should do both, on purpose. Rehab or teardown brick in the city. Plat or take down lots in Will, Kane, or McHenry. Different facilities. Same lender. Do not copy the city pro forma onto the plat.
Worked example — eight-lot Will County annexation
Scenario. 4.8 acres on one PIN, currently unincorporated Will County, annexing into a municipality with sewer capacity. Product is eight detached lots for builder takedown, not a Chicago three-flat. First-time small-plat sponsor. Exit is lot sales, not eight spec houses on day one.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Land contract | $485,000 |
| Civil, hearings, annexation legal | $92,000 |
| Horizontal (street, water, sewer, storm, sidewalks) | $512,000 |
| Will transportation impact (8 × $9,374) | $74,992 |
| Municipal park and school cash (planning band $11,500/lot) | $92,000 |
| Contingency 12% of hard horizontal | $61,440 |
| Interest reserve and closing (land + horizontal, 14 months) | $78,000 |
| Cost to eight finished lots | $1,395,432 |
| Basis per lot | ~$174,400 |
Nearby finished-lot sales support $205,000 per lot to a production builder. Gross spread before lot-sale costs is about $30,600 per lot. At two takedowns per quarter, the last lots sit twelve months. That is why the reserve is sized to the slow lots, not the first closing.
Loan sizing. Land closes first at 50%–65% of as-is acreage, not 80% of eight retail houses. After improvement plans and a bond estimate, horizontal draws fund inspection milestones. House-level LTC waits until lots release. If a builder wants two lots now, that can be a separate takedown facility. It is not a reason to max leverage on the remaining six.
What breaks the file. A left-turn lane the county engineer adds in round three. A school-cash number the district revises after annexation. A builder who “loved the sketch” and will not sign a takedown. Any one of those erases the $30,600. The option needs a walk right if lot count falls below eight or if off-site road work exceeds a stated cap.
Kane four-lot minor, for contrast
A four-lot split on an existing Kane road, classified minor, is a different animal. No new street. Concept and preliminary combine. County review fees still assess per lot on the combined plan, on improvement plans if required, and on the final plat. That is smaller than the full five-stage stack. Horizontal might be service laterals and a shared detention easement, not a public road. Land basis dominates. The killer is still access and drainage, not a Will road fee. If KDOT will not grant the fourth driveway, you have three lots. Price the land as three until the access letter exists.
How Jaken Finance Group structures the stack
We match the facility to the collateral that exists today.
Land and hearings: typically 50%–65% of as-is value. Interest-only. Reserve sized to the hearing calendar, not a six-month flip.
Horizontal: construction draws after sealed improvement plans. Inspectors see stone, pipe, and binder. Performance or maintenance bonds are part of the file. See the bonding deep-dive. We do not front-load more than 20% of a vertical or horizontal budget before the first inspection milestone.
Vertical on released lots: 8.99%–13.5% interest-only. We fund the lower of loan-to-cost and 75% of as-completed value. Qualified files can reach higher LTC. First-timers sit lower. Permanent rental takeout uses DSCR at 5.75%–10.5% and 70%–75% LTV.
Every loan is business-purpose, non-owner-occupied investment property only.
Common mistakes on this corridor
| Mistake | What happens | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Asking for house LTC on unrecorded acreage | Pass, or a month of re-trade | Name the phase. Land is land. |
| Using DuPage’s $0 road fee on a Will parcel | $9,374 per house missing | Pull the Will schedule. |
| Importing Naperville land-cash onto Joliet | Wrong donation math | Use the annexing town’s ordinance. |
| 90-day close on a Kane concept plan | Earnest money gone | Option through preliminary and a spare comment round. |
| Ignoring McHenry’s two-year record clock | Preliminary void | Put recordation on the reserve calendar. |
| No builder letter, “they will come” | Lots sit through a winter | Takedown or self-build plan in the first package. |
| Modeling Chicago DOB time on a municipal plat | Wrong risk | City teardown and collar plat are different pages. |
What to send
Name the county and the municipality. Name the phase: unplatted, in-process plat, or finished-lot takedown. Attach the survey, zoning or annexation status, staff comments if any, civil estimate, fee quotes, and builder interest or self-build budget. For takedowns, attach the recorded plat and the lot-release language.
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Official resources
| Resource | Link |
|---|---|
| Will County Land Use (permits) | willcountyillinois.com/landuse |
| Will County Division of Transportation | willcountyillinois.com/DOT |
| Illinois Road Improvement Impact Fee Law | ilga.gov — 605 ILCS 5/5-901 |
| Kane County Subdivision Administration | kanecountyil.gov — Subdivision Administration |
| Kane County Clerk plat tax certification | clerk.kanecountyil.gov — Plats |
| McHenry County Recorder plat requirements | mchenrycountyil.gov — Plat requirements |
| McHenry County Unified Development Ordinance | mchenrycountyil.gov — UDO |
| Chicago DOB permits (city contrast) | chicago.gov — Building Permits |
Verify every fee against the current municipal or county schedule before you lock a land price. Published 2025 Will road-fee coverage and DuPage’s 2023 elimination are starting points, not a closing statement.
Related reading
- New construction loans for investors
- Subdivision development guide · subdivision financing
- Entitlement and platting · horizontal costs and bonding
- Illinois spec home construction loans
- New construction loans Chicago
- Chicago infill teardown economics
- Vacant land loans
- Hard money Will County · Kane · McHenry
Disclaimer: Rates, terms and conditions offered only to qualified borrowers and are subject to change at any time without notice. Closing times are in business days and commence upon receipt of appraisal payment and satisfaction of borrower conditions. All loans are subject to full underwriting for loan approvals. Jaken Finance Group only finances non-owner occupied investment properties.
Municipal plat, impact-fee, and annexation rules change. Confirm current figures with the relevant Will, Kane, or McHenry department and with qualified Illinois counsel before you commit capital.